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Being a southerner, I love a good fried sampler platter, so this spring I wanted to gobble up a backyard road trip that showcased the best of the Lowcountry—that stretch of Spanish moss-drenched, palmetto-
peppered woodlands and marsh languidly sprawling along the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina. While the shoreline offers a few scraggly islands and thin ribbons of sand meets sea, the area is by no means deserted.
I start in Savannah, Georgia, the square-filled, 18th-century city that’s now a walkable outpost of Southern urbanity. The ample historic district is filled with glimpses of the haute and übercool Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), which has taken over renovated townhouses, warehouses, theaters, old storefronts, and more. Because plenty of magnolia-accented Savannah characters still live and work downtown (remember Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil?), the mix is divine: Picture a pierced art student in black and a coiffed lady who lunches both on their way to the same café/gallery and you get the idea. The morning begins at Troup Square, where breakfast at the Firefly Café gives me a corner view of the sunup scene. Even at this hour, Savannah’s downtown is alive. Briefcase bearers tip hats to delivery-truck drivers, people walk their dogs in the lushly landscaped square, and others read papers on shaded benches. Quitting the Firefly, I amble on for a trolley ride; the scoot-around gives the lay of the land and previews where I’m going to shop—some trips I’m just not in museum mode. 
photography: Buff Strickland
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I end the exploring with dinner a few bridges away at Tybee Island’s Crab Shack. Locals come from 20 miles around to down the Lowcountry boil (a spicy medley of shrimp, sausage, potatoes, and corn on the cob) on decks perched above an expansive marsh. Tybee itself is the closest oceanfront to Savannah, and like so many beach towns, a devil-may-care attitude rules the place, making tuning in and dropping out as natural as breathing.The next morning, satiated with Savannah, I follow skinny backwoods highways where the season overwhelms. In late March, wild azalea bushes wear white, fuchsia, and pink confetti blooms; wisteria clusters give a bacchanalian air to vine-choked trees; and shy green buds peek from the limbs of dogwoods, pecans, and crape myrtles. Roadside stands have reopened to sell backyard produce and hot boiled peanuts, and, if I’m not shooting through a tunnel of live oaks linking limbs overhead, I’m in the midst of a marsh, golden and shaggy as a lion’s mane. Snowy egrets roost in clumps of cypress trees, and white ibis flurry overhead. It’s nothing short of wonderful. Soon I arrive in Bluffton, South Carolina, where the remnant buildings of an 1825 fishing village are filled with antiques stores, galleries, and art studios—a contrast with the resort island (Hilton Head) just a few miles south. The sea-island soul in Old Town Bluffton is palpable, and chatting up longtime shopkeepers is a blast. There’s Jacob Preston, local politico/potter who leaves his studio open when he steps out, asking only for patrons to leave checks in exchange for goods. And then there’s Amos Hummell and his protégé Michelle Roldan-Shaw, who now apprentices at Hummell’s art shack because she “just kept coming ’round.” Over at The Store, Babbie Guscio introduces me to porch dog Sophie and mentions some of the town’s lunch options: homemade soup and sandwiches in a small house in the historic district (Café Rebecca), Southern comfort food in a onetime barn (Pepper’s Porch), or good barbecue from a roadside red trolley (Bluffton Barbeque). 
photography: Buff Strickland
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After Old Town Bluffton, I continue northeast to Beaufort, a small waterfront town founded in 1711 that’s a bastion of old-time Southern charm thanks to its lively Bay Street, portside park, and surrounding neighborhoods rife with antebellum manses and cottages. It’s a nice place to lay over for the night with a buggy tour followed by a nouveau Lowcountry dinner. A creaky, horse-drawn ride under the oaks via Carolina Buggy Tours gives me a brief history lesson, and when the driver points out a town preacher’s Golden Retriever trotting alongside, there’s no mistaking the apple-pie flavor of life here. Later, I head across the bridge to Lady’s Island for dinner at Bateaux. The meal (shaved beet salad with chèvre, crab and mascarpone empanada, and fresh local flounder) rivals the view of the sun setting over Beaufort Sound.By the next morning I’m aching to trade my strolling skirt for shorts and a T-shirt, so I drive northeast to the ACE Basin where the Ashepoo, Combahee, and Edisto rivers form a federally protected waterlogged wilderness. Mike at ACE Basin Outpost leads a sunrise kayak trip past the telltale signs of antebellum life (former plantations, rice fields, and irrigation tracks). Slipping along at critter level, I find it easy to play alligator, scoping out herons that spear fish on the river’s edges. A few hours out—with droning city sounds long since traded for the plops and squishes of the watery landscape and walking supplanted by the dip, pull, glide, and lift of the kayak paddle—I’m so laid-back it’s like I’ve had a massage. Continuing off the grid, Edisto Beach beckons. With nary a hotel in the area and only a tiny Piggly Wiggly grocery store to service vacationing families, this rural sea island’s as mellow as a choreless day off. I’ve rented one of the marshfront state park cabins for two nights and load up at George and Pink’s Vegetable Stand and Edisto Seafood for home cooking chez moi. With boardwalk biking to the beach, shelling under the palmettos at the state park, and reading (snoozing) in the porch rocker, my Lowcountry vacation buffet is complete, and spring’s officially heralded. |
