The adventure continues with our second National Park family trip! This time the Crew made the short drive up to South Carolina’s Congaree National Park. Congaree was a totally different experience to our Smokey Mountain National Park trip. This park could best be described as a majestic swamp boardwalk. That’s right, our entire hike was on a man-made boardwalk over a swamp bottom that seriously looked like it could gobble us up if we were to stray off the trail. The swampy bottom prevented underbrush from growing so all you could see were more and more trees in the distance. The park was also full of wild life. We saw everything from tiny caterpillars, squirrels and raccoons, deer, to all sorts of birds. Oh and insects…lots of insects as Hunter will attest to. Poor guy, he was MISERABLE. Hunter has…an aversion…to bugs right now. He doesn’t like them. AT ALL. As you can probably tell by some of the pictures below. As a matter of fact, he was practically glued to Mommy the entire hike which is why the photos of him on the hike are limited. Speaking of bugs, Kayla was smart enough to schedule our visit to correspond with the synchronous Fireflies phenomenon that happens every year and lasts about 2 weeks. This was the highlight of the trip. Very cool stuff. You can read more about it here but essentially the Fireflies come out around 8-10 PM and put on a light show for all visitors to enjoy. During this time groups of Fireflies synchronize and look like floating Christmas lights. So glad we got to experience this. The kids also completed their Jr. Ranger activity books and got their Congaree Jr. Ranger badges as a reward. So proud of these kiddos. We’ll mark this trip as a success, despite the bugs, and we look forward to our next National Park adventure.
