Yowzah! How is it that the lawn is starting to grow and the buds are popping out on the trees already? Winter was a blur and downright non-existent in the Mid-Atlantic region (despite predictions that it would be the snowiest in many years… ha!). We were optimistic that we would have at least an average snowfall and had planned & reserved our first-ever winter camping trip in Talley at Canaan Valley State Park to have some spring skiing. But when the season turned out to be a dud and they had consecutive weeks of rain leading up to spring break, we had to pivot to something else at the last minute… so back to Myrtle Beach we went.
Thankfully even with only a only a week to spare, we managed to snag a site that worked for our size and schedule (unfortunately we had to move on Day 2, but that’s ok). Lois had planned to come to Canaan with us as well, so in an effort to give her the long overdue break she deserved, Kris found a hotel for her to stay at that was right on the beach Lois doesn’t camp… lets be clear.
The drawback to all this was that we really wanted to maximize our time there and so we drove the whole distance in one day. Google says we can drive that in a little less than 8 hours. But lets be realistic… towing is slow. Driving with kids is SLOW. Add into this equation that we had a Lois’ car as well so Kristin drove that with her mom and one kid while I had the rig, the other kid and two dogs. A convoy it was.
We arrived on Sunday shortly after dark and had an easy setup for a site we would only have for one night (we would change the next day for a site we could remain in for the duration) and once we did the basic setup Kris took Lois over to her hotel where I would later meet up for dinner. In the following days, we packed a lot in… from the obvious beach trips to everything science related at Wonderworks, the aquarium to Dino Dinners and encounters with pirates with everything in between. A warming trend hit the whole east coast and we meandered the avenues of Myrtle in shorts and flip flops.
It was a wild week and in a flash… it too was over. We crawled back home on Saturday (at an even slower pace than the week before) and were happy to be home but anxious to get the Ryder out of school and our next camping trip underway.
