Well, we ended up going down to Brunswick. It was a typical highway drive down I-95, but it was good to get out of the house for a bit. Brunswick is interesting, and it resembles Savannah quite a lot. There’s even a bridge there that leads from Brunswick over to Jekyll Island (The Jewel of Georgia) that is exactly the same bridge that links Savannah to South Carolina. We drove through Brunswick and decided it was a terrible idea to go on a road trip to visit another town on a Sunday… the place was a ghost town. It, like Savannah, also has a lot of really great restored old mansions that are surrounded by abandoned slums. We drove down main street and couldn’t help but wonder how expensive it would be to buy the whole town. It was so strange to see a main strip that was made of these really old buildings that unoccupied and were literally falling apart, with brand spankin new services like bank ATM machines and drinking water fountains jammed between them.
We drove through the town and decided that even though the main strip was quite an odd mix of ancient buildings and new fixtures, we’d visit again on a week day. We went from there to the giant bridge to Jekyll Island. This bridge, just like the one in Savannah, is a giant cable bridge that makes a big arch over a mile long and I don’t know how high. At the top of the bridge is an amazing view of the surrounding area, which is completely flat. You can see out into the Atlantic for miles too. We got off the bridge and turned left to go out to Jekyll Island, but after a few miles we came to a toll checkpoint. We were both like “WTF is this, Banff!?”… we drove all the way up to the toll booth, then pulled a big fat U turn with disgusted looks on our faces… much to the dismay of the toll attendant. On the way out we took a picture of the welcome sign, which says nothing about paying a fee to enter the town.
It should say “Jekyll Island: 5 minutes down this road, the only road in or out of Jekyll Island, sits a toll booth where you’ll have to pay to even enter the town. If you don’t want to pay this fee, don’t bother wasting the gas or your time to drive all the way out there… its not a very scenic drive.”
Don’t go putting down Jekyll Island. It’s my favorite place in the world and it really is a beautiful island.
Shame you couldn’t cough up five bucks. It goes towards the upkeep of the island and is good for repeat entrances until midnight of the day you paid it. Of course the drive across the causway isn’t very scenic, it’s just a strip of sand accross a marsh topped with blacktop, but the island itself far surpasses scenic.