amusements and pastimes

There’s an interesting getaway a leisurely five hour drive from Tampa: Jeckll Island, Georgia (www.jekyllisland.com).

The History of Jeckll Island page of the above website gives an encapsulated account of its history:

“In 1886, Jekyll Island was purchased to become an exclusive winter retreat for America’s most elite families, known as the Jekyll Island Club. For more than half a century, the nation’s leading families, including the Rockefellers, Morgans, Pulitzers, and Goulds, came to Jekyll Island ‘to secure an escape.’”

Jeckll Island Hotel Club exteriors

As with many of the pleasures one discovers in life, a trip to Jeckll Island would never have been something I would have sought out on my own initiative; rather, I went there because of an external event–the wedding of my son!

My son and his fiancé–now his wife–decided to have a small, “destination wedding.”

I’d never heard that term before. But, now that I’ve learned about it, I must say I’m taken with the idea. The couple and those invited to the wedding go to the destination and rent rooms through the night of the wedding. The wedding takes place on the grounds of the destination and included in the price of the event are things like the officiant, the musician, the photographer, the wedding dinner, etc. Then, the day following the wedding, the guests return home and the couple stays at the destination for their honeymoon.

Such a lovely idea. And in this case, this particular destination was such a lovely place, a place I would never have come to otherwise.

The guests and bride and groom stayed at the Jekyll Island Club Hotel (www.jekyllclub.com)–either the main building or one of the “cottages,” which are the former residences of people who used to winter there and who originally bought the island, people such as the Rockefellers, Morgans, and Pulitzers. Humble folk. Just about as humble as their three storey “cottages.”

Jeckll Island Hotel interiors

All the pictures in this post are of the Jekyll Island Club Hotel buildings and grounds.

There are other, quite good, less expensive places to stay on the island, but the Jekyll Island Club Hotel was less expensive than I thought it would be. Actually, it was less than some hotels on St. Pete Beach. So, if you’re only going for a couple nights, as I was, it doesn’t break the bank. For a very nice two days within a short day’s drive from Tampa, I really do recommend Jeckll Island, Georgia, and the other neighboring Golden Isles of Georgia (St. Simons Island, Brunswick, and Sea Island–see Brunswick and the Golden Isles of Georgia).

Jeckll Island Hotel dock

One last suggestion: when you visit the Jeckll Island Club Hotel, take time to visit its bookstore. Allow at least an hour to browse its many rooms, each dedicated to a specific theme related to the Georgia islands. My favorite (you can tell by checking my credit card statement for that visit) was the cookbook room, with many cookbooks relating to the Atlantic barrier islands cooking history.

Jeckll Island bookstore

There are two cookbooks in particular I’d like to mention. One is Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way: Smokin’ Joe Butter Beans, Ol’ ‘Fuskie Fried Crab Rice, Sticky-Bush Blackberry Dumpling, and Other Sea Island Favorites. The other is Cornbread Nation 5: The Best of Southern Food Writing.

Cornbread Nation is the most recent in a series of Best of Southern Food Writing volumes. That title is obviously carefully chosen. It’s the quality of the writing, not just the recipes, that is the appeal of the series.

trees and moss

Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way is, of course, about the cooking of the Gullah region (the coast of South Carolina and Georgia), home to the Gullah who…

” are known for preserving more of their African linguistic and cultural heritage than any other African-American community in the United States. They speak an English-based creole language containing many African loanwords and significant influences from African languages in grammar and sentence structure. The Gullah language is related to Jamaican Creole, Barbadian Dialect, and the Krio language of Sierra Leone in West Africa. Gullah storytelling, cuisine, music, folk beliefs, crafts, farming and fishing traditions, all exhibit strong influences from West and Central African cultures.” [ref]

To say more about the Gullah would require another whole post. There is also an incredibly rich and beautiful Gullah musical tradition that would require yet another whole post! So, I’ll leave you with these five links that interested me in a Google search of Gullah.

• Gullah Language & Culture
• The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leone-American Connection
• Hilton Head Island Gullah Celebration
• Gullah Festival
• Gullah Gourmet

Also…all best wishes to my son and daughter-in-law. May you have many, many happy years together!

[Disclaimer: if you buy something, like the books above, through my Amazon.com links, I receive a teeny-weenie commission from Amazon. It really is miniscule. It doesn't increase the price of the item in any way. So, if you'd be willing to buy something through my Amazon links, I might be able to afford a second cup of coffee some morning! I make this disclaimer because we are now required to by law, so please consider things thoroughly disclaimed.]

Sometimes you see something that is so stunning, you’re actually able to overcome the inertia of living, go home, get the big camera (well…big for me; it’s just a lower end Nikon DSLR, but it’s bigger than my old Canon point-and-shoot which I still love and use a lot), go back out in the heat, drive back to the location, get out in the heat, brave the bugs (I’m a real sissy when it comes to flying, stinging bugs), and take some pictures.

It’s worth it though. I just love this tree. I’ve never seen it quite so glorious as it was today. I’ve blogged about it before here. At the end of that post, you can see the same tree when it’s not flowering.

Searching for that earlier post, I realized that I’ve actually got ten (10…!!!) posts on trees. I guess I really am a tree-hugger.

Here’s the list of those posts in case you’re in a tree-hugging mood yourself.

• It’s not all palm trees
• The kapok tree
• Spring
• More flowering trees
• Orchid, tree, jacaranda, royal poinciana, and tamarind
• Crepe-myrtle
• Yellow & orange fall foliage
• Red fall foliage
• Mount Dora Moss
• Monument

While I was out, today, I snapped this crepe-myrtle, too. These are everywhere down here right now. So easy to not notice how Pandora gorgeous is the place where we live. I remember one of my grand-nephews, who’d spent his entire life in the brown hills of northern California, helping me drive cross country a few years back. We took the southern route (my favorite) along the Gulf states. He’d never seen anything so green and lush in his life. Sometimes we’re lucky enough to see what’s around us through someone else’s eyes.

If you click on a picture, you go to a larger version. And, depending on the size of your monitor, if you click on that larger picture, you may go to an ever larger version!

After spotting an enormous flock of American White Ibis feeding on a lawn in the city, I swung around the block and slowly edged up to get some pictures. There were at least twice as many Ibis as you see in the picture below; I just couldn’t get them all in one picture. They were aggressively feeding on something. Competition was fierce among them. What striking, streamlined birds they are, with their curved beaks.

A Florida poet, Erik Scott, now living in the northwest, wrote a poem about Florida in which the Ibis is a symbol. This poem was one of a collection of his that I set as a vocal composition . He chose a good symbol for Florida; this bird is quite common in local neighborhoods. Usually, though, I only see one or two at a time. This time, there were at least 25 or 30. The energy of such a large flock in a confined space is what caught my eye. If I’d dared to get out of the car and get a more oblique angle, maybe I could have gotten them all in one frame.