• By Travelspoc

A Getaway To Tybee Island Savannahs Beach

Beaches, Off the Beaten Path, USA

So many destinations could be summed up with, “If only it had a beach, it would be perfect.”

It’s a designation that Barcelona and Miami hold with pride; it’s something that New Orleans and Tokyo wish they had. Having beach access elevates your city several rungs on the best-place-ever index.

Savannah, Georgia, is one of my favorite cities in the world. And it just so happens to have a beach: Tybee Island. I’ve known about it for a long time — even suggesting a visit in my three-day Savannah itinerary

 — but I’ve never actually been.This month, Visit Tybee Island invited me to Tybee to experience it as a standalone destination. A little visit to Savannah would be worked in, of course, but the main goal would be to experience Tybee on its own, not as a side trip.

filled with beautiful nature and colorful houses and very friendly people and the best sunrises I’ve seen in years. This is Tybee.

Enjoying Beach Time…in October!

When I stepped off the plane, I was met by a wave of heat. For all my days in Tybee, the temperature was in the mid-eighties with high humidity — a big change from New York, where a recent cold spell had my friends doing emergency harvests to save their tomatoes.

It felt incredible to step back into summer. When out at night, I didn’t even need a cardigan. But you wouldn’t know it from looking at the beach — look at all that space!

Also, I was delighted to see what I thought was a baby seagull for the first time in my life, only to be informed by my readers that it is, in fact, a sandpiper.

The Crab Shack is one of the big, casual (and yes, very touristy) restaurants of Tybee, most of it set in a deck overlooking the marsh. We decided to order the sampler plate for three: giant crab legs for each of us, plus shrimp, corn, mussels, sausage and crawfish that you twist in half before peeling apart and eating.

And it was SO good, and no, we didn’t even come close to finishing everything, but the showstopper was the crab claws. I WOULD DO ANYTHING FOR THIS CRAB. However I’ve been eating crab my whole life, it’s been wrong. There’s nothing better than cracking those open and dipping them into melted butter.

Biking Around and Exploring

The first thing I noticed about Tybee was that it was almost chain-free. There’s a single Subway…and that’s it. No McDonald’s. No Starbucks. And it sounds like such a small thing, but that is an increasingly rare find in the States (not to mention something people are willing to pay money to enjoy).

But who needs chains when you’ve got places like Huc-a-Poos, a kitsch-stuffed dive bar and pizza restaurant featuring all kinds of crazy slices, each of them roughly the size of your head, as satisfying as a meal, and costing only $4?

Or Tybean Art and Coffee Bar, where you can get everything you’d find at Starbucks plus Southern praline lattes, with the addition of art by local artists on the walls…

Or Seaside Sisters, a fun store that goes above and beyond the standard gift shop with lots of cool, artsy items. I may have bought a tea towel with Jesus holding up two cups of coffee that reads, “CAFFEINE SAVES.”

The chain-free atmosphere makes Tybee feel like it’s from a bygone era — a time when people knew the local business owners more intimately.

Tybee has an unpretentious feel to it. This is a down-home Southern destination with quirks in all the right places.

As I explored the island, places kept reminding me of different parts of the United States.

When you buy a ticket to the lighthouse, you also get admission to the museum, which is a monument to how the lighthouse keepers once lived. Worth a visit to check out the banisters shaped like lighthouses and the old-timey radio!

“AJ’s is the spot for sunset,” everyone told me when I started planning my trip. Tybee’s beach is along the eastern shore of the island, so the west is a mix of much smaller beaches, marshland, and grassy hills that grow right into the sea. There are lots of homes on the west side but few commercial businesses. AJ’s is one of them — a casual restaurant perched above the shoreline, giving you gorgeous views.

I sat down with a bowl of crab stew and a plate of fried flounder, watching the sky change before me.

Kayaking Through the Islands

Sea kayaking is a popular activity off the shores of Tybee Island. I signed up for a half-day excursion with Sea Kayak Georgia, one of the local providers. They also do SUP and canoe trips, and more intense kayaking trips for experienced sea kayakers.

I’ve never done actual sea kayaking before, but this was a very easy way to start — for the most part, the water was very still, and it was only once we paddled out into the ocean that we had to deal with slight waves. Eventually we let the current take us back to shore — fear not the inadvertent roll!

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