Vacation excursions
Perfect
vacation tip #6: Plan good excursions, but not too many
When we decided to go
to Pawleys Island, I started researching area attractions and soon
came up with a short list of half a dozen places I'd really like
to visit.
But when it came
right down to it, I knew we'd want to spend most of our time on
the beach, so I narrowed our main excursion down to one ---
Brookgreen Gardens. (We also made a few forays to the
grocery store, took in a movie, and stopped at the library, book
store, and Audubon store. Oh, and Mom wanted to go to the
consignment shop to get another sweat shirt.)
Having one major excursion in the middle was perfect. Our
first vacation day was a "sea day" in which we spent all of our
time at home or at the beach, so by our second day we had plenty
of energy to walk through the sculpture-and-botanical garden.
We were stunned by the live oaks and their attendant epiphytes
(Spanish moss and resurrection ferns). And I was
particularly taken by the way the landscapers had worked with
textures and designs that showcased the strengths of each
sculpture.
I highly recommend
this particular outing to anyone interested in plants and/or
art. Vastly better than a museum!
(More gratuitous
photographs. Plus, doesn't the trellis above look very
useful if you wanted to grow kiwis?)
Perfect
vacation tip #6.5: Don't try to do it all
As the leader of this
excursion, though, I made one mistake --- I dragged my compatriots
past the formal gardens to check out the zoo. I wanted to
learn which heirloom livestock were historically used in the area
(which I'll post about eventually on our chicken blog).
But we ended up footsore and saddened by the caged animals.
Mark and I figured that the livestock would be much healthier and
happier if they were rotationally grazed on the vast lawns, and
the grass would probably be greener there too.
So, my corollary
piece of advice for this post is to pay attention to your energy
levels and not to go see the otter exhibit just because the
visitor center lady said it was not to be missed. If you
don't feel like it, miss it.
| This post is part of our Gratuitous Vacation Photos lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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