This Spring was hard. As such, I was quiet about writing about some of the best parts of this Spring. It’s been mostly about survival mode in these parts.
I realized earlier that life got in the way and I never posted about our 20th anniversary trip to St. Simons!
On April 2, Jared and I celebrated our 20th anniversary. We decided to commemorate the occasion by staying 2 nights at The Queen’s Court, at St. Simons. We got married at Lovely Lane Chapel at Epworth-By-The-Sea on April 2, 2005.
Jared’s lone request for the trip for himself was the selfie of us, above. It’s a re-creation of a photo from our wedding day. I set up the tripod, got Jared in place, set the self-timer, and ran down to get in the shot and we snagged this shot in one try. As I packed up the tripod, the Epworth bells were tolling noon.
My caption for the photo above on Facebook was, “I am home.” It truly felt that way.
And yes, at home before we went on our trip, I did get out the dress because I wasn’t sure but I’d had a several years-long dream of fitting into my wedding dress on our 20th anniversary. And the zipper is actually broken on the dress such that it will no longer zip up all the way, but yes, it did fit. Jared snapped the photo above the Saturday before our anniversary.
Jared wanted the Lovely Lane re-creation photo, but this is the photo I wanted: us close to the St. Simons Village. The beach is no longer accessible from the Village so we walked down beyond the Methodist Church for the beach access for this shot.
That part of the St. Simons trip made me sad. I’ve known since I was a child that the south end of the island is washing to the north end of Jekyll, and climate change has surely accelerated that process. But it occurred to me on this trip that it might happen during my lifetime that the St. Simons Island Village is no longer the tourist spot that it’s been my whole lifetime. And that makes me sad, since I grew up going there literally every 4th of July of my childhood.
This was us sitting on the far side of the pier the night of April 1, shortly after we checked into the Queen’s Court….this sweet girl named Bailey came up to us after we got up and told us she’d taken this shot and got my email and sent it to me the next day. It was indeed a very beautiful evening, and that whole side of the pier was empty at the time. A magical memory.
I snapped this selfie of us after the more posed shot with my tripod, before we left the beach close to the Village the morning of our anniversary.
The evening of our anniversary, we rode over to Jekyll. It was the very first time I ever remember ever going to Driftwood Beach and it was a gorgeous evening.
It was a relatively quick 2-day trip; we arrived the evening of April 1 and walked down to the pier and had dinner at Brogen’s, where we’d hung out with friends after our rehearsal and rehearsal dinner on April 1, 2005, and then after photos on the morning of April 2, we drove around the island a little bit. Discovered there is the cutest little Goodwill boutique on the island now and I scored a very cute (if impractical) vintage purse that just needed a little bit of love to get it back into working order.
We ate an early dinner at Barbara Jean’s in the Village on the 2nd and after our nap (because we are indeed old people now) went over to Jekyll. After Driftwood Beach we had a quick ice cream at the Jekyll DQ before headed back to SSI.
By the morning of the 3rd, I was ready to get back to our boys so we hit the road pretty early.
It was a very nice, if accidental, touch that the Queen’s Court had put us in their Room 20 for our 20th anniversary.
(An Aside: I love that when they remodeled several years ago that the Queen’s Court kept the light-up sign from forever ago, and I love the new wall that surrounds the pool. I learned how to swim in that very pool when I was 7 years old. And, I loved that in the office they were selling $4 keychains in the exact same shape as the old keychains they used to use for the room keys back when we stayed there when I was a child…..of course I had to have one. It’s blue whereas the ones they used when I was a kid matched the green in the sign in the photo above, but it has to be sourced from the same place because it’s the exact same shape otherwise.)
I took my camera but the trip was not a big photo expedition. This was the lone scenic type photo I shot, on the evening of April 1 before dinner, probably before Bailey took that photo of us above. It’s startling to me how high the rocks have been piled now, and how there is no beach access from this area now at all. I very much wanted this shot to remember this evening, this exact way the island was at that moment in time, for the future.
This was a beautiful getaway to celebrate 20 years with my Jared. On that sunny morning in April of 2005, I really had no idea what lay ahead of us. I am humbled and grateful that we have this beautiful life together, with our three beautiful children.
You can read more about why I write about my wonderful life here.
