My Happy Place

What is your favorite place to escape and why?

I don’t have to go far to find a wonderful escape. In fact, it only takes maybe five minutes to get there, but it’s a wonderful place to decompress and escape the cares of the day. This place is called The Hagood Mill Historic Site. Here’s the description you can find on the Internet:

The Hagood Mill Historic Site has over 50 acres to explore and is on the National Registry of Historic Sites. Featuring an 1845 gristmill, restored log cabins, blacksmith shop, cotton gin, moonshine still, nature trails, and a gift shop featuring local crafters, musicians and authors! We have monthly musical performances every third Saturday with a different musical theme each month. It is on these days that you can visit and see the grist mill in operation, a variety of living history demonstrators and a quality artisan market. Located on the same grounds is the South Carolina Petroglyph Site, the state’s only protected and most accessible collection of rock art.

Sounds nice, right? Well, for me the nature trail is the biggest attraction. The trail runs along a good sized stream, and the sound of the water running over the rocks carries all my stress away. I always take my dogs with me. Ginger is a swimmer. I can count on her to get in the water and paddle around every single day. Bruce wouldn’t drink from the stream at first. I believe he thought water was supposed to be taken by bowl. Izzy likes to stretch her legs. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with her.

For a long time we were the only ones there, but the place has really caught on. There’s a group of us who are usually there, and we’ve met some interesting people. Lately, a man from South Africa and a woman from Chile stopped us to talk about the dogs. Since Bruce only has three legs he gets a lot of attention. We (my husband and I) had just arrived at the Mill, and a car heading toward the road stopped beside us and a lady asked, “Where is Bruce? I only see two dogs.” We pointed him out, and she went on her way with a smile. We don’t know her, but she knew of Bruce.

We’ve seen wildlife there as well. Of course squirrels are everywhere, but we’ve also seen deer, ground hogs, turtles, rabbits, and snakes. (Big snakes. We left them strictly alone.)

After our walk we take the dogs on a short ride. They stick their heads out the window, and we count the number of deer we can see. Last night we only saw two, but we’ve seen as many as twenty. We live in the foothills so a short ride puts you in sparsely populated territory with few houses to mar the landscape.

I promise that after our walk and little ride I’m feeling so relaxed and tranquil. l feel great. There is another place that works just as well for me, but I plan to talk about it in a few weeks so I won’t mention it today.

So, where’s your happy place?

The image below was taken when the Cherokee Indians came to visit. They were teaching everyone to dance.

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