Jan. 20, 2014:  We have now gone down the coast as far south as we want to go: Jekyll Island, GA. We left St. Helena Island this morning.

Our stay in St Helena was primarily a stop made to get cable TV. It would have been better if we didn't have it on Sunday; watching the Patriots play-making was painful. Oh well, half way through the season we did not think they would even make it to the play offs.

While we were on the island we did drive around the island. It is a very different scene than what we are use to seeing in NH--large live oak trees draped in spanish moss creating tunnel-like enclosures over the road. There are large tidal marshes that cover very large areas. Along the ocean edge, there are large long-needle pine and palmetto forest--almost jungle like--and really great white sand beaches.

We also visited a National Historical Landmark, the Penn Center. It was the site of one of the first schools to teach freed slaves to read and write, established during the Civil War. It developed into a school to teach vocational skills, along with educating children from grade 1 though 12. It is now a museum, since becoming an Historical Landmark in 1973, but also provides community services. The museum tells the story of the slaves who worked the rice plantation on the low country islands and how, because they were isolated from the mainland, they developed a unique language called Gullah. The descendants of those slaves still live on these islands and called themselves Gullah.

When we left the island and crossed into Beaufort, we made a turn onto a roadway that would take us south. The traffic came to a slow crawl. At first we thought there was accident or fire ahead of us, but we soon found out that it was neither of those things; we found ourselves at the back end of a parade for MLK Day. A large ladder firetruck and two police cars were ahead of us and the last police car made a stop at every side road to remove cones to stop traffic from coming out onto the parade route. We felt sorry for the policeman, he was the driver of the car and he had quite a large number of cones to move. We figure he was the low man in the station or had really ticked off a higher up.The slow drive was not upsetting to us because it gave us a chance to get a good look at the really magnificent homes that lined this road that ran along a bay--with large spanish moss trees lining the bay side of the road.
We continued south; again through marshes, rivers and waterways with high- rise bridges, along US 17, until we arrived at the cutoff to go east to Jekyll Island.

The island is a state park--as a result we had to pay a ten dollar fee to cross over to the island--because we are considered an oversize vehicle. Getting off the island is free. The Jekyll Island campground is at the north end of the island which we easily found since there is only one road looping around the island. We had called the campground earlier in the day to check on the availability of sites. I thought the woman who answered was "play acting" somewhat because she took some time checking her list. When we got here, we were surprised to see how many campers were here--and how close together the sites are.

We have decided to stay here for a week. Hopefully, we will finally get to experience a warm southern climate. Maybe even for a few continuous days. Today, when we arrived here, the temperature was 65° and sunny. Nice start.