Roam With Me! Tybee Island, Georgia, June 2020

During the isolation time of late March,  April and May, I started writing a new novel. The idea for it had been bouncing around in my head for a few years. I have multiple story ideas every single day, and, when possible, I write a few down from time to time because I think they are good and don't want to forget them. Inevitably, most of the ideas remain simply that -- ideas -- because I'd need a million lifetimes to write stories about every idea I have; however, a few of my ideas take up residence in my mind and send me a steady stream of reminders that it's time to sit down and try to make a story out of them. So, with plenty of writing time on my hands, I did just that, every single day for two or more hours each morning until the end of May. I still haven't completed the story because it's doing what most of my stories do -- leading me astray for a while -- but I have over 300 handwritten pages completed along with a stack of note cards full of things to fix or add or change, etc. So, what does all of this have to do with Tybee Island? Well, I wanted the story to take place on the east coast in a coastal town. I wanted it to be in North Carolina, South Carolina or Georgia. After some map perusal and web searches, I decided that Tybee Island looked like the perfect place, so that's where my new novel is set.

As I wrote, I often used the internet to look at photos of the island and the community, and I searched for little snippets to make it feel real. However, until I actually see and experience a place, I feel like I'm writing blindly about it, and even though I'm writing fiction, I still want the place to be real. In my first novel, "The Clearwater House," anyone from Clearwater, Nebraska, or even from rural Northeast Nebraska knows that the setting is very real even though the story is made up. While my inability to visit a place won't keep me from including that place if I feel it's the best place for my characters to be (Georgia visits Hawaii and Alaska -- two places I haven't yet been -- in "State of Georgia . . . and Other Writings"), I do believe that gaining a personal perspective makes for a better story. So, with a desire to actually see Tybee, I added a couple of days to my recent Tennessee visit, and we drove down to Tybee Island.

Since we arrived in late June on a Sunday, it was very hot and humid as well as packed with day trippers from Savannah, but by the next day, the island was much less packed even though it was still incredibly hot and humid. We stayed at a small inn -- a converted house -- called 17th Street Inn only a block from the beach and one of the handy boardwalks for crossing the sand dune. We had the first floor room on the left which contained a king-sized bed, a small bathroom with shower and a full kitchen. The porch stayed shaded all day and made for enjoyable evening sitting. 

The beach is lovely, expansive and quite clean. It stretches the full eastern side of the island and across the north side, too. Even though there were many people on the beach when we first arrived, there was still plenty of beach and ocean to go around, and when I stayed to watch the sunset and rose early for the sunrise, the beach and ocean in all their glory were mostly mine. I'll show you a photo with the late-afternoon Sunday crowd and a couple from late Monday and sunrise on Tuesday. 

Beautiful, isn't it? The water was just cool enough to take away the heat from our skin after sunbathing a bit. The waves were constant and only had enough force to throw me off my feet once when I wasn't paying attention. Otherwise, we just bobbed up and down with them. The sand was soft and full of tiny shells above the tide line, and it was hard-packed and great for walking in a wide swath that ran along the waterline.

Tybee Island has a couple trademark constructions. One is its lighthouse and the other is its pavilion and pier. We drove by the lighthouse but didn't go in it because tickets had to be purchased online in advance, and we simply lacked the time. Also, it was really hot and probably not the best time to be climbing stairs in a tall lighthouse. The pier and pavilion, though, we definitely walked on because I'd already included them in my novel-in-progress, so I really needed to see them up close. We also walked under the pier, so here are some photos from above and below as well as the lighthouse.

      

 

There are a couple places that offer dolphin excursions. We went to Captain Derek's, hoping to get lucky and still be able to get a ticket at the last minute. We managed to snag the last two tickets for the day on the 2:00 p.m. excursion. The boat took us out onto the north side of the island where dolphins are prevalent in the shallower water. We saw many, and it was well worth the 15 dollar per person price. Not only did we see a lot of dolphins, but the young narrator, a guy named Damian, regaled us with a litany of Dad-style dolphin jokes to help pass the time along with the dolphin-related educational information he shared. Example: What's a dolphin's favorite country? Finland! How are a piano and a fish different? You can't "tuna" fish! And many others. I loved them all because they reminded me of my wonderful co-worker, Nate Metschke, who passed away for too young a year and a half ago. He taught band and loved to tell "punny" jokes. Anyway, the dolphin excursion was fun, and I'd recommend it to anyone going to Tybee.

One of the main things I wanted to see for myself was how the houses looked as well as get a feel for the town. The houses vary from one story to two, so that fit in perfectly with the two main houses in my story, and I learned that Sandra Bullock's Tybee Island house is for sale -- you can find it on realtor.com if you look for the 3.5 million dollar house on the northern part of the island. If anyone reading this would like to find about thirty more people, we could all go in together and buy it! Ha ha. 

Like any beautiful place I visit, I would really like to return and spend a week or more on the island to soak in even more of the local flavor, but I managed to get a pretty solid feel for the town during my short stay. Overall, the food was good. I'm not a fan of seafood, so I can't speak to that particular fare, but the chicken and other sandwiches I ate while I was there was good, and I was especially happy to find that Diet Coke was served everywhere. I would, though, like to recommend the bar Tybee Time where you should go in and ask Rachel, a very nice bartender, to serve you one of their amazing rum/everclear/who-knows-really-what-kind-of-alcohol-infused slushies. I had a mango one, and it was super yummy and super cooling on a hot evening.

I'll just leave you with a few more beautiful beach shots because the beach and the ocean are the real reasons for visiting and living on Tybee Island.

Now, I'd better get back to writing that novel!