Valentine's on Sapelo Island
One of my favorite places to relax and spend a day or night is on Sapelo Island, off the Georgia Coast. There are many places to choose from to stay on the island affordably, but my favorite experience so far is camping at Comyam's Campground in Hog Hammock, owned by the Bailey's who are locals there, check em out: http://www.gacoast.com/geecheetours.html. Anyway, we bolted from Athens and missed the ferry the first day... but we made a night of it at a cheap motel and dinner at the awesome Old School Diner, then headed on the 9am ferry on Valentine's Day to camp for one night.
Me and Chef Jerome... so it turns out, his mom cooked for the notorious Green Frog restaurant in Waycross back in the day!!
We ordered the wheelchair platter of course! Lots of crispy seafood and ribs on the side. The hushpuppy appetizer was absolutely delicious!! I LOVE hushpuppies and Chef Jerome is right on with his recipe. Look at Walker's sticky fingers back in there!
These pix of the diner were from my iphone, pardon the quality... I was mad at myself for not bringing my camera. You gotta see this place during the day, we had reservations at 7pm so couldn't really see a lot outside, but certainly felt the sweet carpet in the parking lot!
It was freezing Friday night! Probably a good thing we missed the ferry... our cheap hotel in Eulonia was fun, we'd do that again too, so we can spend more on great food around the area.
We arrived at the campsite and two bikes were waiting for us. It's about a 2 or 3 mile ride to Nanny Goat beach from the campsite. We brought Rudee so we squashed her in Walk's backpack for most of the ride. Next time I'd love to check out Cabretta beach, it's just a 2 mile or so walk down a dirt road from the campsite.
It was instant immersion for Rudee
Her energy is amazing at the beach, she loves it. Fetching shells and just being overall adorable.
I was too chill to take photos on the beach... but we ended up finding a sun soaked cranny near the dunes, away from the light wind. We spent an hour or more absorbing the sun and it felt like we were the only people on the beach. It's always like that there. We watched several dolphins near the shore which made it even more magical. We headed back and let Rudee run a while after us, and stopped along the nature trail.
An enormous magnolia. Read below, pretty cool.
Near sunset we walked a bit away from the campground. The marsh and live oaks are gorgeous around there.
Rudee totally fell in love with this most awesome dog. They played and she giggled and made weird noises like a lovesick girl.
Julius hooked us up with some live oak to burn for our campfire and Walker was fascinated the whole time about how solid and strong and long it burned. The next morning the embers were still glowing and all I had to do was throw in a little spanish moss and a few more logs and we were rockin for cowboy coffee. I toted a huge pot in my luggage on the ferry just for that... which was ridiculous but we made it twice to make it worthwhile.
Looks like we're about to set the tree on fire but it's just the angle. I can see how fires are easily started around these islands though.
We had to wake up at the crack of dawn because we were leaving on the 8:30 ferry to head back to Athens and Julius was coming by at 8am to pick us up. I'm normally a very late sleeper... but I heard some roosters crowing around 6 and had this extra energy and excitement from the peaceful night there, and was looking forward to watching the sunrise over the marsh, so I woke up and waited for it.
These two photos are views of the sunrise from the pinhole we created for the digital camera.
We exited the ferry, which football player Allen Bailey (from Sapelo) happened to be on with us! I had no idea who he was, but he was huge so I suspected... and we saw him later at a convenience store and I confirmed it. This adorable poodle was in the parking lot as well, I missed out on the photo of Allen Bailey but did get the poodle.
On the way back, we couldn't miss going to the Smallest Church in America, off Hwy 17. It's adorable.
Angels together.
The end. We cruised back home to Athens and entered the ice storm.
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