family footnote to the 624 mile round trip...

When we were amusing ourselves on the Island, someone asked if I had been before. And have I ever...
Many times over the years, but not recently. In  recent years, 'the beach' was in a completely different direction: south to the FL panhandle, rather than due west from south GA to the Golden Isles.

When I was young, my Dad served in the National Guard, and was expected to spend two weeks each summer on active duty, training with fellow members of the Guard from Brooks County. Their destination would be what he referred to as 'Camp Swampy' (possibly a reference to the shenanigans seen in the newspaper comic strip Beetle Bailey?) Ft. Stewart is near Hinesville, GA, and not far distant from Savannah, on the coast. The members of the Brooks home-guard would load up all their motor pool vehicles and drive north-east to spend two weeks practicing their skills on the reservation property of Ft. Stewart.  Over that weekend between those two weeks of Army business, my dad would come and visit his family at St. Simon's Island.

My grandmother Benson had a cousin who lived in middle GA, and owned a cottage a block or so from the beach. My mom, my brother and I would go and stay for the two weeks my dad was on active duty, and expect my dad to come on the weekend. There were often other people there: the cousin of my grandmother (as well as Grandma), Ruth Rogers, along with an assortment her children and grandkids who would be about the age to engage in high-jinks with my brother and I. Nothing bad, just kid stuff. The worst I can remember is my brother telling me he'd put crabs in my bed: which I now know was not true. He was probably as fearful of getting pinched as I was! And the sneaky suspicion that the guys were peering down at me in the (enclosed) outside shower, as I stood out there in the great outdoors in my 'all-together'. And they giggling, pleased with themselves for being so nefarious, observed from an upstairs bedroom window while I was trying to get the sand out of my crack.

I was curious about the cottage, and drove by: still there, with little visible change, other than the upstairs sleeping porch has been enclosed, weatherized. I don't know if the Rogers family still owns it, but it did look occupied when I passed by. Lots of memories there: thinking of my dad, who never, ever went barefoot, getting the tops of his feet and legs sunburned (before the idea or invention of sunscreen) when he would put on the swim-trunks he wore one weekend each year. Then having to put on socks and his lace up boots over tender skin to get back to the woods and 'work' of another week of Army-ing.