Day 134: Astoria, GA to Beaufort, SC

We woke up to a still and misty Georgia morning and started our day with a big breakfast. The lake was like glass with not even one ripple.

We centered our adventures this morning around the activities offered at Okefenokee Swamp Park. We took a boat ride through North America’s largest black water swamp. The swamp is entirely rain fed and acts as the headwaters for both the Suwannee and the St. Marys Rivers. As we floated along the swamp lined by dense forests of cypress trees on both sides, we saw tiny juvenile alligators with zebra striped scales (about the size of your hand) and huge colourful spiders (larger than a toonie) on gigantic webs the size of a place mat. Did you know that alligators are like chickens in that they swallow rocks to aid with digestion (and in their case the rocks help with sinking under the water too)? Neat! We saw the carnivorous hooded pitcher plant and the sweet pepper bush (also called poor man’s soap because it foams up in water). We also saw nests of mud dauber wasps under the bridges. These wasps feed their young live insects which they trap and store alive until the eggs hatch and are ready to devour their first meal.

Next we rode a fancy red and black train on a loop around the swamp. We learned about the Indigenous Peoples (the Seminoles and the Timucuans) who used to live in the swamp and the types of huts they built out of cypress wood and palmetto.

We also saw an old village on Pioneer Island that would have been inhabited by white settlers in the 1800s. We learned about how they raised chickens, pressed and processed sugar cane, made moonshine and harvested turpentine that they sold to waterproof boats.

A live reptile encounter was our final activity at Okefenokee. We petted Mickey the box turtle. She is the only type of turtle that can completely retract inside its shell and hinge its underside closed for protection.

We also visited with Bellamy the gopher tortoise. She was very friendly and loved walking up to check out our shoes. She kept trying to push her enclosure fence over so she could spend more time out walking around. She also deposited a huge pile of poop on the carpet which the kids in the audience thought was hilarious.

We also met Pumpkin the oddly coloured corn snake. We all petted him carefully with two fingers in the direction of his scales. And finally we greeted a tiny 10 month old alligator. She felt like a warm and soft leather shoe. 

After the reptile meet and greet, we checked out the large gators. Our favourites were Mr. A (we were told that the A does not stand for alligator) and his mate Ali. Mr. A was over 16 feet long and incredibly rotund. He is apparently quite ill tempered and even bites Ali when he is feeling especially grumpy. Ali was also very large. She got out of the water and walked on land for us which was very cool to see. I wouldn’t want to meet either of these gators in the swamp though. They were enormous and looked very strong.

We spent our afternoon driving past Savannah towards Charleston. We obviously tired Alistair out with all those alligators and he had an epic nap.

We stopped in to visit Georgia Peach World to try numerous samples, everything from peach fudge, to peach pecans, to peach lemonade. We picked up a jar of sweet and spicy peach habanero salsa which should pair nicely with the red fish in our freezer.

After crossing into South Carolina in the early evening, we visited the seashore at Hilton Head Island to beach comb during low tide. We saw loads of snails, hermit crabs, a horseshoe crab and some conches. Alistair was given a large live conch was a pair of fishermen. Liam was outraged when they suggested that we could pull out the conch living inside so we could keep his shell. We didn’t, of course. He went back intact into the ocean, shell and all.

We completed the drive to Beaufort and parked along a side street just outside of town, near a military airport. A fighter jet landed just as we were falling asleep and we have never heard anything so loud. It sounded like a being directly in the path of an oncoming train! Luckily they don’t land overnight.

Tomorrow we have exciting things planned, so time for a good sleep.