Travel dates: April 3, 2018
If you stand on Jekyll Island‘s Driftwood Beach and look north, you can see the lighthouse of Jekyll’s bigger, more congested neighbor, St. Simons. St. Simons is another of the four barrier islands that make up Georgia’s “Golden Isles” (the others are Little St. Simons and Sea Island), and we spent one of our days driving over to see what it had to offer.
One thing is has to offer is much bigger crowds than Jekyll. Jekyll is publicly owned and development is strictly limited. St. Simons not so much. The spring break week traffic was no fun to deal with. But, on the other hand, you’ll find a much bigger selection of shopping and restaurants, and features like more than one gas station and a real grocery store. And there are also at least a couple of great attractions to see with your kids (probably more, but we didn’t have time to find them all). It’s about a 40 minute drive to St. Simons from Jekyll, depending on where exactly your coming from and going to.
Fort Frederica
Fort Frederica and the surrounding town were built back in the early 18th century when the Spanish and British were still fighting for control of this part of the continent. Today the remains of the site are preserved as a National Monument by the National Park Service.
The Touring Camper went to Jekyll just a few weeks before we did, and they passed along the tip that Fort Frederica has an especially awesome Junior Ranger program. We’re big Junior Ranger program fans, so we knew we needed to check it out.
It did not disappoint. Abe and I did the program while the older kids and grown-ups did a ranger led tour of the site (which we just happened to show up at exactly the right time for). They give the kids a haversack (that’s fancy colonial talk for “bag”) full of tools and equipment that they’ll need to complete the junior ranger book. And they let you borrow a hat:
It’s formatted like a scavenger hunt that takes you through the ruins of the town and tells you a little about many of the different sites as you attempt to deliver an important message about a Spanish invasion.
At one house Abe was instructed to play quietly in the yard, but to be careful because the owner of the house was known to come out and yell at children he found on his property. This delighted Abe.
We met back up with the rest of our group by the fort remains and Louis joined in for the last couple of activities (and said he would have done the whole thing with us had he realized how superior it was to other junior ranger books).
So Fort Frederica is definitely worth a stop, especially if you have junior rangers along with you. It won’t take long to see; I think we were there maybe an hour and a half to two hours. They have a couple of other junior ranger books you can complete here as well (an underwater one and an archaeology one maybe?).
St. Simons Lighthouse Museum
After Fort Frederica, we grabbed lunch in the downtown area and then walked over to the lighthouse (passing by the beach and a big public playground on the way):
Admission here ($12 for adults, $5 for kids 6-12) grants you access to the lighthouse itself (all 129 steps of it), the keeper’s house, and a short film about the history of the lighthouse.
The first floor of the keeper’s house is a museum with exhibits about the lighthouse and the history of St. Simons. The second floor is set up to show you what the keeper’s house might have looked like 100 years ago. And then you climb!
Then we sat in a bunch of traffic to go to the grocery store and back to Jekyll. Dave and I both agreed that we really enjoyed what we saw on St. Simons, but also that we were happy to escape back to our relatively undeveloped little Jekyll Island. Which is good, because there’s no RV camping on St. Simons anyway.
And now we’re just more than a month out from our big summer trip, so it’s time to get to work finishing up documenting LAST summer’s trip! This year’s goal: be more efficient with this next time!
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Looks like you had an awesome time! We wondered about the traffic situation–it wasn’t too bad when we were there, but in some areas I could only imagine how congested the roads would get! (And thanks for linking to us! 🙂 )
If I remember right, traffic wasn’t too bad on the way to Fort Frederica, but once we got close to the downtown area things got a lot more crowded and there were traffic lights everywhere. Jekyll spoiled us 🙂