The Golden Isles, End to End

The Golden Isles sit off the Georgia coast in a short row, close enough that one causeway system serves them all, and different enough that driving the row end to end amounts to three vacations in one. This route runs south to north, Jekyll to St. Simons to Sea Island, wants three nights, and is best in spring or fall, when the marsh is green or gold and the heat has manners.

Start on the island the Gilded Age millionaires kept as a private club, where the Morgans and Vanderbilts wintered behind the marsh until the war ended the arrangement and the state took the island for everyone. Stay a night in the old clubhouse if you can, tour the cottages of the millionaires' village, and give the morning to Driftwood Beach at the north end, where the fallen oaks lie bleached on the sand like sculpture. The island is kept deliberately undeveloped by law, and it feels it.

Cross to the biggest and most lived-in of the isles, where the lighthouse still works, the village still centers on a pier, and the oaks arch over every road. Climb the lighthouse, ride bicycles under the oak tunnels to the fort at the island's north end, and take dinner in the village, which holds down its corner by the pier as it has for generations. St. Simons is the isle families settle into, and an afternoon here explains why.

End at the private resort island that Georgia families have been handing down since 1928, five miles of beach, a great hotel called the Cloister, and a standard of service that has survived every decade thrown at it. The seaside golf here hosts the tour each autumn and receives visitors the rest of the year, and the beach club dinner, dressed, unhurried, with the Atlantic going dark beyond the dunes, is the correct final evening of the route. Book far earlier than feels reasonable, then drive home planning the return, which is what everyone does.