Myrtle Beach Day 2

Sunday started with some beach time for me and Matt. We headed to Myrtle Beach state park, just south of the main hotel/free beach area. First stop was a walk along the nature trail, which delivered in it's nature promise! Various birds, lizards, both legless and ones like this fellow. This one was huge although I know it's hard to tell from the picture

Red Headed Skink

Unfortunately most of the animals we encountered were pesky mosquitoes, so it was kind of a sprint nature trail as they were very hungry apparently. The trail came out a little way down the beach and we had this lovely view:

Myrtle Beach State Park

Watch out little bird

We hung out on the beach for a while. The water was pretty chilly, we only went in up to our knees! I was satisfied sitting on the beach and watching the pelicans and other birds fly by while Matt strolled the beach looking for shells and other things.

Jellyfish!

There were lots of washed up jellyfish along the beach and I was always told not to touch them even if they are dead but Matt didn't follow my advice. He was fine though! After a stroll along the beach we picked up Matt's parents and headed back south to spend the afternoon at Brookgreen Gardens. It's a huge garden area filled with various sculptures from American artists, started by the couple whose house we visited the day before.

The gardens were nice and some of the sculptures were quite lovely. We did a sculpture tour which was a little more detail than I needed to know but I enjoyed the gardens and all the Spanish moss on the trees. Very southern! 

Spanish moss

Golden sculpture

Huge (close to full size I imagine) Don Quixote sculpture

The gardens also had a zoo type area with a big bird atrium you could walk through, alligators, eagles, owls amongst others. I think I was most fascinated by the giant, slightly evil looking local squirrels though. Don't they look mean?!

Giant mean squirrel

We were flying out that evening so after a quick game of mini golf on one of the what seemed like hundreds of mini golf places (I kept up the Martin family name by winning of course) we headed to the airport and back to Albany after a fun weekend.

Hello from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina!