Our family’s Thanksgiving break started off with a quick and fun trip to Congaree National Park outside of Columbia, South Carolina. We have a goal of seeing as many national parks as we can while the boys are at home with us, and this one was a great one to check off the list!

It’s only about a 6 hour drive for us (if you drove non-stop, so it was more like 7.5 with stops for food, snacks, restrooms, and stretching legs.) We arrived in time to get settled into our hotel and get everything ready for our adventure the next day!

Congaree National Park is a floodplain forest, meaning there’s water, and lots of it. Everything we’d read said you really needed to get ON the water to really experience the park.

So we reserved a half-day kayak tour for the morning in order to really get a feel for the park.

We had never kayaked before, but it turned out to be one of our most favorite national park experiences so far!

Our guides were really fantastic. They were friendly and knowledgeable and also just really kind.

They took photographs of our family for us along the way, tied one of our boys’ kayaks in with theirs when arms got tired, and even let a kid borrow his gloves for the chilly morning. Check out JK Adventure Guides if you ever decide to make this fun trip!

We kayaked for about 3 hours (you’ll notice a certain smallest brother even took a nap towards the end).

When I called to reserve our tour, the guide had suggested we pick up lunch before we headed to the park. There is no food in the park, and the nearest place to get anything is half an hour away.

That turned out to be great advice because we all worked up a big appetite after the kayaking!

My other piece of advice is to bring a complete change of clothes. You don’t get as wet as whitewater rafting, but there’s definitely some dripping and splashing from the paddles, and our morning was a little chilly. We were all so very thankful to have dry clothes to wear for the rest of the day!

After our lunch break, we stopped at the visitor’s center to talk to the rangers about some good trails to hike for the afternoon.

Congaree floods about 10 times a year, so they have a 2.4 mile elevated boardwalk trail to allow for hiking even on flooded days. Fortunately our day’s weather was absolutely perfect with tons of sunshine!

We still enjoyed the unique boardwalk hike, and then we did one more loop on a couple other trails for a total of 7 miles for the afternoon!

We hiked right up until the sun was about to set!

As for photos, it kind of killed me not to bring along my DSLR, but I knew it wasn’t a good idea for the kayaking part. So I gave myself a little challenge to see what I could do just with my iPhone XS. I was pleasantly surprised at what I was able to capture with just that camera for the day!

Another great reminder that the best camera is the one you have with you!

So here are some of the photos from our fantastic day at Congaree National Park! Stay tuned for our next National Park adventure!