Just a half mile off I-85 before you cross the South Carolina/Georgia state line, turn left into the park. On your right is the old fashioned visitor center which has registration for the many campers and fishermen, basic foods, free fishing rods to borrow if you forget yours, drinks, snacks and souvinirs, even those wonderful caps with the South Carolina palmetto tree logo (I bought a brown one and a yellow one for Martin and Mathew). There are restrooms and a big comfortable sitting area with overstuffed couches and chairs. Very cozy.
There is a short 1.8 mile trail which begins to the left a short distance behind the picnic shelter which has a full scale outdoor basketball court beside it. In the road, just at the trail head, I found a football shaped magnetic sign saying, "Save the TaTa's". I kept it.
This is a beatiful winding path through hardwood forrest. Once you come near a cove of the lake.
There are five or six one-person size footbridges that cross tiny streams. I had to encourage Boofa to go across the first one. Beside the path, yellow and red toadstoods grow. They remind me of the toadstools in old Disney films, yellow underneath with red tops, splattered with yellow freckles. Katherine Quigley could go out into the forrest and pick mushrooms as she knew which ones were poison. Since these are red, I suspect they are poison. There are many ferns here too.
Cicadas sing softly and I hear a few birdsongs. You come out in the parking lot at the visitor center.
We leave the park and cross the Tugaloo River into Georgia. (I read that the Tugaloo were a fierce Native American tribe who practiced cannabalism and chased the Edisto onto Edisto Island. I do not know if this is true).
A Volvo station wagon passes us. On the back window in hand painting, it says, "Beware of the
Woods."
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