Kiawah Wildlife

I'm just now getting around to posting about my little weekend getaway mainly because I was too lazy to go digging for the cord to transfer the pics from my camera until about now.  It's not entirely relevant to the dogs because, well, they weren't invited :)  Ok, that's not entirely true; I originally thought I could bring them along and then found out I couldn't.  So I shuffled them off to Pet Paradise for the weekend and had a very relaxing weekend without dogs... but not without wildlife!

We rented bikes for the weekend (because that's really all you need on the island and everyone does it... and yes, if everyone was jumping off a bridge, I probably would, too!).  We were feeling ambitious on Saturday and began riding our bikes down the beach, to the shopping center and then over to the neighboring island, Seabrook.  While there, we saw horses (below).

(Fine, they aren't wild.  They're on a farm or something... but this is my blog and I can do what I want!)

 On our way back, we stopped at a beautiful lake area.  Signs like this are posted all over the islands... but we kept commenting to one another about how unlikely it was that we would encounter a gator.  (Side note: you know these are posted because some idiot did, in fact, approach a gator and the scene did not end well...)

We did see a ton of adorable turtles.  We sat and watched this group on a log for awhile.  They kept teetering the log back and forth, eventually rolling it completely, and then they would all climb back on and the adventure started over.  This kept us entertained for at least 30 minutes!

Shortly after our turtle watching break, we realized that not only were we very far from our condo on the other island, our legs were getting very, very tired!  The ride back was probably about 45 minutes... but it felt like 450!  (Our total round trip mileage was 16 miles, btw!)  As we finally reached the street where our condo was located, we happened to glance over at the lake almost directly across from our unit and notice THIS GUY watching us peddle on by:

Of course, like the morons we are, we turned around to get a closer look.  Sure enough, it was the gator we doubted we'd encounter!  He slyly started moving closer to us and lifting himself a little further out of the water, so we immediately decided to cut our visit short and be on our way.  Given the exhausted condition of my legs and inevitable shit in my pants, I seriously doubted my ability to outrun that monstrosity had he decided to start moving a little faster.  I am, however, about 900% certain that had he decided to sneak into the condo and hide under my bed, I was prepared to battle because I didn't sleep a wink that night!

In hindsight, I'm a relieved we did not get to bring the dogs because being the morons that we are (I'll speak for us both, though I'm the moron mastermind), we probably wouldn't have thought much of letting Nugget swim in that lake - uh, before spotting the gator, obviously. With that said, and after reading the recent commentary about the lake in Charlotte we frequent being highly polluted, I ask our followers this:  What precautions do you take, if any, before allowing your dog to swim somewhere besides a swimming pool?  How do you know if it's free of predators and pollutants, bacteria, etc. that could harm them?