The Island That Raised You

Ask anyone who grew up summering on St. Simons Island what makes it better than every other beach, and you will get a list instead of an argument, delivered with the certainty of someone reciting family history. The pool, the golf, the ice cream after dark. The island sits at the southern end of the Georgia coast among the Golden Isles, close enough to Savannah to add to a Lowcountry trip, and it has been raising repeat visitors for generations without changing much of anything that matters. The rhythm is the attraction. Learn it once and you will be back.

A St. Simons day has an order, and the families who return every year did not invent it so much as inherit it. Morning belongs to the golf, with the courses at Sea Island next door setting a standard the rest of the coast measures against. Afternoon belongs to the water, and for the generations who have stayed at the King and Prince that means the pool as much as the beach, since the resort has held down its stretch of oceanfront long enough that the pool deck itself is a family tradition. Evening belongs to the village, where dinner gives way to the island's true institution, which is ice cream on Mallery Street after dark, eaten walking, with the pier and the lighthouse at the end of the street.

The island's restaurants are the kind people stay loyal to for decades, and the loyalties run deep enough to argue about. Barbara Jean's has built its reputation on crab cakes and from-scratch Southern cooking, and regulars will tell you to save room for the bread alone. The Crab Trap, an easy walk from the King and Prince, does casual seafood the way a beach town should, with a crab soup that people plan their first night around, and Crabdaddy's has been grilling the local catch a few doors down since 1988, which on this island counts as the new place. Brogen's holds down the spot by the pier with burgers and onion rings on the deck, the kind of lunch that follows a morning on the beach, and Sal's Neighborhood Pizzeria up on Frederica Road is where island families have settled the what's-for-dinner question for as long as anyone can remember. ECHO, at the King and Prince itself, puts dinner directly on the oceanfront when the occasion calls for it.

Sea Island, the resort world next door, is where the island's sporting traditions live, and they run well beyond the fairways. The shooting school, the falconry, the horseback rides on the beach, and the boats going out for redfish and tarpon make up the special-occasion tier of a St. Simons trip, the things that turn a beach week into the year's big memory. Access runs through the resort, so plan it as an occasion rather than a whim, and know that the fishing in the marshes and sounds around the island needs no membership at all, with local captains running charters out of the marinas year round.

The King and Prince Beach and Golf Resort is the island's grand old address, oceanfront since the 1930s, and it holds the middle of the island's beach with its pools and its villas. It is where the traditions tend to start, since a child who learns that pool never fully accepts another one. The village end of the island offers inns and rentals within walking distance of the pier, which trades the resort's beachfront for the pleasure of being steps from the ice cream.

Come in summer if you want the island at full rhythm, with spring a close second for softer heat and easier tables. Give it a proper stretch of days rather than a stopover, since the whole point is settling into the order of things, and book the good dinner early in the week so the trip has a centerpiece. And if you are driving the coast from Charleston and Savannah, know that St. Simons is where that road was always heading, an hour past Savannah and worth every minute of it.

The island does not perform for visitors, and it does not need to. It simply keeps the same summer it has always kept, and lets you fold yourself into it, and sends you home already planning the same week next year. That is the whole trick, and no other beach in the South does it quite as well.