Sand in every nook and cranny

Hello Internet! I'm back from the wilderness.

This weekend a few us went camping on Capers Island, SC. It's a beautiful island off the coast of Isle of Palms (near Charleston). There's nothing on the island but sand, sand fleas, mosquitoes, and alligators. There were plenty of the first three, but I didn't see any gators.

The forecast called for a 70% chance of rain, but being the optimists we are, we ignored that. When are the weather forecasters ever right? Uh, this past weekend they were.

We arrived at the Isle of Palms marina on Friday at about 4pm and took a boat out to the island. I'm guessing we were about 1,000,000 miles off the coast of SC, but I'm horrible at distances. The boat ride took about 10 minutes. We unloaded all the gear (No men in my life can ever call me an over-packer again as I packed the least amount of stuff, seriously, these boys packed as if we were going to be gone for a month) and hiked to our camp site. We chose a nice stretch of beach maybe half a mile from where we were dropped off. We set up camp, built a fire, and all the jazz. Then it started to rain. It pretty much rained the whole time we were there, but rotated between heavy rains and not so heavy rains.

On Saturday we hiked around the island into the marshes. I met about 70 billion mosquitoes. And even though I was wearing long sleeves, pants, shoes, and socks, I still got murdered. I probably have seven types of Malaria. The marshes were pretty. Lots of fish. So many fish I believe the water was overcrowded as they were constantly jumping out of the water. Fisherman Jamie was unsuccessful at catching dinner for us, but in all fairness, he didn't really try. I kept my eye out for gators, there were signs posted everywhere warning us of the dangers of alligators and what not to do if we saw one (under no circumstances should you feed one or insult it's mother), but alas, no gator sightings for me.

We hiked back to camp, got the fire up and roaring, I took a fireside nap, and then the sky opened up and we camped through what I like to call Hurricane All Your Clean Clothes Are Going to Get Wet. The rain pounded us, the winds were upwards of 30 MPH (I know this to be fact because the charter captain told me so), tents were blowing over, it was scary. I kept anticipating that any minute the coast guard was going to pull up on one of those yellow inflatable boats and rescue us. I wasn't completely freaked out because there were some other people camping on the island (like people that weren't part of our group and I figured they were likely to call for help if need be and they knew we were there as well and they would have us rescued too or their karma would forever be tainted). The worst part was that Hurricane AYCCAGTGW got all my clean clothes wet. For some reason we stayed dry in the tent but everything else got wet. I was so excited because I had packed just right and would have one clean pair of jeans and one clean t-shirt (and bra) to wear on the five hour car ride home. But, alas, that was not the case. Everything was soaked. And sandy.

For someone who stayed completely covered up the entire weekend I managed to come home with sand on every part of my body (really, half the beach was in my belly button), a whole bunch of damp to soaked clothes, and bug bites (damn you sand fleas!) on every part of my body. I look like I have chicken pox. And I'm just as itchy.

But it's OK. Because, at the end of the day I survived and had a great time. I'll be going back to Capers Island, it really is beautiful, but next time I'll believe the weather reports and I'll be going back in December, when the bugs will be non existent. I hear they migrate to Florida that time of year.