Hunting Island SC

This past weekend, we took advantage of the long Veterans Day holiday and visited Hunting Island State Park on the southern South Carolina Coast. Hunting Island is near Beaufort SC, and is not far across the river from Hilton Head SC. However unless you have a boat, you will need to drive about 70 miles to get to Hilton Head. It is also just south of Edisto Island. You can easily see Edisto from the the beach at Hunting Island, but again, it is about a 60 mile drive to get there.

The light house at Hunting Island (HI) can be climbed for a small fee of $2.00 per person. We arrived too late on Saturday to make the trek to the top, as it closes to climbers at 3:45.

Beaufort SC (pronounced Bew-fert) is a beautiful coastal town. It reminds one of Charleston only on a much smaller scale. There are many old historic homes to see. Guided or self-guided tours are available, as are carriage tours.

We left Friday morning and drove to HI, arriving at about 1:30 PM. Our checkin to the campground was a breeze, being greeted by two very personable camp host volunteers. HI State Park is one of the most popular state parks in South Carolina, and most of the sites are reserved well in advance, as was ours. The greeters met us at the park entrance, verified our name, provided us with a park map, and sent us to site #22. We didn't even need to get out of the RV.

This picture is not of our site, but of the campground road that runs right along the beach to the left. There are some smaller sites on the left of the beach road that accomodate tents only. The RV sites of varying sizes are on the right in this picture.





This next picture is of the campground from the beach. This is a rather old campground that was not designed specifically to accomodate today's RVs. The sites vary greatly in size, some are very large while only some of the smaller RVs or tent-trailers will fit on others.

But as you can see the beach is the attraction here and the beach is what keeps the campground reserved months in advance at a very high rate of occupancy.


This trip to the beach was very relaxing and enjoyable. After unhooking the Tracker and backing into our site, it was apparent that there would be no TV watching this weekend. There is very heavy tree cover across the entire campground. Imagine my surprise when, just to see what would happen, I received a strong satellite signal on the dish. Apparently I had stopped exactly where there was a small hole in the tree canopy and was aligned exactly with the DirecTV satellite. In spite of that, we still didn't watch any TV. This is just too beautiful a place, and the weather was too nice.

Here is a brief slide show with the highlights of the weekend. Some of the things you will see in the slide show include

• Campground scenes
• Trip to Fripp Island where the deer are perfectly comfortable walking around the homes and businesses
• A drive into Beaufort with the beautiful old homes and harbour
• Dinner at Dockside Restaurant in Port Royal just south of Beaufort where we watched the sunset.
  

Please enjoy the pictures and if you would like more information or just want to comment, please feel free to do so.

Chuck & Pam