One Last Vacation Before School Starts

Chris & I had a wonderful anniversary trip to California in early June and the kids had a week at various Grandparents' houses, but we hadn't gone on any family vacations this summer. We didn't want to spend a whole lot of money, so we ruled out destinations that required flying. We narrowed it even further by deciding to go somewhere in our home state of Georgia. We then decided that it had to be someplace we had never been to before. I spent some time searching online and came up with Jekyll Island.

Jekyll Island is one of the Georgia barrier islands. It was a 5 1/2 hour drive from Powder Springs. It's not at all touristy like some vacation spots. The beaches were the most beautiful I had ever seen on the Atlantic side. My own experiences are a limited to Georgia and Florida on the Eastern coast. The sand was nice and soft, not made up of broken shells.

We arrived on Jekyll Island mid afternoon on Wednesday. We went directly to our hotel. We stayed at the Days Inn which is on the South Beach. There are just a handful of hotels on Jekyll Island. The Days Inn was pretty basic, but it met our needs. We are used to staying in beautiful condos that we get through my parents' timeshare, so the kids were a bit disappointed with our accommodations. We had 2 double beds, a deluxe continental breakfast, and a beach front location, so we were satisfied. 

Here is a picture of the hotel taken from the beach. For most of our vacation, it was never very crowded. It only got crowded on Saturday. The line of cars to get on the island that day was never ending!

One of the first things we did after checking into the hotel was to explore the beach. The kids have been to many different beaches, but this was the first time we had been to one in the summer. Usually we go around Thanksgiving time. The weather was hot, mid 90's, but there was always a nice breeze out on the beach.

Here's a different view of the hotel taken from one of the pools. 

After exploring our hotel and beach, we drove around the island for a little bit and found a beach front restaurant for dinner. We had a lovely dinner out on the deck overlooking the ocean.

We stayed on Jekyll for 4 nights. Since breakfast was included with our hotel, we went out for lunch and dinner each day. If we had stayed more than one more night, we would have had to repeat restaurants. There was only one chain restaurant and that was a Dairy Queen. We (Chris and I) ate lots of  "Wild Georgia Shrimp".  We had grilled shrimp, blackened shrimp, a Low Country boil, shrimp and grits, and much more.

Overall, we had a fantastic time on Jekyll Island. I will be posting separate blogs about some of the activities we did on our trip. We did too much to include in one entry!