Hilton Head: Anticipating The Trip

Now that I've refrained from talking about our most recent trip in as many ways as I could, it's time for Hilton Head 2012!

The pieces had all fallen into place. We'd chosen the location, booked a respectable looking house within walking distance of the beach, made sure it had a table big enough for multi-night games of beer pong, and assembled the crew. After that  came the months upon months of agonizing wait time where we didn't have much to do aside from stare at the calendar and pray for some sort of Rip Van Winkle scenario where we'd wake up and it would be vacation time. (To be fair, we did have a few things to look forward to between the time we booked the trip and the date we left. I think I might have gotten married or something.)

After the trip is booked, I choose to spend my time leading up to departure doing as much research as I can do without getting up from the computer. This involves a lot of random Google searches, reading reviews on Yelp, and checking the Wikipedia entry multiple times. I've stated before that I don't like to over plan a vacation. By this I mean, I don't like to set plans prior to getting there. That doesn't mean I don't like to figure out everything I could possibly do while there before the trip actually starts. I find that it's good to know what your options are, even if you end up ignoring mostly all of them in favor of a good book and glass of beer.

While I was reading various restaurants on Yelp, I noticed that one of the highest ratings belonged to a place called Dye's Gullah Fixin's. It took me a minute to recognize why the word Gullah looked familiar to me but I instantly took to Wikipedia to confirm my suspicions. This immediately promoted a message to Turner which read something like this.

Holy shit, dude. We're going on vacation to Gullah Gullah Island. 

While it turns out that Gullah Gullah was filmed on the coast of Charleston, the most popular definition of the Lowcountry, home to the Gullah people, is the area that stretches from Charleston to Savannah, Georgia. This was good enough for me. I was on the hunt for giant ass pollywogs!

My research didn't yield much in the way of pollywog sightings but I did learn that Hilton Head is host to an alarmingly large amount of alligators. I also learned that Hilton Head doesn't like to light up the streets at night, partially because they like to keep the beach dark to aid sea turtles and partially because they are a bunch of dicks that want people like me to get eaten by alligators. One of the articles I read said that alligators like to come out at night to cool down and that it generally wasn't that great of an idea to walk around. If you've been paying attention, you'll recall that one of our favorite things to do is drunkenly retire to the beach late at night to stare out at the ocean and reflect on life.

This prompted some research into gator safety tips. I discovered that fully grown adults don't stand much of a risk of getting by a gator because we are simply too big. Babies and small dogs, however, are another story. This instantly made me stop being afraid of maimed and killed and shifted my focus to being maimed and left alive because I was too big for the gator to finish. Of course, the article did mention that if you were to encounter a gator, one of the best things to do was to make a lot of loud noises to show it that you weren't afraid. I've heard the same thing holds true for certain kind of bears as well. To me, this advice has always seemed kind of like bullshit. If I were ever to encounter an alligator within close enough proximity that my only recourse was to try to frighten it away, my thought process would probably be as follows.

Fuck, that's an alligator.

Fuck, that alligator is going to eat me.

Fuck, I am now being eaten by an alligator and it hurts just as much as I imagined it would.

At no point would I have the mental capacity to start yelling at the thing. If I ever encounter a creature that feasts upon small dogs and children, I'm not going to show it which one of us is the boss, because quite frankly, it has already proven that it is very much the boss.

Aside from that, my research produced about what you'd expect. A list of restaurants to try, various places for putt putt, and several ideas for day trips. All that was left was the patiently await for the day to arrive when we could leave. And arrive it did!

Up Next: We actually go on vacation!