Plantation, Beach and Baywatch the Sequel

Richmond Hill, GA

The forecast is not good for the next few days but today was nice so off I went to see a plantation and a beach. Neither ended up being as I expected.

There are many pictures of the iconic driveway of Wormsloe Plantation and I bet you’ve seen one along the way. I’ve seen one of the best taken by photographer friend Graeme and it’s on Karen and Graeme’s wall at The Villages. Today I made my amateur attempt. I headed out to Wormsloe Plantation (my autocorrect keeps changing the name to Wormhole so if I miss correcting one, that’s why!) expecting to see the driveway, and tour a plantation house, as I had done in Louisiana and Mississippi. The problem is that at Wormsloe the descendants of the original builder still live on the plantation in a new house built much later and the original house is in ruins.

In any case, to start my tour today, I entered the gate, built by one of the original owner’s descendants in 1913 to honour his son’s birth and in front of me was the magnificent Live Oak Avenue, with more than 400 live oak trees which had been planted along this drive in the early 1890’s to honour the same son. That’s 125 years ago. But this property dates back all the way to 1733 when Noble Jones, a humble physician, carpenter and surveyer arrived with General James Oglethorpe and 113 other colonists to start the new planned colony in Georgia.

I dutifully stopped at the Superintendent’s Cottage to pay the prescribed fee, and then headed to just in front of the “stop and pay” sign, (put there just to discourage picture taking during off hours, I’m sure) to take my picture while no one was travelling down the road. Since the road actually is used by visitors to get to the museum and parking lot, you have to time your picture taking to a time when there are no cars in sight or they are far enough in the distance that they don’t interfere. It was almost noon, a difficult time to take a decent picture, with hard shadows and it hasn’t rained for a while so the Spanish Moss and Resurrection Ferns are brown and not green. Yes, I’m setting you up so you won’t be too disappointed in my attempt. But it is what it is.

I drove slowly down the road, enjoying every minute, to the museum parking lot. They have a great film in the visitors centre that explains how Noble Jones came to be at Wormsloe in the first place and much about the Oglethorpe Georgia colonization attempt. Jones became an indispensable leader within the small colony with his skills as a physician, surveyor and carpenter. Oglethorpe relied heavily on him to take leadership roles in all those areas and more. At one point, though some of the envious colonists turned against him and many of his responsibilities were removed, giving him time to strike out on his own and develop a plantation, home/fort and businesses. This property is the demonstration of his successful efforts.

After wandering the property, taking pictures, I headed to somewhere completely different, to Savannah’s beachfront on Tybee Island. It’s less than a 30 minute drive from downtown Savannah to the south end of Tybee Island, where most of the beach activities, pier, restaurants, shops, and night life are located. It’s a relatively small area but quite a long nice beach.

The surprise for me here was that the area around the pier was closed off to the public because Paramount is filming a sequel to Baywatch, if you can believe it. So on one side of the pier the beach was completely shut down with stuff all set up for supposed 2017 lifeguard tryouts at a beach called Emerald Bay, Florida. On the other side was the sign you see above and there were lots of people who purposely sat there hoping they’d be in the movie. They had the pier set up with various kiosks selling beach stuff, but of course no one was allowed out there so I didn’t get my walk on the pier. Trouble was, the wind was so bad they weren’t able to film. And it was only 23 degrees or so, and with the wind whipping off the water, it wasn’t any too comfortable. Zac Efron was supposedly on set and there were many teenage girls hanging around hoping to get a look.

And of course, if there is a lighthouse, I’ll find it, so on the way back I stopped at the Tybee Island Lighthouse just to take a picture. I figure I’ve climbed my quota of lighthouses on this trip so I didn’t bother.

P.S. Seeing another pineapple on the gate at Wormsloe got my curiosity on overdrive and so I looked it up when I got back. The reason the pineapple is associated with hospitably in the colonial times in north america is explained in a few websites, but this one seemed to cover it all:

http://www.levins.com/pineapple.html