Jekyll Island Club

Jekyll Island, GA · Golden Isles

About

From 1886 the Morgans, Rockefellers, Pulitzers and Vanderbilts wintered behind this turreted clubhouse, and in 1910 a few of them slipped onto the island in secret to draft the plan that became the Federal Reserve. The Queen Anne tower, wraparound verandas and croquet lawn still stand at the heart of a 240-acre National Historic Landmark District you can tour on foot or by trolley. Walk the same riverfront path where AT&T placed the first transcontinental phone call in 1915.

Highlights

Getting there

371 Riverview Drive, Jekyll Island, GA 31527

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Attractions

Expedition: Bigfoot, The Sasquatch Museum

Cherry Log, GA · North Georgia Mountains

Tucked along Highway 515 between Blue Ridge and Ellijay, this 4,000-square-foot shrine to Sasquatch claims the largest permanent collection of Bigfoot artifacts anywhere, and it does not pretend to be neutral about whether the big guy is real. Founded in 2016 by Navy veteran and Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization member David Bakara and his wife Malinda, it packs in wall after wall of footprint and handprint casts, sighting maps, hair samples, and listening stations piping out genuine recorded grunts and howls. You can settle into the Sasquatch Theater for looping eyewitness footage, gawk at the world's only Bigfoot research and tech ATV the Bakaras once drove on Florida investigations, and find a cast of a rare Bigfoot butt-print laid out on red velvet. Cap it with the gift shop, where David sells footprint casting kits he assembles himself.

Attractions

Babyland General Hospital

Cleveland, GA · North Georgia Mountains

This columned white mansion is the official "birthplace" of the Cabbage Patch Kids, the soft-sculpture dolls Xavier Roberts dreamed up in these North Georgia hills. Time your visit for the hourly "delivery," when a Licensed Patch Nurse tends the Magic Crystal Tree, announces that a Mother Cabbage is in labor, doses her with "Imagicillin," and pulls a freshly born baby from the leaves while pink and blue BunnyBees decide the gender. You wander rooms full of dolls in incubators and adoption cribs, and yes, you can take one home with its own birth certificate. Admission is free, the staff play it gloriously straight, and the whole thing lands somewhere between sweet and wonderfully surreal.

Attractions

Old Car City USA

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Billed as the world's largest classic-car junkyard, this 34-acre forest swallows more than 4,000 vehicles built in 1972 or earlier, most of them rusting hulks from the 1950s and 60s with saplings growing up through their hoods. What began as a 1931 general store turned into a salvage yard, and the family who still runs it now charges photographers a few dollars more than walkers because that is who really comes: this is a photo pilgrimage, with 6-plus miles of pine-needle trails winding past moss-furred Fords and the famous "two-ton flowerpot" Chevy. Plan on several hours, wear real shoes, and note it is open Tuesday through Saturday, roughly 9 to 4. Bring a camera and let the rust and roots do the rest.

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Beaches

Cumberland Island National Seashore

St. Marys, GA · Golden Isles

Cumberland Island is Georgia's largest barrier island, reachable only by ferry from St. Marys, where wild horses graze among the moss-draped oaks and tabby ruins of the Carnegie family's Dungeness estate. Beyond the historic district stretch more than 17 miles of undeveloped white-sand beach with almost no one on them. Spring and fall bring the mildest weather and the fewest bugs for hiking or biking the maritime forest.

Lakes & rivers

Crooked River State Park

St. Marys, GA · Golden Isles

Salt marsh, pine flatwoods, and live oaks dripping with Spanish moss spread across 500 acres on the south bank of the tidal Crooked River. Four miles of trails carry you past gopher tortoise burrows, fiddler-crab flats, and a birding platform on the Sempervirens loop, where wood storks, ospreys, and painted buntings turn up through the seasons. It is also the closest base for the ferry to Cumberland Island, with cottages, riverside campsites, and guided kayak trips out into the marsh.

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Georgia Attractions

The Georgia stops worth building a day around. Atlanta's Coca-Cola vault and a whale shark the size of a school bus, the oak-shaded squares of Savannah, a visionary's painted folk-art compound in Buena Vista, FDR's Little White House, and a 56-foot sheet-metal chicken in Marietta. The famous, the historic, and the gloriously strange.