Golden Isles Slow Weekend: Jekyll, Cumberland & St. Simons

A morning walk through the Jekyll Island Club Historic District, before the organized tours and the day crowds arrive, is one of the most pleasurable hours in the Golden Isles. The live oak avenues are shaded and cool in the morning; the muscadine vines and resurrection fern that colonize every horizontal surface drip with dew; and the 33 surviving Gilded Age structures — from the restored main clubhouse to the enormous Crane Cottage to the intimate Hollybourne cottage — are at their most photogenic in the low morning light. The sheer improbability of this collection of late-Victorian and Edwardian grandeur in the middle of a Georgia barrier island never quite loses its power to astonish.

The Georgia Sea Turtle Center is a working rehabilitation hospital for injured sea turtles found in Georgia coastal waters, operating inside a restored 1903 power plant on the Historic District grounds. The public exhibits are substantive and the rehabilitation pools — where recovering loggerhead and green turtles can be observed through large windows — provide an unusually direct encounter with these large marine reptiles at close range. The center's interpretive staff are expert and enthusiastic.

Jekyll Island's 20-mile paved bike path network circuits the entire island, connecting the historic district, the beaches, the campground, and the wildlife management areas. The northern stretch along the oceanside to Driftwood Beach is the most dramatic: the path emerges from a live oak tunnel onto the wide northern beach strewn with the bleached skeletons of enormous dead oaks, lying in the surf zone like the wreckage of a drowned forest. This section of the path is also the best place on the island to encounter the fiddler crabs and ghost crabs that inhabit the wrack line, and the shorebird and wading bird concentrations on the mudflats of the tidal inlets at the island's north tip are excellent.

The 45-minute ferry crossing from St. Marys deposits you at Dungeness Dock on Cumberland Island's south end, where wild horses often graze the clearing visible from the dock before you've even disembarked. A short walk through the live oak forest reaches the Dungeness mansion ruins — Carnegie's 150-room estate, burned 1959, now a spectacular ruin of tabby and brick — and from there the 15-minute cross-island trail to the Atlantic beach. The morning walk, with the sun still low and the dew still on the sea oats, is the best possible start to a Cumberland Island day.

An unhurried midday on Cumberland Island's Atlantic beach — picnic lunch on the sand, swimming in the clear Georgia coast water, walking the tideline in both directions as far as inclination takes you. The beach is as wide and empty as any on the East Coast, and the absence of commercial noise makes the experience of simply sitting on it, listening to the ocean, unusually restorative.

The afternoon hours on Cumberland Island are best spent in the maritime forest and the Dungeness clearing, where the wild horse herd typically congregates in the shade during the day's peak heat. The horses are the island's most iconic residents — approximately 150 feral animals descended from Carnegie stock, completely wild and completely free — and a close-range encounter with them in the live oak clearing around the ruins is the defining Cumberland Island experience.

Neptune Park occupies the oceanfront at the center of the Pier Village area, the historic hub of St. Simons Island. The park's lawn and benches overlook the Atlantic and the fishing pier, backed by the compact little commercial district of Pier Village: a few blocks of restaurants, galleries, and shops that have remained largely unchanged in character since the mid-20th century, retaining a genuine small-resort atmosphere that the larger Golden Isles developments have systematically demolished elsewhere.

A final afternoon drive to Christ Church, Frederica, and the St. Simons Lighthouse closes the Golden Isles circuit with the island's two most atmospheric historic sites. Christ Church, founded 1736, stands in its grove of ancient live oaks with the churchyard quiet and shaded, tombstones from the 18th and 19th centuries half-obscured by resurrection fern. The 1872 St. Simons Lighthouse, four blocks from Pier Village, offers a final panoramic view from the lantern gallery before the drive home.