A Glimpse of St Simons

Our volunteer agreement with Fort Frederica National Monument on St Simons Island, GA was for, roughly, November to March, five months.  Our original strategy was to take a winter position that would have more pleasant weather than the record setting cold of Big Bend National Park of last winter.  But by happy coincidence we also learned that we were going to be first-time grandparents around the end of December. Our daughter and son-in-law live in Atlanta so this will put us only a six hour drive away as opposed to a 20 hour drive had we stayed out west again this winter.

And being this close to family and friends in the Atlanta area during the season of holidays we spent a great deal of time on the Golden Isle Parkway.  Lunches with friends from our former jobs and holiday weekends with family were great.  But we spent so much of our days off on the road and in Atlanta that we barely got to know our surroundings on St Simons.

And then the time came for the grandbaby.  We had arranged for time off so we could go to Atlanta and stay with our daughter in the days leading up to the delivery.  But the week went by without so much as a hint of labor pains.  John headed back to St Simons to fulfill our agreement with the park service and Cyndee stayed in Atlanta.

After getting back to Fort Frederica late on a Sunday evening the call came early Monday morning that things were happening.  Back into the truck and on the Golden Isle Parkway.  The drive started with half-hour phone calls for updates on the progress of the delivery.  This was supposed to be one of those doula-coached births into a tub of water.  It was a relaxed atmosphere with dad-to-be and soon to be mom's mom all in the room helping.  What was supposed to be a calm, quiet, low stress birth experience was torn asunder by a baby with its own idea of how things were going to go.  During one of the half-hour phone updates with me still about 2 hours away from the hospital the sounds in the background took on a decidedly different tone, one of distress.  The next phone call came in just a few minutes, the baby had turned breech right in the middle of delivery and an emergency C-section was now in order.

But all turned out well.  We got us a beautiful, healthy baby girl.  There were a few frayed nerves on the adults but that faded away soon enough.  The only downside was that a C-section was not planned for and the daughter was going to be out of work and need help a lot longer than she had envisioned.  Grandma to the rescue!  Cyndee spent six weeks at our daughter's, doing a little bit of everything you do to keep a house running and acclimate a newborn to the world.  John went back to St Simons and held the fort down (pun intended) by himself.

But that was another month and a half gone that there was no exploration of our new digs.  By the time Cyndee came back it was mid-February and the heart of winter.  There were a few hours of a day every now and then that the weather was agreeable and we got out for a short while.  St Simons has a lot of beach but a big portion of it is private, the small part that is public is so-so as far as the Atlantic Coast goes.  We got out one evening just before the sun went down and took a look.

St Simons public beach looking west into the mouth of Saint Simons Sound.

St. Simons has a land mass of 3 X 12 miles, same as Manhattan Island, NY.  But unlike Manhattan, the population is sparse and there is no public transportation.  Where our RV pad is at Fort Frederica is roughly mid-way on the long axis of the island and up against the Frederica River on the extreme west edge of the island.  While we could bike to where we wanted to go (there are tremendous bike paths alongside most of the main roads) we didn't because we would combine our outings with grocery shopping or adventures in dining.  Either too much to carry on a bike or too dark and cold for the trip home.  

 

Most of our time was spent either at our post in the visitor center or our little condo on wheels, staying out of the cold and wet winter that St Simons was experiencing.  This makes two winters in a row where the locals have told us that the winter was more severe than anybody could remember in the last thirty years.  Lucky us.

 

Fort Frederica Visitor Center.
The breeze-way is the entrance to the monument.
Ranger offices on the right, visitor center, book store, museum and theater on the left.

Once we had more than four people in the building at one time.  A real rarity.
This was a slug of home-schoolers that had got together for a field trip.

On the southern tip of the island is what could best be described as downtown.  Kitschy shops, tourist traps and restaurants all crammed together on to a space about the size of a postage stamp.  Adjacent to downtown is a city park with pier and chamber of commerce.  A number of the brochures we stocked in the fort visitor center were from the chamber and we would have to go there to replenish our dwindling supplies. One of the things that made the trip downtown a little special was the old lighthouse adjacent to the park.

 

 

While we managed to get a few pictures of it on a clear day we never did get inside and climb to the top because it was either lousy weather or closed when we were off work.

 

Another bright spot that occurred near the end of our stay was that John's cousin and her husband came over from Houston, TX to spend a week plying the coastline from South Carolina to Florida.  We made arrangements to meet up with them in Savannah, GA and do a full day of sightseeing with them.  And true to the rest of the winter, the day was not what you would expect of the coastal deep south.  We packed our heavy coats and headed out.

 

As St Simons is a barrier island for Brunswick, so Tybee is for Savannah.  And it too is adorned with an impressive lighthouse.

 

The wind was whipping, sky overcast and occasionally something would hit your face and you were not sure if it was a cold drizzle or tiny sleet.  Didn't matter, we were going to the top of this one.  Well, three of the four of us anyway.  Cyndee had already experienced the joys of climbing this structure years ago and she decided to pass on it this time.

Although the view is great from atop the Tybee Island Lighthouse, all Cyndee wanted to do was a close-up inspection of the paint.

 A visit to Savannah means a mandatory stop at Forsyth Park's famous fountain.  It is beautiful even when the weather dreary.



We enjoyed the river walk too but to be quiet honest, I was too cold to take my hands out of my pockets and take any pictures.  I can say though, that since our last visit 10 or so years ago, that lots of work and construction has been done along the river.  There has been revitalization of some blighted areas and completely new structures added.  This will be the place to be on pretty days.

 

It was great being with family, even if only for a day.  We capped off the day in a little restaurant facing the beach on Tybee Island, sipping drinks that chased away the chill.  We visited and watched ships sail over the horizon as the day's light faded into ink-black night of a moonless ocean.  Life is good.

 

Fort Frederica National Monument, St Simons Island, GA

My last post was months ago, just as we arrived at our next Visitor Center Host position at Fort Frederica National Monument on the island of St. Simons, GA.  There were high hopes of island exploration and observing coastal wildlife.  But it did not work out that way.

After nearly two years in the remote deserts of Arizona and Texas, with our shortest drive to something that could pass for as a grocery store being 85 miles one way, we went through nearly a month of culture shock.  We could actually leave our job, change out of uniform and be at a full-service grocery or one of dozens of excellent restaurants in 15 minutes.  Amazing.

We knew we had been on the far reaches of the grid for too long when we caught ourselves being mesmerized by the tall, shiny buildings of the big city.

Gleaming buildings of Atlanta catching the setting sun.

Only a few minutes later the same buildings glowing in the night.

 While looking across the parking lot and framing up these photos a woman was approaching from a parked car and she kept looking at me and then back over her shoulder in the direction I was shooting.  The expression on her face made it clear that she could not find what I thought was photograph worthy.  When she got close, her curiosity got the better of her and she put her hand on her hip, cocked her head and said; "What are you taking a picture of?"  I replied that I was really impressed with the way the setting sunlight was playing off the buildings.  She said that she had heard about people like me and walked off shaking her head.

Our November arrival on the island was just in time to see a decline in the weather.  It seemed that every time our three days off came around the weather was foul and we huddled in the comfort of our rolling condo, dry and warm.  However, we did quickly learn that the power feed to our RV pad alongside the maintenance building was lacking.  For every electric appliance that we turned on there was a corresponding drop in voltage to our power distribution center.  The power management system on the rig constantly monitors the incoming voltage and if it drops below the minimum set limit it will isolate the rig from the bad power by shutting off the connection to the power.  We had many a power outage before we learned what could be run in combination without causing a service-clipping drain.  It turns out that there was very little we could run at one time.  If you wanted heat there was not much else you could do.  If you wanted to use the microwave, run the washer or dryer or heat water, the heat had to be shut off.  Constantly turning off one thing so another could be turned on got to be a drag but it became routine.  Multiple requests to the park service to have the power problem investigated went ignored.

In addition to now being in the middle of civilization we are also plopped down right in the middle of a beautiful park setting.  And not just your everyday park, this is a park of the deep south, coastal deep south where live oaks grow to massive proportions and they are draped heavily in Spanish moss.

This is the walking path between our RV pad and the Visitor Center.

On the walking path to work looking west, towards the Frederica River.

The national monument, Fort Frederica, is not very large, just a couple hundred acres of archeological digs with only two tiny partial structures left standing above ground from the original 1736 construction.

About a third of the fort's powder magazine remains.  The Frederica River meanders through the salt marshes between the island and Brunswick, GA in the background.

The only original piece of military equipment from the fort.  This canon was fished out of the river during the archeological digs in the 1950's, hence the heavy pitting.

But back to my opening remarks about things not working out as planned in regards to making blog posts.  Despite being back in the middle of civilization, our connection to a cell tower was abysmal.  Getting a phone connection was sketchy at best, getting a connection for the jetpack to the internet was rare.

And to top it off, the National Monument assignment really wasn't much to write home about.  Visitor ship was about one hundredth of what we are accustomed to.   And the visitors we did get tended to be of the "shuffle" variety, which tends not to lead to a lot of adventure stories.

More later.