Jekyll Island - Georgia, the Jungle

Watch out for that tree! This morning we packed a water bottle, lunch, and the camera and borrowed two of the marina's complementary loaner bicycles. It has been years since I was on a real bicycle (one that actually moved and wasn't stationary in an air-conditioned gym with a TV in front of it, anyway). We started down one of the unpaved woodland paths and it took a few minutes for me to stabilize the handlebars, I kept veering left towards the marsh and right towards the stands of live oaks. But I finally got the hang of it and we made it to the historical district without incident.

The tram tour was well worth it, 90 minutes of all the history you could stand. Back around the turn of the century, fifty of the nation's wealthiest men decided they wanted a place to "get away from it all" during the winter months. We're talking J.P. Morgan, Joseph Pulitzer, Marshall Field, William Vanderbilt...they bought the entire island and pooled their money to build the Jekyll Island Clubhouse. The club was very exclusive and you could only set foot on the island if you were a member, a member's guest, or a servant. Over time, some of the wealthier families built "cottages" nearby to get even more privacy. Interestingly, few of the cottages have kitchens since most of the families took their meals at the clubhouse. During evenings at the height of the season, more than one-sixth of the world's wealth was represented in the clubhouse dining room. There's a lot of historical significance to the club...during secret meetings in 1907 the groundwork was laid for the Federal Reserve banking system. And the first transcontinental phone call was a party line call between President Woodrow Wilson in Washington DC, Alexander Graham Bell in New York City, Thomas Watson in San Francisco, and Theodore Vail (then AT&T president) right here on Jekyll Island (he'd intended to be in NYC for the call but broke his leg and had the cable set up specifically for the historic call). The club fell into decline following the Great Depression, and during WWII the sinking of several US ships by German U-boats right off the coast of Georgia caused the millionaires to seek out other vacation spots during the war years. After the war the state of Georgia bought the island and nowadays the clubhouse is a swanky hotel and the cottages are restored to their former glory for the tourists.

After the tour we had lunch in a shady spot then we headed out to the north end of the island to check out Driftwood Beach, which the tram guide had recommended as one of the "top 10 most romantic beaches in the US". I feel bad for our tour guide's girlfriend because I found the beach to have a very distinctive odor that pretty much quashed any romantic sentiment, and it really wasn't much to look at either. On the way we had taken a wrong turn and went through the forest primeval with mossy vines hanging across the path and mosquitos and spiderwebs everywhere. If you didn't know you were in Georgia you could've mistaken it for the Amazon. And when it started raining on the way back it seemed even more rain-foresty. We got a little damp but got back to the boat before it really started coming down.