Backroads And A Sunny Georgia Beach

By Tom Poland

 

I like to combine work and play. Last week my family and I vacationed at Tybee Island. As I made my way to the island, I took back roads through the Lowcountry. I was looking for great stories and photos for a book I’m writing, and I found a few.

At Tybee, I forgot about work and had a great week. When we packed up to leave Saturday morning, great memories left with us. Tybee Island has a lot going for it, including the massive cargo ships that steam across the horizon. To where are they going. What do they carry. From where do they come.

Restaurants are plentiful. Parking is difficult even though Tybee Island’s not crowded. Unlike Myrtle Beach, Tybee let’s you claim a sizable piece of real estate for setting up your tent, chairs, and coolers. The beach is spacious and sea oats fringe it creating a picturesque setting. Best of all you don’t see wall-to-wall high-rise hotels ad infinitum. Someone had the foresight not to erect a wall of cement that blocks views of the sea.

I found the beach free of riffraff, something I can’t say about a certain legendary beach. The joke goes that you can easily find shells at that legendary beach, .38 casings. We encountered no drunkenness, no disorderly types, no unwelcome loud music. Just sand, sea, sea oats, sky, and surf. We watched dolphins and porpoises cruise offshore and one day watched them attack a school of shad. Pelicans flying in vees and pelicans plummeting seaward proved entertaining.

 

 

The island itself has bike trails and we rode bikes checking out the island’s lighthouse, Tybee Island National Light Station, and an old fort, Fort Screven. We rode by the now and then beach home of Sandra Bullock, too. Easy to spot. The sophisticated security system screams, “Someone really wants privacy here.”

Just up Highway 80 is Fort Pulaski where you’ll see the smallest lighthouse in Georgia, Cockspur Island Lighthouse, 46 feet tall. Tybee Island National Light Station, however, stands 144 feet high.

If you go to Tybee Island, take Captain Derek’s Dolphin Adventure. You’ll see dolphins in the wild up close. They put on quite a show.

The week sped by and Saturday morning we all said goodbye. For me, it meant a chance to work on my back roads book. Taking rural routes from Tybee Island to a book-related event in Aiken Saturday was an easy decision though I needed to be there by 1:30. Through the heart of lovely historic Savannah I drove to Highway 17 North to the Talmadge Memorial Bridge, which spirited me into Carolina. I had plotted a route down 17 to 321, onto 278, and to Highway 19, which would take me through New Ellenton into Aiken.

 

 

Along the way I came across yet another abandoned store. They’re everywhere, folks. When I got out to photograph it, a wiry, tan fellow left the pickup engine he was working on to saunter over. He looked at me with curiosity, cocking his head as a dog does.

“Mind if I photograph your store,” I asked.

“Might as well. The beautification committee wants me to tear it down,” he said.

“I think it’s beautiful.”

“Well tell that to the committee,” he said. “I told ’em, ‘You want it tore down? Get some crowbars and hammers and have at it.’ ”

It’s junky but something about this store evokes beauty, a glimpse into the past. Why tear it down? It’ll collapse one day.

As I drove through Estill, my days teaching at Columbia College came back to me. I taught a girl from Estill all those years ago. Can’t remember her name but I recall she would send a bouquet of roses to herself each Friday when her boyfriend came to see her. She left the roses at the front desk to make him think another fellow was interested in her. The goal? Marriage. It worked but I have no idea what became of her or him. The realist in me says divorced. Maybe not, though. Some folks actually like being married.

Rolling into Allendale, I recalled a friend from a lifetime ago. He had worked there as a pharmacist. Then changes set in. The upshot was that he vanished into a hermit-like life.

It was in Allendale too, just off 278, that I saw a strange tower, a standpipe, one of three in South Carolina. Circa 1915, it’s a predecessor to today’s water tanks. Trust me when I say you don’t see standpipes everyday. Imagine the biggest silo you’ve ever seen and multiply that by a factor of five.

After a hasty, tasty detour for barbecue in Barnwell, I hit the road for Aiken. No more stopping. I arrived at the event 10 minutes late. After it ended, I broke my rule and drove home on I-20. I had been up since 5:45 to photograph sunrise at Tybee Island, and I just wanted to get home. I had been gone nine days on a trip that took me onto Beaufort’s back roads and ended in Irmo with eight days in Georgia in between, a true Georgialina adventure. Unpacking my bags, folded neatly, there they were. Family and backroad memories. Great memories that will last a lifetime.

 

All photos by Tom Poland.

 

Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
Email Tom about most anything. [email protected]

 

Tom Poland is the author of twelve books and more than 1,000 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press released his book, Georgialina, A Southland As We Knew It, in November 2015 and his and Robert Clark’s Reflections Of South Carolina, Vol. II in 2014. The History Press of Charleston published Classic Carolina Road Trips From Columbia in 2014. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture and speaks often to groups across South Carolina and Georgia, “Georgialina.”

 

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