Hitting the beaches

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So from Atlanta we headed east. After about 5 hours driving, we decided to stop. We had heard about a nice campsite by a lake near Columbia so we went searching for it. En route we had a nice little stop off at a beach by another lake but it was so hot that we couldn't sit longer than half an hour!

We finally found the campsite and thought we'd got lucky when the office was closed. We went right ahead and set up the tent right by the lake in the hope that we could make an early escape the next day! Unfortunately it didn't take long for the warden to find us! Didn't get too much sleep that night as a threatening storm kept the thunder rumbling and we kept thinking we might need to make a dash for the car!

We had an early start the next day and headed for Myrtle Beach. We had heard a lot about this place and we were armed with lots of hotel brochures with special walk-in rates that we thought would work well. Bad news was that we arrived on a Friday and lots were booked up, and others just weren't prepared to give us any good rates. Even the campgrounds were charging about $60!!

We quickly realised that although the beaches looked great, the town itself was very Blackpool-esque (really just trashy and over-priced). So we had an hour's rest on a beautiful beach before heading further north in search of cheaper accomm!

We had no luck and everywhere was really dear. We felt like we had been driving forever and just wanted to sleep, so when we came across a dodgy campsite we thought it would do ok and probably be very cheap. It was more like a 'traveller's' campground and the bathrooms were awful!! So no showers for us and as you can imagine in that heat, that isn't a good thing-anybody want to share a tent with us??! We nearly fainted when the owner showed up and said we had to pay $30! We didn't even have a picnic table or an actual site, just a patch of grass in front of some RVs. Another night with not much sleep and lots of noise from the other 'travellers'. So in our wisdom, we decided to do what any self-respecting camper would do in this situation, and we camped and dashed-at about 7am!! Well, it would have been madness to pay, and in our defense, noone ever asked directly for the dosh!

So tired and in need of a good shower, we headed for Wilmington, about an hour north, with the intention of getting online and finding out where to go next. However, cheered up by a great brekkie of bagels with peanut butter and 'jelly' and upon the discovery that there was a great beach nearby, we booked in to a motel close-by and hit the surf! Ok, so without surf boards or anything, but the waves were pretty good and we did swim a bit! We spent the day sunbathing and eating ice-cream-not a bad way to spend a day. The beach was amazing-great waves, lovely sand and it felt like we were on holiday-like a proper beach holiday! We have never felt as happy to have a motel with a kitchen and somewhere to do the laundry and have a good shower-it was like 5 star luxury after the camping!

Heading further north, we had another motel stop off in Suffolk before hitting Virginia beach. It was cloudy and rather grey so we were surprised to see that the beach was still absolutely packed! It cleared up after lunch so we enjoyed a few more hours sunbathing before heading towards Williamsburg. Another great beach and we even saw what we hoped were dolphins really close to shore, but it certainly made everyone a little nervous as the water cleared pretty quickly. We read up on Google that sharks are frequent in the area, so who knows?

We stopped off in Williamsburg for the night, which looked like a nice town, but after all the excitement of the beach, all we could manage was takeaway pizza and an early night before heading to Washington DC the next day.

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