Part 2

The reason we chose Hilton Head was because I was reading a Parenting magazine article that listed the 10 most family friendly beaches (can't remember if it was US or worldwide) and a beach on Hilton Head came in at #2. I checked our timeshare book and told Jon to check into booking a resort that was just a couple miles away. The first 3 days there were gorgeous weather- mid to upper 70's. So we hit the beach on those days. And the article was definitely right. It was an awesome beach for the kids. You can see in the pictures where the waves are breaking way off the shore--that was a sand bar. So they could walk all the way out to that point and at low tide it wasn't even ankle deep on the sand bar. The ocean was cool at this point in the year but still tolerable.

Also, you can see in these next two pics that at low tide, there was a little river of ocean water that was left way up on the shore. So we set up our chairs near that because I knew Dawson would love playing in that shallow water. It was so fun. Plus the sand there was like powdered sugar. We've been to tons of beaches in the Caribbean that weren't nearly that nice.

The live sand dollar we found and Bennett's awesome ocean do:

We also spotted a few jelly fish, found a live star fish that was missing a few limbs and Jon saw a sting ray.
The other fun part about the island is that its very marshy with tons of little ponds everywhere. We had 3 alligator sightings that week! (and yes, I was just as excited as the boys. Ok...more excited). The first one was about 3 feet long. We watched it for a long time swim under a little bridge we were on and were all excited when it came and snapped up a dragon fly. Then the next day during a timeshare presentation (yes...a vacation with my husband is not complete without a couple of those! But we got $150 in cash at each one so we couldn't pass it up) we saw this guy!!! :

On the video, when you hear me scream, he chomped a big turtle down in one gulp:

He was literally 10 feet long. It was the coolest animal encounter we've experienced in the wild. The rest of the week, anytime we passed a pond, Dawson would say, "A-gator in there? Maybe!"

And then we found this little guy whom we named, "Big Eyes" for obvious reasons. We took him back to our hotel and got a bug cage for him but after a couple days he was near death so we released him.

More to come...