Bittersweet. Our last stop on our road trip was Congaree National Park in South Carolina. Once mistakenly called a swamp, this flood plain is home to a lot of little critters! Most abundant were the salamanders and the spiders! They were everywhere.

So the big thing to do is to walk on the boardwalk trail that leads you on a loop down to the lake and back. There are about 20 stops along that way of a self-guided tour. However, two different sections of the boardwalk were closed. One had been under repair, and the other had just been closed that morning due to a fallen tree. So we were able to walk around most of the trail, went out and back and then took another, somewhat muddy trail down to the lake.

The trees here are ginormous and there is a loblolly tree that was a former state champion. (I couldn’t fit it all in one picture).

The other really interesting thing were the “knees”, actually parts of the roots that grew up out of the ground in order to help stabilize the tree during flooding.

We were having a great time on the boardwalk until we saw…. A snake. 🐍

Probably harmless, we didn’t chance it so we turned and walked the other way. We tried waiting but it was no moving so we let it do its thing and figured the other trail we could take would be just as good!

Finally we made it down to the lake. There were plenty of turtles swimming around and it was really nice and peaceful. There were hardly any visitors here at all.

 

As one might have expected when you visit a swamp in July it’s going to be hot. Just covered in sweat. We decided not to stay at the campground since there were no showers or potable water there and make the 3.5 hour drive back home to North Carolina. It was a fantastic end to our journey. I’ll put up a final post in the next few days. In the meantime, thank you for following along with us and reading!

BTW… It wasn’t until we got there that we realize we were pronouncing it Con-A-Gree and learned that we were totally wrong.