‘We should have stayed in Ohio’: Hilton Head tourists get snow instead of sand

It’s Thursday afternoon on Coligny Beach, and 3-year-old Evan Williams is flying a green spaceship. Kind of. The spaceship is actually a kite, but that doesn’t matter — little Evan is happy to be running around on the beach.

He and his parents, Britt and Terry Williams, drove down to Hilton Head Island in late December from the cold Washington, D.C., suburbs to spend their New Year’s vacation on on the warm, sunny sands of South Carolina.

Instead, they got snow.

About 4.5 inches of snow accumulated on Hilton Head Wednesday in a rare winter event, blanketing Coligny’s sand and the island’s other beaches in white.

When the Williams family visited two years ago in late December, Evan wore swimming trunk. On Thursday, he wore a puffy blue coat.

“It is a little disappointing,” said Britt, Evan’s mother.

But Britt, Evan and Terry, along with five other family members, made the best out of their snowy beach vacation by playing Monopoly on Wednesday and enjoying what they could of the beach Thursday.

The Williams family weren’t the only people on Hilton Head who ventured to the beach Thursday afternoon. The day was sunny, even with temperatures hovering above freezing, and a thin layer of snow topped part of the beach. At the main entrance of the usually-packed Coligny, a couple of dozen people jogged or walked along the water. Some took photos. All wore coats.

Another family, the Britos, traveled to Hilton Head from Chicago, so they knew a thing or two about cold weather. They’ve visited the island annually for over ten years, and South Carolina had always been a respite from the freezing Chicago winters. But the Britos had never seen snow like this on Hilton Head.

“It’s kind of a bummer,” said Ben Brito, a graduate student.

His high school brother Max Brito had a more blunt word for the situation: “This is wack.”

While the snow fell on Hilton Head Wednesday, the Brito family headed to the movie theater — but it was closed. Then they were hungry, so they searched for a place to eat. They couldn’t find an open restaurant.

“Everything is closed here when it snows,” said the family’s mother, Lisa Brito. “In Chicago, things don’t slow down like this.”

In the end, Lisa said, the snow storm wasn’t so bad. The family still got to spend time together. And the temperatures on Hilton Head were still higher than the single-digit sting of Chicago’s frozen air.

Not everyone was quite so content: “My family and I are also on vacation,” wrote one Island Packet reader on the website’s Facebook page. “Should have have just stayed in Ohio LOL!”

Another visitor, John Eibeck who traveled from Illinois to for the first time Hilton Head to celebrate New Year’s Eve, posted a photo on Facebook of his mobile home surrounded by snow

“Come to Hilton Head Island, they said. It’s ‘Paradise’, they said..... well, not this year,” he captioned the photo.

But even though Eibeck was unable to put on his swimming trunks, he was still happy to watch TV by his electric fireplace as the snow fell down — plus, he got to to eat “some of the best ribs I’ve had in my life, even better than Kansas City ribs,” at One Hot Mama’s on Hilton Head, he said.

“I’ll be back,” he said, although next time he plans to visit when it’s considerably warmer.

Like most Hilton Head visitors, Eibeck took the snow storm in stride and made the best of somewhat unusual and certainly unexpected circumstance.

For Evan Williams, the little boy flying his kite on Coligny Beach, the forecast was entirely inconsequential.

“I think it’s nothing,” he said, and then picked up his red bucket to make a sandcastle, mixed with a bit of snow.

This story was originally published January 5, 2018 at 7:51 AM with the headline "‘We should have stayed in Ohio’: Hilton Head tourists get snow instead of sand."