Part 1: We couldn't skip the beach

What happens in the summertime? Does the heat just melt my eagerness to do things? Does time move faster in the summer — the Earth spinning with a little more zip thanks to the hotter days? Or are we just pulled in too many different directions in the summer, without the focus that we have for autumn, Halloween and Christmas, when you have such a narrow window to accomplish your bucket list?

Whatever the reason, I generally find myself planning all sorts of grand adventures and activities for summer — which feels like it will be never-ending in late May — and then wondering why we haven’t accomplished any of them when Labor Day is upon us.

That’s what happened with our annual beach trip this year.

We’ve gone every year since Sawyer was born, and he loves the beach. The first few years, we purposefully planned a trip at the tail end of summer. We prefer to avoid the ridiculously hot weather in the dead of summer. We enjoy missing the large crowds and mostly having the beach to ourselves. And it was usually easier to get time off late in the summer, rather than when most people were taking vacations.

This year was just a mess of excuses and inconveniences to throw a wrench into our beach bonanza, including but not limited to the lingering pain from my ankle sprain and the accompanying doctor bills, an impromptu business trip for me to San Antonio and Ray’s business nearly doubling in size in July. We just seemed busier and more broke than usual.

But I PROMISED Sawyer we’d make it to the beach. It has become a family tradition, and I’m big on traditions. Ray says Sawyer’s to young to remember things that I go overboard doing, and he’s probably right. But we’re building the foundation for the tradition now. It doesn’t just get to become a tradition when we take him somewhere at age 10. It starts now, even if he doesn’t remember all the details.

And part of wanting to go so badly was to keep the tradition — even if it was mostly for ME.

By September, we still hadn’t been, and I knew I was running out of time. So I chose the final weekend of the month and committed to it. Rain or shine, we were GOING to the beach. We usually rent a friend’s beach house, which Sawyer believes is OUR beach house, but I decided to save money and camp instead.

I thought Sawyer and I would go on lots of camping trips this summer. We have a great time camping, but it just turns out to be so much harder and more work every time we go. By summer’s end, we’d only camped once. I decided camping at the beach — which I knew would be messy and challenging — would kill two birds with one stone.

It was everything hard and stressful that I expected and more.

And it was wonderful and memorable like I expected and more.

We left early on Friday morning and drove four hours, mostly in the rain. Sawyer was antsy. I was dreading the possibility of rain all weekend. It was not a good start.

After several stops, a couple U-turns, some cursing my GPS and drive-through lunches, we made it to Myrtle Beach just as school was letting out. The traffic into town was bad, but we finally arrived at our destination: Myrtle Beach State Park.

I’m planner, so I’d scoured the park’s campground map, trying to decide which site was optimal — something that’s hard to do with one teeny picture and no real information, especially about who your neighbors will be. I’m picky about campsites. OK, I’m picky about most everything, but the campsite thing I attribute to my dad. We camped a few times most summers when I was growing up, and we had a popup camper. We had to pick just the right kind of site … flat enough so it would be level, pull-through was great, shade was good but not so much that it would stay damp, etc.

So I am not the type who pulls up and says, “Just give me a campsite.” I MUST scope them out — discern how close the bathhouse is, score one that’s got some privacy, find a flat spot for the tent, etc. Well, this campground was not meant for someone like me.

Few of the sites had any privacy (some had zero). The bathhouses were oddly situated so that you had to walk way around or cut through other sites to get to them. Between sites and rows, there was no grass or even trees like in the moutains; there were palm trees and scrubby brambles, making shortcuts impossible.

We drove through all the loops a couple times, jotting down sites that I liked, only to be told back at the reservation booth that those were full or unsuitable. (The first woman that helped us, I believe, thought we must have a 40-foot camper, not a 7x9-foot tent.) We hopped back in the car for another couple loops. Sawyer was getting frustrated and so was I.

We finally settled on a site, and thank goodness the new clerk found it and said it was open! Wahoo! There was no one on either side of us when we reserved that spot. Two hours later, we had four new neighbors, including a family from Wisconsin with a 3-year-old girl named Ginger who took it upon herself to become Sawyer’s shadow and best friend. 

After quickly setting up the tent and our air mattresses, we hit the beach. Gray clouds covered the sky, and the wind whipped through the waves and the sea oats. Ominous is the best way to describe how the beach looked and felt — as if a storm was going to drop on us at any second.

Sawyer couldn’t have cared if a hurricane was about to make landfall. He ran in circles — cackling in delight at having his feet in the sand, his hair wild from the gusts and the constant motion. Somehow he managed to stay mostly dry; the water was too cold to go more than ankle-deep and the waves were probably a bit intimidating. I had no desire to get wet, and I told him the surf was too rough and I wasn’t coming in to help him. For once, my reasoning was good enough.

We spotted a child’s beach shovel by the entrance to the beach, and since it seemed to belong to no one, I told Sawyer he could play with it.

After an hour or two of playing — mostly running, throwing handfuls of sand and catching a few tiny ghost crabs, the only activity that could bring his boisterousness down to a simmer — the raindrops came full force. We scurried back to the car and made a stop at the bathhouse to cleanup.

If staying dry was still my goal, it was surely an impossible one. Cramped, icky showers and a 4-year-old unwilling to experiment with turning them on left me almost as wet as a fully bathed Sawyer.

Mostly clean and ready for dinner, we turned right out of the campground for the grocery store. I had planned to build a fire and cook hotdogs, but I have my limits. And cooking in the rain is one of them. So after we bought some food for the weekend, we headed the other direction for dinner.

It would’ve been easy to find a fast food spot and order two meals, but I thought maybe we’d find somewhere local. We disagreed for a mile or two and then finally settled on Waffle House. Not exactly local, but a little better than a burger and fries.

It turned out to be a great choice. Sawyer chose to sit at the counter, which gave us a bird’s-eye view of the cooktop and waffle irons. The cook and our waiter took a liking to Sawyer. They gave him a paper Waffle House hat and added extra chocolate chips to his waffle. It was the perfect entertainment for our dinner.

Back at the campground, Little Miss Ginger came over when she saw we had returned. I handed out glow-stick bracelets and necklaces to the kids and Ginger’s dad, who came over to talk. He said they were headed out in the morning, on their way to Charleston before heading to Nevada in a multi-stop trip to visit family and friends. An 8-month-old and a 3-year-old driving and camping for days on a cross-country trek? Brave people.

We built a campfire with damp wood and roasted about three marshmallows before the fire fizzled out.

When Ginger's family turned in, I convinced Sawyer it was time for us to do the same, but he didn't want to walk to the bathhouse. So I let it slide. Bad decision. 

The chill in the air, Sawyer’s tossing and turning and my fear that he’d kick all the covers off made for a night of little sleep. And the cold should’ve been the least of my worries. He woke me up around 6 a.m. after having wet the bed. Thankfully, we don’t share a bed!

Still dark and quite chilly, we trudged to the bathhouse, by then a fairly unnecessary trip at least for him. With dry pajamas on, we snuggled under my covers, listening to owls in the forest and early morning stirrings of other campers until the sun came up.

 When it was clear that staying quiet in the tent was no longer an option — at least for Sawyer, I forced myself to get up. His little buddy Ginger and her family were already up and at ’em, cooking breakfast over a fire. My powdered doughnuts weren’t enough to trump the allure of a cute playmate and her parents’ oatmeal, something Sawyer refuses to eat at home.

Soon, the request came over the shrubby campsite border: “Mom, can I have some oatmeal?” Followed by, “It’s OK. We offered it to him.”

I spoke for a few minutes to Ginger’s mom while the kids ran laps through the three adjacent sites, stopping to yell at Sawyer when I heard the gushing sound of a spigot at the farthest empty campsite.

Then Sawyer somehow managed to step in dog poop and get it all over his second pair of pajamas that morning. It was a clear sign that we needed to hit the beach; the place that usually feels like so much work was looking like the place he could cause the least havoc. We bid a sad, pigtailed Ginger goodbye for the time being and drove to the beach. It was probably less than a quarter-mile, as the crow flies, but carrying all our junk that far with Sawyer dawdling behind me did not seem like the best plan.

We drove and parked just 50 feet from the beach, hauling our chairs and towels over the boardwalk and sand dunes to a spot far enough from the pier to be out of earshot from most of the fishermen and tourists, not that there were many. We had the beach largely to ourselves, heaven for me, torture for Sawyer who wanted to bump into Ginger or some other yet-to-be-made friend. Surprisingly, it was sunny — warm if you were sitting still but not hot. In fact, my sweatshirt and yoga pants were perfect.

The never-cold Sawyer splashed in the water, rolled in the sand, chased seagulls and dug like he was part terrier — heaving giant scoops of sand back into the sea.

I followed him around like a paparazzi for awhile, stooping in the dry sand to click off a dozen shots of him frolicking, trying to capture that carefree exuberance he has every time we step on a beach.








A little out of focus but so classically Sawyer.









The Myrtle Beach airport is right next to the state park, so all day, we watched airplanes zoom right over the beach and land.

The sand sculpture artists


An igloo and snowman


A crab with shell eyes and a found pacifier mouth


A sand sea turtle (the winner!)

Everywhere we went, strangers struck up conversations with me. 

After letting Sawyer play for several hours, we walked down to the pier to see the fishermen, dodge dangling hooks, peek into buckets of bait and browse the weird items in the gift shop. We also got to watch two wedding parties — one that was there post-wedding for photos and a cookout reception, another setting up for a wedding on the beach that was destined to get rained on. 

We did our load of dirty laundry — wet sheets, poop-covered pajamas and beach towels — while we showered, this time moving to the big bathhouse near the laundromat. (Note to self: The bathhouse near the RV loop is the biggest and best!)

The rain really set in, so we went for ice cream and then drove to Target to do a recon mission for Sawyer’s Halloween costumes that were on sale. No luck on the costume but Sawyer got in a decent nap while I sat in the car regretting that I’d left my book in the tent.

My original plan included a seafood dinner and maybe miniature golf, but every restaurant we passed was packed and expensive. While we hunted, we passed an amusement park and Sawyer begged to stop. It was $8 just to park, so I told him we’d keep driving and find something else nearby. Three-dollar parking, bizarre shops and tourist traps like the SkyWheel and an arcade lured us to the Ocean Boulevard boardwalk.



Thankfully, the rain tapered off just as we parked so we strolled around a bit checking out the oddities of The Strip. As we walked along, hand in hand, it struck me how much I would’ve liked to have a cute boy and a hand to hold when I went to the beach after high school graduation … and now I have one! (Two if you count the one at home.)

We ended up in the arcade, where a whopping $8 in tokens entertained us for an hour or more. We Skee-balled, shot a cannon to knock clowns over and — our favorite — played old-school pinball on a baseball machine. It was tremendous fun, and it reminded me of the time Ray took me to the same arcade, years before Sawyer was born, and won a stuffed bear on the pinball game. Sawyer picked out a whistle as his prize and shrilled it down the boardwalk as we headed back to the car. 

We grabbed dinner on the way home, and since it was drizzling and late, we decided to skip another campfire. We made sure to hit the bathroom before bed that night — our flashlights bobbing along as we tramped through now-occupied campsites, me hushing Sawyer’s loud questions and observations every minute or two.

I had asked him if he’d like to get up one more and see the sunrise. We accidentally did this his first trip to the beach. I wanted beachy portraits of him, and on our last day, he just happened to wake up super early. I figured the beach would be empty, so we headed out, catching the early morning sun in our photos. Since then, I’ve never bothered to try to wake him up early enough to repeat it, figuring his sour mood would negate the lovely light. 

But we were so close to the beach, I thought it might be fun. He agreed, so I set an early alarm before we hit the sack.

See next post for our final morning at the beach.