Hilton Head Lighthouse

We ended up only having 1 morning in Hilton Head so we used that morning to visit the lighthouse. One thing that I never read anywhere was that the lighthouse was located in a community called Sea Pines. And in order to get into Sea Pines, you have to pay $6 per vehicle. I mean, this won't break the bank or anything, but it was a surprise and I definitely didn't budget for it.
Then, when we finally arrived at the lighthouse, it was a little before 10am so we sat on some red rockers that are placed around the base of the lighthouse facing the basin and waited. Well, apparently we also weren't told that they play fast and loose with their hours of operation, because they did NOT open at 10. We decided to walk around and saw that there was a pier we could walk down. As we got closer to the pier, there was a small beach that had a TON of shells so Owen took that time to collect some. We took some pictures and then headed over to the information booth to ask when the lighthouse would open. They said it would probably open some time between 10:30 and 11. We decided to walk past and it was open.
We entered around 10:15-10:20. It cost $4.25 per person. We walked up the 114 steps to the top stopping to look at pictures and random facts and to get some pressed pennies. It's pretty tight in there so if it's busy, I'd imagine it's not too easy to navigate past people.
When we got to the top, there was a cute little gift shop. You could go outside to see the views on a deck that wrapped around the entire top. After we did that, we came inside and Owen bought a lighthouse snowglobe.
And that was our trip to the lighthouse! We really enjoyed it, but definitely wish we had known a couple of these things before visiting.

Hilton Head Island, SC Hotel

Holiday Inn Resort Beach House 1 South Forest Beach Drive

For our second destination, we chose Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. I looked at a couple of places and decided it would be worth the money to stay on the beach to save time. Since we were only planning to stay for one night, it just made sense so that we could wake up and head straight out to the beach and then come back to wash up with plenty of time before check-out. After looking at pricing, we finally settled on the Holiday Inn Resort Beach House.

We check in around 5:30pm. My husband got a text after checking in to inform him that he could text the front desk with any requests or issues. I think this is a great feature that a lot of resorts are adopting.
The room was nice. It was your typical hotel room; nothing special. Unfortunately, there was a problem with a pipe or something so they had to turn off the water for quite a long time to fix it. It was very inconvenient for us. However, we understood there wasn't much they could do about it.
The bar next to the pool was very active the night we were there. Plus, outdoors there is a firepit (only 1, but it's a big one). You can probably fit a good 6-10 chair around it depending how close you sit.
When we woke up in the morning, it was a very cloudy day so we weren't able to see the sunrise like we had hoped. Luckily, we brought our own breakfast items since it's not included with this hotel. We made our way down to the beach after we packed everything up. It was unseasonably cold that morning so there was no way we were getting in the water. However, we were still able to take some pictures and play in the sand a little before we left.
Unfortunately, our stay at this hotel wasn't what we were expecting, but we could tell it was still a great hotel that we wouldn't hesitate to book again.