Blue Letter Bible – Greenville, SC and Congaree National Park

October 2025

The first stop on this journey to South Carolina was at Buc-ee’s just south of Lexington, Kentucky
Blue Ridge Parkway runs from Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee. It’s a beautiful drive that’s hundreds of miles long.
I think you can see what I mean when I say the Blue Ridge Parkway has beautiful scenery
This is a photo of when we were exiting one of the tunnels
As you could see from this video, some of these tunnels are long because they’re cut right through the side of the mountain
I thought this was a beautiful picture of a Morning Glory flower. There are a lot of these in North Carolina.
The Blue Ridge Parkway is so long that you go from one national forest into the next. This is the National Forest. I stayed in for one night.
Very nice campsite for the night
The next morning, I started down from my campsite up on the Blue Ridge Parkway. The road was extremely curvy.
After leaving the Smoky Mountains in North Carolina, I headed down to Greenville, South Carolina to visit Jake Evatt at Blue Letter Bible
Here’s Jake showing off his standup desk in his office
After my tour of Blue Letter Bible facilities and having a chance to meet some of the friendly staff, we went downtown in Greenville to have lunch and explore the city a bit
We ate outdoors, and we had a great view of the river from our table
You know the rule . . . The camera eats first.
Next day, I headed to Congaree National Park. I was very excited to finally explore this Park.
Yep, South Carolina is far enough south that there are lizards!
I had to take a picture of the spider. I couldn’t believe how big the spiders are in the Park.
Since Congaree is considered swamp land, a lot of of the trails are on a boardwalk that is elevated off the swampy ground
In this picture, I tried to capture how the boardwalk is on the stilted legs
Some of the trees down here are super Duper tall !!
Just a scenic picture walking along the boardwalk
That’s Weston Lake in the background. It’s where a lot of the swamp drains into.
And yes, there are fish and turtles that live in the lake. I did have a picture of the fish, but it didn’t turn out too well.
Cypress trees have an interesting feature where their roots send up little shoots that poke out through the ground. These little shoots are called knees.
Hiking on one of the few trails that actually on the ground
Next, I stayed at Santee, South Carolina State Park for two days
I couldn’t believe how blessed I was to get this beautiful campsite overlooking the lake!!
I had to take this picture because even when I was in the van, I had a wonderful view
I thought this was a scenic picture as the sun was setting up pontoon boat cruised by slowly leaving a beautiful lake. Not sure if you could see, but those are Cypress Trees growing out of the lake.
I zoomed in here so you can see how these trees are just growing out of the lake
Then I had my first experience with Geocaching. It was a blast, hiking through the woods, finding a different hidden Caches!!
Although using your GPS on your phone get you close to the cache. It’s not so easy to find the actual prize.
This cache was much easier to find
See if you can find the geocache in this picture?
And yes, South Carolina has Spanish Moss on its trees
The next morning, I got up early to start heading back north. I had to take this picture of sunrise over the lake.
Driving north in South Carolina I couldn’t resist stopping to take a picture of this Cotton Plantation. It’s beautiful.
That’s where your blue jeans come from 😁
While I was driving through North Carolina. Linda sent me a link for a Winery since I needed a place to stop and stretch my legs.
What an absolutely beautiful postcard picture Vineyard!
My last night camping before heading to Michigan was in Ohio. I stopped to play around of disc golf before going to my campsite.
This was a pretty nice disc golf course. Well taken care of with reasonable shots
My last campsite was at a KOA just outside of Toledo so that I could drain all the water out of Greta and winterizer her before heading north into Michigan