Making Marines - South Carolina Low Country

(Parris Island, SC)  Hi 77 Lo 48 -- Another beautiful day. We spent today driving around the base and surrounding area. This is the road that runs past our RV park. (Click on photos to enlarge.)
 

About a half mile down it dead ends at Port Royal Sound, with a small recreation area. It's called Elliott's Beach, it has a small beach and playground.

The coastline you see across the sound is Hilton Head Island. It's very close by boat, but almost an hour away by car.

We heard small arms fire all yesterday afternoon and this morning. We followed the sound and came to the firing range area. The ranges are huge, with targets up to 500 yards away. Every Marine, including women, must qualify with the M-16 rifle.

This is one of the many obstacle courses scattered around the base.

One of the base housing areas. They're duplexes, and very nice looking.


And they do it well...

A drill instructor (DI), the most feared and respected person a young recruit will ever meet.




















I wonder where he's going?

We spent about two hours in the Parris Island Museum.

The museum covers about 8,000 square feet on two floors, including a small theater and gift shop. It not only covers the history of basic recruit training, but also has many exhibits covering the history of the Marine Corps and the many battles they've been involved in. It was neat seeing how the uniforms changed over time. And it was interesting to see the exhibits of war equipment and uniforms of enemy troops, including the Japanese and Chinese from WWII and the Korean War.

We had lunch at Backyard Burgers, across the street from the museum. When we came out after lunch we were greeted with two platoons of women Marines marching by. If you've never heard stirring sing-song cadences yelled out by a Marine drill instructor, you have no idea how it gets the old patriotic juices flowing!


After seeing all of this we both have such a secure feeling that our country and our freedoms are in good hands. Don't ever let anyone tell you that military training has been "dumbed down" in our politically correct world. From what we saw today, their training is tough! And what's most comforting is, even though Marines are trained to be the best fighters in the world, they're also taught core values of respect, integrity, ethics and morality as part of their training. We got to talk briefly with a couple of recruits who were on a cleaning detail in the museum, and they showed us an unbelievable amount of respect. It was so heart warming.

For the rest of the afternoon we took a drive to check out the surrounding area. We drove through Port Royal and Beaufort. Kind of funny that a week ago we were in Beaufort (Bo-fort), NC and this week we're in Beaufort (Be-ew-fort), SC. Beaufort has a quaint waterfront area, but overall there isn't much there.  It was recommended that we drive out to Hunting Island State Park. It's about 13 miles east of Beaufort, with nothing but salt marshes the whole way. We checked out the Campground, which is right on the beach.




There’s LOTS of trees for the nature lovers. Most of the sites looked pretty tight and we wouldn't be real comfortable maneuvering Tumbleweed around there. We’ll stick with the base RV park, but it's very nice for those who want a little more seclusion.


We didn't feel it was worth paying $5.00 each to enter the park just to see a beach and lighthouse, so we headed home just as a light rain started to fall. It was a nice, leisurely day of sightseeing. We were planning to go to Savannah tomorrow, but we heard on the local news that a Veterans' Day parade that will have the downtown area blocked most of the day. So we'll postpone out trip until Saturday. Don't know what we'll do tomorrow... maybe nothing. :)