Georgia Has a Coast?
bittersoutherner.com
bittersoutherner.com
It's not Orlando, It's not Miami, it's not even Jacksonville. It's a tiny little spot with decent beaches, a long history that's reasonably-well-preserved, and quiet relaxation.
The marsh that's pictured in this article (labelled "boardwalk over marsh") looks like the Bloody Marsh [0], the site of the battle that was the "last straw" for the Spanish in their attempts to claim land further up from Florida (which used to extend a bit farther north than it does today).
The colony of Georgia was chartered by Britain around this area in part as a response to that "invasion", in an attempt to protect the important British port of Charleston up in Carolina (before the NC/SC split). Of course, the other key motivation was to have a whole bunch of land to use as an alternative to overcrowded debtor's prisons, so there's that.
This is in part why Savannah (another beautiful historic coastal spot in Georgia, though a much larger one) was so significant to the state for so much of its early history: it was the first planned city in the state, as evidenced by the fact that it's home to the oldest still-standing building in the entire state (a gardener's shed built in the early 1700s, now part of a tourist-trap restaurant).
All this to say: yes, Georgia definitely has a coast, and it's worth seeing (in this HNer's opinion), and worth preserving.
Having spent many a weekend in Savannah from youth through to being an adult, and now having lived in Charleston for the better part of a decade, I really think Savannah is a nicer city.
Perhaps because Savannah was planned or because Charleston is constrained by its peninsular nature, but Savannah always felt like a small city whereas Charleston really just seems like a haphazard, overgrown town.
If any of y'all reading ever consider a trip down to Savannah, it's well worth a long weekend at the very least.
I also grew up in a tourist destination. There's a reason it's a vacation destination and not somewhere people with a brain actually want to live year round. I could rant for hours about all the things that are terrible about it. I think it suffices to say that when ripping people off for a few months of the year is a large fraction of the local economy it that has a bunch of negative trickle down effects.
I grew up ~60 miles down the coast from Charleston, on Hilton Head Island. Totally different vibe, beautiful, natural island. The Town of actually made real efforts to manage development and prevent developers from doing the normal land-grab over-development.
I've lived in Charleston for 7+ years and, despite a temporary moratorium, the City of is letting developers raze the city to build more and more hotels with no damned parking. Very little is done to manage or plan development. It's a whole different vibe, and I'm actually going to be leaving Charleston with no intent to return here in the coming months.
My experience in Charleston has really made me appreciate the island I grew up on. Not all tourist towns are built alike.
I've lived in a variety of other small towns and a few cities. The pattern I've noticed is that when a large chunk of the community makes it's living by siphoning a few bucks off of people who don't live there permanently and have no plans to (tourists, university students, commuters) it creates a bunch of incentives for highly (more so than in a normal town/city) selfish behavior from all the local parties (business owners, politicians, town departments, individual property owners, etc) that basically boils down to everyone trying to squeeze every cent out of everyone else and nobody wants to live in a place where everyone is doing that because it sucks. I'm definitely in the "individuals are generally good and trustworthy when left to do their own thing" camp but a couple of the places I'v lived make me well aware of why some people believe that people are untrustworthy by default and need to be controlled.
In the case of tourist towns, the special snowflake image projected on top of all of this is just kind of a slap in the face for everyone living there. You've got your annual town parade for whatever and half the crowd is frowning because they know the backstory to everything they see in front of them. The local business that sponsored the float for a sports team is just doing it because a local offical's kid is on the team and he needs said official to not look too hard at his business. The fire department's 100ft ladder truck is just a waste because there's no more than a 3-story building in the town but the EMTs did a favor for the school superintendent who crashed his car while drunk (legend is that he had to be cut out by the FD and the EMTs recognized him and whisked him away before the cops could make him blow) so he called his friends and put in a good word for the fire department when it came to budget. The reason some of the town officials in the parade aren't behind bars is because the police know that scandals are bad for business and they'd rather just have it to hold over them anyway. The only reason the landscaping material company has money to blow on the nearly new trucks that are towing the floats (dirt moving is a low margin industry so you don't usually see that stuff) is because they have a local monopoly and overcharge everyone they deal with. It's just terrible to live in a place where everything is scummy but presented as quaint in order to fleece the tourists for a few months of the year and that's how most tourist towns become. No wonder everyone does drugs all winter. It wears on you. I suppose if you just take it all for granted or are just so overwhelmed by the quaintness that you don't notice it might be ok but that's just not me.
I think one of the real differences between a strictly-tourist town and the island I grew up on was that it also served as an upscale retirement destination for Snowbird types such that it has its own thriving economy and year-round population (in the 30,000 - 40,000 range) so it wasn't strictly dependent on tourism.
The surrounding area has also grown and developed into its own area since. Rather interesting to watch the sort-of bootstrapping of the surrounding sleepy town into a thriving area over the years.
very glad I left, never have regretted it.
If you visit, your first impression is that it is very pretty and quiet. When you're there for a more extended period, everything feels very...sterile. Everything looks the same. You can't find anything.
It's also this odd place in South Carolina where if you order tea it's unsweet and if you ask for sweet tea they'll either look at you strangely, give you sugar packets (not the same thing) or say they don't serve it. During the summer, all you see is Ohio license plates.
When I thought I was going to end up working there after college I was going to live in Beaufort just to avoid living there. Grew up in Florence.
St Simon's has changed over the years. It's finally succumbing to development though they are being careful about it so as not to kill the golden goose (a very private feeling island). Most of the people that lived there prior to its rise in popularity have been driven out by high prices or cashed out if they were lucky enough to own land. The Eastern part of the island has become much more accessible to lower income populations. (edit: I've got this next sentence wrong as corrected in a comment below)Rich homeowners, as a result, erected a guarded gate in front of Sea Island (basically part of SSI) to keep everyone out.
I still love SSI. My only hope is that it doesn't continue on the path it's currently on. Privacy and exclusion are separate ideas. SSI can still be private, but it doesn't necessarily have to exclusive. My hope is that can change. However, my head tells me that everything I like about SSI is scarce and prices will only continue to climb, driving away those not fortunate enough to afford it.
My biggest hope is that Cumberland Island, GA can avoid this fate. It has no bridge to it, and most of it is preserved as wilderness area, but the county seems to be trying its hardest to develop what private land remains on the island. It's a real shame, because it's one of the last wild, preserved islands anyone can get to by booking a ferry with the park service.
Hilton Head native here, I don't think the HHI history is quite the same. Prior to Fraser kicking off the island as we know it in the '50s, it was basically just a handful of Freedmen farmers, Gullah natives and a rather large hunting reserve for the rich. Also, while some of the gated communities don't allow the riff-raff in, unless you decide to bike or make a restaurant reservation, some still do, most notably Sea Pines.
Also, the Town of is rather cognizant of their place as a very natural, family-friendly island and goes to great pains to preserve land[0] and limit what and how folks build[1][2] to preserve the nature of the island.
I think Kiawah or Seabrook up the coast make for a more apt comparison.
> Hunting Island, SC as well - Fripp Island is a gated community.
Wait, Hunting Island and Fripp Island are discrete, separate islands with Hunting Island being a State Park. What's the problem with Hunting Island?
[0] - https://www.hiltonheadislandsc.gov/council/landacquisition.c...
[1] - https://www.islandpacket.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/david...
[2] - https://www.islandpacket.com/news/business/article33627555.h...
I'm not sure how much of the beach is considered public in east coast states, I know CA has laws against full privatization. But by gating the only road access, you've effectively privatized the beach unless you kayak there or something.
They sell tourist passes for $6 (Used to be $5... damn inflation).
> I'm not sure how much of the beach is considered public in east coast states
In the state of SC, there is no such thing as a private beach. Of course if the island is fully gated, it would require boat access.
In the case of Fripp, there is no public parking insofar as I'm aware but one could park at the edge of Hunting Island, walk across the bridge, then access the beach as the gates are inset.
Of course I'm also sure the security folks would try and make you feel unwelcome. One of those "can't beat the ride, can beat the rap" situations.
Ironically, it was a gated community before that was cool, but had to be evacuated during World War II because of German U-Boat threat.
So now anyone can visit. As long as the ferry is running.
You're conflating two islands here -- Sea Island is a separate island that has been privately owned since at least the 1920s. You have to drive across St Simons to get to Sea Island. For sure, Sea Island is a high end, gated resort community of a few hundred people.
St Simons is home to about 12k people. It has been an expensive place to live since at least the 80s. I, too, share your concerns about the current development going on -- I'm not sure the developers are in fact being careful about killing the golden goose. Developers are cutting down our historic oak trees and indiscriminately putting up cheaply built condos as fast as the corrupt planning commission will let them.
This is the perfect opportunity to plug the St Simons Land Trust: https://www.sslt.org/
You're right developers are destroying trees. I guess what I was alluding to was the historical restrictions on building sizes and things like that.
What's worse is when things don't pan out, and you are left with hundreds of half finished condos.
Perhaps what's happening in the bay is the result of responsible, long sighted policies designed to mitigate or forestall a population collapse during a proverbial gold rush in what could become a future Rust Belt.
I'm curious to hear your views. Where should we meet to talk about it? Galveston, Atlantic City, Detroit, Buffalo, New Orleans...?
You're forgetting the great quake of 1906 which destroyed nearly 80% of San Francisco, and the continuing threat of the San Andreas fault.
Society moves forwards, people who want to "preserve" really don't want us to move forward. Whether they are killing mass transit plans because they want to "preserve" their small city culture or not allowing the building of high-density housing to meet the demands to our ever growing population.
Preserve is even more sinister as it uses justify racism and oppression or south likes to refer to as "preserving their southern culture" as they fly confederate flags and put up statues of Confederate leaders.
Unlike national conservation organizations (which are great and have their place), local land trusts can really take on the priorities of the local area.
For example, the land trust I'm involved with here in the Inland Northwest does a lot of work to make sure that land used for agriculture and forestry is preserved for those uses, doesn't turn into housing developments and can even be passed down from generation-to-generation of family farmers without a prohibitive tax burden.
In Montana where there's been tons issues over access to public lands blocked by private landowners, they're playing a key role in preserving that access.
The Land Trust Alliance is a great place to find your local land trust: https://www.findalandtrust.org/
I expect you'll be surprised at the amount of "good for your community" work they're doing.
This is happening all over the South Carolina coast as well.
No, it’s not an island in the middle of the Atlantic, but it is one of the eight barrier islands of Georgia.
I have literally changed my perspective, and I am obsessed with it. Shooting from a drone, with a straight-down vantage point, has allowed me to explore my coastal muse with a brand new eye
To me along with mobile phone, the drones are transforming how ordinary people are able to capture and tell amazing stories.
You can argue drone photography, is the most important camera innovation of the past 100 years.
Sadly, there are a lot of backlashes against it. Before I became a convert, I found them annoying, too. People do not like the buzzing sound (which I agree and I'm glad companies like DJI are doing innovations to reduce the buzzing sound). There are a lot of privacy concerns, which is fair. But I don't see that privacy concern in public areas any worse than mobile phones.
I just hope that drone operators use common sense and be considerate and not ruin the use of this amazing technology, for the rest of us.
Sounds very Jackson Pollock.
> There are a lot of privacy concerns, which is fair. But I don't see that privacy concern in public areas any worse than mobile phones.
This directly contradicts your earlier point about being able to see things you couldn't before.
What drone photography does change is how easy it is to photograph angles that were difficult before, not the fact that it's possible. Which is the same for mobile phones. Since the invention of the camera, it's always been possible to photograph anything anyone anywhere. Camera phones just made it easier, since now nearly everyone has a camera. But that doesn't mean it wasn't possible before, or that you have less privacy in public places. You've never had privacy in public places.
A drone changes that.
I have seen more no-drone signs up at National sparks such as Joshua Tree, but that’s fair enough in spots like that.
Hopefully the positive trend of human drone harmony continues!
>You can argue drone photography, is the most important camera innovation of the past 100 years.
Really? I mean you could, but it seems silly. I'd say digital image sensors are by far a much more important innovation. Without those, you don't have drone photography, or you do, but it's so prohibitively expensive that it's not available to anyone who can do interesting things with it. Without digital image sensors you don't have camera phones, you don't have GoPros, you don't have dashcams, you don't have bodycams, you don't have drone cameras, you don't have cameras mounted on the sides of rockets, etc. You don't have the DSLR revolution that got high quality cameras in the hands of amateurs last decade.
Of course, I could rent a helicopter (almost impossible for some locations and prohibitively expensive) but to carry a small gadget and send it up to tell a story is something that has only become possible recently.
Take something like this [0]. It's a former spy radio satellite the operated in current Latvia during the USSR days and now has been turned into a radio telescope. It would be impossible to tell a story about it's location in middle of trees, etc. unless I had a helicopter.
Or how do you show there is a monument built on top of the hills in Buda side that overlooks the river on Budapest. You can not [1]. As I said, it gives you abilities to tell stories that you could not do with an analogue camera.
[0] https://www.eyeem.com/p/121629319 [1]https://www.eyeem.com/p/110013323
Before that, literally no one had seen the world from that vantage point. Baring a convenient mountain.
Regardless, I thank God we'll never see such senseless bloodshed again.
1 - It's near the arctic circle by the Lofoten area in Norway. In or near the arctic circles the sun and the moon (in winters) stay very low, so you get this very long period of low angles of the moon or sun. In San Francisco, you are rushing to capture 1-2 shots before the moon has moved a few degrees upwards.
2 - that moon image was at the opposite side (if I remember correctly) of the picture below it [0] which is a reminder to always look behind you, during dramatic colors.
It made me a little sad to find out that some cities in my metro area have ordinances banning me from using them there. So for instance: I can't fly them at family gatherings to take videos of us.
I went to New Zealand last year for 3 weeks. It was the most beautiful place I've visited in my life. And not just visually beautiful, but audibly beautiful too. The ambience made for an incredibly serene experience like none other.
Nothing ruined those experiences more than when someone with a drone showed up to drown out all the noises of nature.
Drones, I don't really have much of an opinion on to be honest. There is certainly good and bad outdoors etiquette; if it were in vogue to play a trumpet outside in a beautiful wild place, I'd probably not be a fan of the person playing it, but I don't mind the instrument in the right context. There does seem to have been quite a backlash against drones here (see rules 11 and 12: https://www.airshare.co.nz/rules), though I don't know how much of that is driven by the general resistance to new things here, or privacy concerns, or how much is the spoiling of public spaces as you mention. My guess is that it's roughly those issues, in that order.
All that said, the sound of a bell on the neighbour's cat is offensive to me, for the fact that I'm hearing it and not the birds it's killed (we also have invasive rodents, which do harm bird life but some are also eaten by cats). It makes me wonder about shifting baseline syndrome too - what would it be like here if we could get rid of most of the the human-introduced predators? https://cacophony.org.nz/
I disagree. Drones are allowing ordinary people to take ordinary pictures, only from a much greater height.
I was extra excited to see the pictures of the Satilla River since it's a blackwater, something I feel like a lot of folks are unfamiliar with [0]. It's a really interesting feeling to swim or float down a blackwater that is clean and pure and full of fish and turtles pecking against your legs but whose tea-colored waters don't admit even a yard of visibility through.
I was struck by the seeming serenity in most of them and then imagined the great whining racket that the drone was probably emitting. :)
Nevertheless, I think the photos were worth the momentary disturbance.
Are there pumps that aren't pay-first? Even in non self-service states they ask for payment first.
I found paying first super confusing. How do I know what it will cost ahead of time?
Then credit cards were ubiquitous and I never really thought about it again.
Why would either of those things be bitter?
Even if you want to talk about Georgia vs. Georgia, the US state is almost 3x the size (in population) and the nation was "Republic of Georgia" as recently as the 90's.
Further, 60% of native English speakers are in the US and also this is the exact headline used by a website for/by US Southerners.
Should the headline have been, "Georgia, the state in the United States, has a coastline?"
Is this really a harmful or inexcusable example of US-centrism? Should publishers in the country of Georgia always explain that they're referring to the country and not the US state?
A kayak just doesn’t seem to go fast enough to get too far.
Also, if you happen to live in the Northeast, I recommend a visit to SSI in the early spring to cure that endless winter misery that you get in March & sometimes April.
Just don’t come the weekend of the Georgia-Florida football game in late October. 10,000 (newspaper’s estimate, not mine) Georgia fans flock to the island and get drunk. We’re not at all equipped to handle that many college kids all at once.
May and September are the standards. Adjust to preference.
That said, the political climate is a real concern for me, but I'm hoping it wouldn't be in my face in a tourist town.
After my wife sees these pictures I'm going to have to figure out how to fit a drone in the budget.
(I live in Georgia and visit the coastal region BTW).
Georgia, USA, could be interesting too, although the only thing I know about it is they film "The Walking Dead" there.
Most of the recent Marvell movies were shot here.
Recent films shot in Georgia include: Godzilla: King of Monsters, the Ant Man movies, Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, Black Panther, Pitch Perfect 3, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House and Spider-Man: Homecoming.
Some television shows shot here: Stranger Things, Ozark, The Walking Dead, MacGuyver and Atlanta.
There's definitely a booming production industry in the Atlanta area.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/feature-film-producti...
Just took a look at a map. Everything I thought I knew was wrong.
I had a couple of irate emails from people entering 'Atlanta' and wondering why it didn't accept their answer.
Tons of movies and tv shows are filmed in Atlanta (Marvel, dozens of Netflix shows, etc.), and the city is a major music hub.
If Atlanta lands HQ2, you can expect for it to take off in the tech scene too.
@samsolomon maybe next time you could put "... Georgia, US"