St. Simon's Island was a childhood vacation spot for me. I loved it. Having gone back just this year for the first time in over 20 years, I realized I like it even more now that I can enjoy the small-beach-town atmosphere and the deep-rooted history.
It's not Orlando, It's not Miami, it's not even Jacksonville. It's a tiny little spot with decent beaches, a long history that's reasonably-well-preserved, and quiet relaxation.
The marsh that's pictured in this article (labelled "boardwalk over marsh") looks like the Bloody Marsh [0], the site of the battle that was the "last straw" for the Spanish in their attempts to claim land further up from Florida (which used to extend a bit farther north than it does today).
The colony of Georgia was chartered by Britain around this area in part as a response to that "invasion", in an attempt to protect the important British port of Charleston up in Carolina (before the NC/SC split). Of course, the other key motivation was to have a whole bunch of land to use as an alternative to overcrowded debtor's prisons, so there's that.
This is in part why Savannah (another beautiful historic coastal spot in Georgia, though a much larger one) was so significant to the state for so much of its early history: it was the first planned city in the state, as evidenced by the fact that it's home to the oldest still-standing building in the entire state (a gardener's shed built in the early 1700s, now part of a tourist-trap restaurant).
All this to say: yes, Georgia definitely has a coast, and it's worth seeing (in this HNer's opinion), and worth preserving.
Many people are probably familiar with St. Simon's from the 30th g8 summit, though they technically refer to it as Sea Island (more on that in a moment).
St Simon's has changed over the years. It's finally succumbing to development though they are being careful about it so as not to kill the golden goose (a very private feeling island). Most of the people that lived there prior to its rise in popularity have been driven out by high prices or cashed out if they were lucky enough to own land. The Eastern part of the island has become much more accessible to lower income populations. (edit: I've got this next sentence wrong as corrected in a comment below)Rich homeowners, as a result, erected a guarded gate in front of Sea Island (basically part of SSI) to keep everyone out.
I still love SSI. My only hope is that it doesn't continue on the path it's currently on. Privacy and exclusion are separate ideas. SSI can still be private, but it doesn't necessarily have to exclusive. My hope is that can change. However, my head tells me that everything I like about SSI is scarce and prices will only continue to climb, driving away those not fortunate enough to afford it.
You're conflating two islands here -- Sea Island is a separate island that has been privately owned since at least the 1920s. You have to drive across St Simons to get to Sea Island. For sure, Sea Island is a high end, gated resort community of a few hundred people.
St Simons is home to about 12k people. It has been an expensive place to live since at least the 80s. I, too, share your concerns about the current development going on -- I'm not sure the developers are in fact being careful about killing the golden goose. Developers are cutting down our historic oak trees and indiscriminately putting up cheaply built condos as fast as the corrupt planning commission will let them.
This is the perfect opportunity to plug the St Simons Land Trust: https://www.sslt.org/
It's a great opportunity to plug all local land trusts.
Unlike national conservation organizations (which are great and have their place), local land trusts can really take on the priorities of the local area.
For example, the land trust I'm involved with here in the Inland Northwest does a lot of work to make sure that land used for agriculture and forestry is preserved for those uses, doesn't turn into housing developments and can even be passed down from generation-to-generation of family farmers without a prohibitive tax burden.
In Montana where there's been tons issues over access to public lands blocked by private landowners, they're playing a key role in preserving that access.
Feels inevitable though. As soon as some developer gets it in their head that they have found the next retirement community, hundreds of condos spring up overnight.
What's worse is when things don't pan out, and you are left with hundreds of half finished condos.
I worried that the oral history I'd always gotten about Sea Island was off. I should have checked into that. Are my memories of riding bikes to it as a kid off base?
You're right developers are destroying trees. I guess what I was alluding to was the historical restrictions on building sizes and things like that.
If you look at it on a map, it's pretty ambiguous where to draw the lines to make islands. I think in a geographical sense, Sea Island could very well be considered part of St Simons.
Because currently profitable industries have consolidated themselves within a few nearby localities, leading to a population explosion that may not be sustainable should those industries not 'continue on an ever-upwards growth trajectory'?
Perhaps what's happening in the bay is the result of responsible, long sighted policies designed to mitigate or forestall a population collapse during a proverbial gold rush in what could become a future Rust Belt.
I'm curious to hear your views. Where should we meet to talk about it? Galveston, Atlantic City, Detroit, Buffalo, New Orleans...?
What you're neglecting in your argument is the weather of central coastal CA. Not only is it far more temperate, it also lacks the constant threat of hurricanes or blizzards. Small earthquake chance, but nothing serious so far. There's a reason the deep south is so cheap - no one wants to summer in our heat and humidity! And very few people enjoy surviving the winters of Detroit.
Cities expand, there's no such thing as non-sustainable growth for a city. Cities can easily go vertical. If cities didn't expand during our parents and grandparents generation they'd just be the farms. It would be quite different landscape if the NIMBY group had clout back then.
Society moves forwards, people who want to "preserve" really don't want us to move forward. Whether they are killing mass transit plans because they want to "preserve" their small city culture or not allowing the building of high-density housing to meet the demands to our ever growing population.
Preserve is even more sinister as it uses justify racism and oppression or south likes to refer to as "preserving their southern culture" as they fly confederate flags and put up statues of Confederate leaders.
The same thing happend to Hilton Head Island, SC. Most of the south end has become a gated community. Hunting Island, SC as well - Fripp Island is a gated community.
My biggest hope is that Cumberland Island, GA can avoid this fate. It has no bridge to it, and most of it is preserved as wilderness area, but the county seems to be trying its hardest to develop what private land remains on the island. It's a real shame, because it's one of the last wild, preserved islands anyone can get to by booking a ferry with the park service.
> The same thing happend to Hilton Head Island, SC. Most of the south end has become a gated community.
Hilton Head native here, I don't think the HHI history is quite the same. Prior to Fraser kicking off the island as we know it in the '50s, it was basically just a handful of Freedmen farmers, Gullah natives and a rather large hunting reserve for the rich. Also, while some of the gated communities don't allow the riff-raff in, unless you decide to bike or make a restaurant reservation, some still do, most notably Sea Pines.
Also, the Town of is rather cognizant of their place as a very natural, family-friendly island and goes to great pains to preserve land[0] and limit what and how folks build[1][2] to preserve the nature of the island.
I think Kiawah or Seabrook up the coast make for a more apt comparison.
> Hunting Island, SC as well - Fripp Island is a gated community.
Wait, Hunting Island and Fripp Island are discrete, separate islands with Hunting Island being a State Park. What's the problem with Hunting Island?
Fripp Island was inline with discussion on the privatization of beaches. The only bridge to get to Fripp Island is through Hunting Island, and they don't let non-residents through. Sea Pines is a little more lax since it's not as elite as Sea Island - they don't check the credentials of cyclists, and it's the only way I've visted.
I'm not sure how much of the beach is considered public in east coast states, I know CA has laws against full privatization. But by gating the only road access, you've effectively privatized the beach unless you kayak there or something.
> they don't check the credentials of cyclists, and it's the only way I've visted.
They sell tourist passes for $6 (Used to be $5... damn inflation).
> I'm not sure how much of the beach is considered public in east coast states
In the state of SC, there is no such thing as a private beach. Of course if the island is fully gated, it would require boat access.
In the case of Fripp, there is no public parking insofar as I'm aware but one could park at the edge of Hunting Island, walk across the bridge, then access the beach as the gates are inset.
Of course I'm also sure the security folks would try and make you feel unwelcome. One of those "can't beat the ride, can beat the rap" situations.
But if you have a lot of money you don't have to bother with the bugs and the riff-raff at the campground, you can overnight in a B&B[1]! Make sure you bring your dinner jacket though. They even provide a private ferry from Fernandina Beach, FL, so no risk of accidentally touching any smelly campers.
[1]http://greyfieldinn.com
The horses roam all over the place - I can nearly guarantee you that you won't miss them. They are everywhere!
As to where to go and what to see - choose one of the trails that hits the beach. Lots to see!
> Most of the people that lived there prior to its rise in popularity have been driven out by high prices or cashed out if they were lucky enough to own land.
This is happening all over the South Carolina coast as well.
> This is in part why Savannah (another beautiful historic coastal spot in Georgia, though a much larger one) was so significant to the state for so much of its early history: it was the first planned city in the state
Having spent many a weekend in Savannah from youth through to being an adult, and now having lived in Charleston for the better part of a decade, I really think Savannah is a nicer city.
Perhaps because Savannah was planned or because Charleston is constrained by its peninsular nature, but Savannah always felt like a small city whereas Charleston really just seems like a haphazard, overgrown town.
If any of y'all reading ever consider a trip down to Savannah, it's well worth a long weekend at the very least.
I also live in Charleston and go to Savannah a couple weekends a year because it really is a cool place. But when it comes to living in a place I would far prefer to live in Charleston. The actual grid plan of Savannah's historic district is superior to Charleston's street plan and I don't think Savannah ever had a building height limit so the taller buildings make Savannah feel more 'urban', but when it comes to jobs and all around momentum Savannah has very little; If there was more going on there it'd probably be the better place between the two. I get why the thought of a tourism would turn people off from living in a place, but in reality, nowadays the same thing that attracts people to visit cities are the same things that attract people to live in a certain city, just look at how Airbnb more less turned every city into a tourist destination.
> an experience that makes me, as an adult, uninterested/incapable of living in another tourist destination, ever.
I also grew up in a tourist destination. There's a reason it's a vacation destination and not somewhere people with a brain actually want to live year round. I could rant for hours about all the things that are terrible about it. I think it suffices to say that when ripping people off for a few months of the year is a large fraction of the local economy it that has a bunch of negative trickle down effects.
Personally, I believe it really depends on the nature of the city / town.
I grew up ~60 miles down the coast from Charleston, on Hilton Head Island. Totally different vibe, beautiful, natural island. The Town of actually made real efforts to manage development and prevent developers from doing the normal land-grab over-development.
I've lived in Charleston for 7+ years and, despite a temporary moratorium, the City of is letting developers raze the city to build more and more hotels with no damned parking. Very little is done to manage or plan development. It's a whole different vibe, and I'm actually going to be leaving Charleston with no intent to return here in the coming months.
My experience in Charleston has really made me appreciate the island I grew up on. Not all tourist towns are built alike.
I did 2 summers in Bluffton and spent a lot of time in HHI when I was in college around 2000. I definitely did not get the vibe you did from HHI.
If you visit, your first impression is that it is very pretty and quiet. When you're there for a more extended period, everything feels very...sterile. Everything looks the same. You can't find anything.
It's also this odd place in South Carolina where if you order tea it's unsweet and if you ask for sweet tea they'll either look at you strangely, give you sugar packets (not the same thing) or say they don't serve it. During the summer, all you see is Ohio license plates.
When I thought I was going to end up working there after college I was going to live in Beaufort just to avoid living there. Grew up in Florence.
That's exactly the kind of town I grew up in (albeit at a more northern latitude). The veneer of quaintness that draws people to the town is very thin, just enough to get them to open their wallets. Beneath that it's all dysfunction and scum liberally sprinkled with less than ethical business practices and corrupt politics that everone's managed convince themselves is normal or doesn't exist.
I've lived in a variety of other small towns and a few cities. The pattern I've noticed is that when a large chunk of the community makes it's living by siphoning a few bucks off of people who don't live there permanently and have no plans to (tourists, university students, commuters) it creates a bunch of incentives for highly (more so than in a normal town/city) selfish behavior from all the local parties (business owners, politicians, town departments, individual property owners, etc) that basically boils down to everyone trying to squeeze every cent out of everyone else and nobody wants to live in a place where everyone is doing that because it sucks. I'm definitely in the "individuals are generally good and trustworthy when left to do their own thing" camp but a couple of the places I'v lived make me well aware of why some people believe that people are untrustworthy by default and need to be controlled.
In the case of tourist towns, the special snowflake image projected on top of all of this is just kind of a slap in the face for everyone living there. You've got your annual town parade for whatever and half the crowd is frowning because they know the backstory to everything they see in front of them. The local business that sponsored the float for a sports team is just doing it because a local offical's kid is on the team and he needs said official to not look too hard at his business. The fire department's 100ft ladder truck is just a waste because there's no more than a 3-story building in the town but the EMTs did a favor for the school superintendent who crashed his car while drunk (legend is that he had to be cut out by the FD and the EMTs recognized him and whisked him away before the cops could make him blow) so he called his friends and put in a good word for the fire department when it came to budget. The reason some of the town officials in the parade aren't behind bars is because the police know that scandals are bad for business and they'd rather just have it to hold over them anyway. The only reason the landscaping material company has money to blow on the nearly new trucks that are towing the floats (dirt moving is a low margin industry so you don't usually see that stuff) is because they have a local monopoly and overcharge everyone they deal with. It's just terrible to live in a place where everything is scummy but presented as quaint in order to fleece the tourists for a few months of the year and that's how most tourist towns become. No wonder everyone does drugs all winter. It wears on you. I suppose if you just take it all for granted or are just so overwhelmed by the quaintness that you don't notice it might be ok but that's just not me.
The cops sweeping crime under the rug was definitely a thing growing up where I did, and the local paper was complicit as well.
I think one of the real differences between a strictly-tourist town and the island I grew up on was that it also served as an upscale retirement destination for Snowbird types such that it has its own thriving economy and year-round population (in the 30,000 - 40,000 range) so it wasn't strictly dependent on tourism.
The surrounding area has also grown and developed into its own area since. Rather interesting to watch the sort-of bootstrapping of the surrounding sleepy town into a thriving area over the years.
In a tourist trap place I used to live, all the crime was committed by hispanics. Non-hispanic names barely made it onto the newspaper's crime blotter. This started getting really weird after a while, once you realized most of the local population was not, in fact, hispanic.
It looks to be more of an "island" than an island. I mean, the piece of water barely separating it from the rest of Georgia is called a "creek", for pete's sake.
Drone photography is transforming how we tell visual stories. I've been doing photography since college and rather passionately for the past 15 years (some of my work here[0]).
I have literally changed my perspective, and I am obsessed with it. Shooting from a drone, with a straight-down vantage point, has allowed me to explore my coastal muse with a brand new eye
To me along with mobile phone, the drones are transforming how ordinary people are able to capture and tell amazing stories.
You can argue drone photography, is the most important camera innovation of the past 100 years.
Sadly, there are a lot of backlashes against it. Before I became a convert, I found them annoying, too. People do not like the buzzing sound (which I agree and I'm glad companies like DJI are doing innovations to reduce the buzzing sound). There are a lot of privacy concerns, which is fair. But I don't see that privacy concern in public areas any worse than mobile phones.
I just hope that drone operators use common sense and be considerate and not ruin the use of this amazing technology, for the rest of us.
It gives a new perspective but it doesn't allow for very visually interesting photos. The shots are (by nature of drone photography) almost always composed exactly the same. The different landscapes in the article are beautiful, but there are basically two compositions in the article: the majority have a vertical composition looking straight down with a path or river going from top to bottom (sometimes it goes from left to right). There are a couple of shots that show a landscape from a non-vertical angle.
>You can argue drone photography, is the most important camera innovation of the past 100 years.
Really? I mean you could, but it seems silly. I'd say digital image sensors are by far a much more important innovation. Without those, you don't have drone photography, or you do, but it's so prohibitively expensive that it's not available to anyone who can do interesting things with it. Without digital image sensors you don't have camera phones, you don't have GoPros, you don't have dashcams, you don't have bodycams, you don't have drone cameras, you don't have cameras mounted on the sides of rockets, etc. You don't have the DSLR revolution that got high quality cameras in the hands of amateurs last decade.
I'd say digital image sensors are by far a much more important innovation
I thought about this statement before writing it, and I know what you mean. But the way I justify this view is that with film vs digital I was never able to take any different images. Sure, digital photography is at the heart of drones. But A digital camera didn't give me an entirely a new way to easily tell a story.
Of course, I could rent a helicopter (almost impossible for some locations and prohibitively expensive) but to carry a small gadget and send it up to tell a story is something that has only become possible recently.
Take something like this [0]. It's a former spy radio satellite the operated in current Latvia during the USSR days and now has been turned into a radio telescope. It would be impossible to tell a story about it's location in middle of trees, etc. unless I had a helicopter.
Or how do you show there is a monument built on top of the hills in Buda side that overlooks the river on Budapest. You can not [1].
As I said, it gives you abilities to tell stories that you could not do with an analogue camera.
> I have literally changed my perspective, and I am obsessed with it. Shooting from a drone, with a straight-down vantage point, has allowed me to explore my coastal muse with a brand new eye
Sounds very Jackson Pollock.
> There are a lot of privacy concerns, which is fair. But I don't see that privacy concern in public areas any worse than mobile phones.
This directly contradicts your earlier point about being able to see things you couldn't before.
I think the idea is that anything in public can be photographed at any time by any one. If you're out in public, someone could photograph you with a cell phone from the street, from a building, from a helicopter, etc. Drones don't change that equation in the slightest.
What drone photography does change is how easy it is to photograph angles that were difficult before, not the fact that it's possible. Which is the same for mobile phones. Since the invention of the camera, it's always been possible to photograph anything anyone anywhere. Camera phones just made it easier, since now nearly everyone has a camera. But that doesn't mean it wasn't possible before, or that you have less privacy in public places. You've never had privacy in public places.
Since nobody else has said it in this thread: wow, some of your photos are fucking awesome! I especially loved the pensive aahhhdammit face composed of the moon on orange sky with three birds.
1 - It's near the arctic circle by the Lofoten area in Norway. In or near the arctic circles the sun and the moon (in winters) stay very low, so you get this very long period of low angles of the moon or sun. In San Francisco, you are rushing to capture 1-2 shots before the moon has moved a few degrees upwards.
2 - that moon image was at the opposite side (if I remember correctly) of the picture below it [0] which is a reminder to always look behind you, during dramatic colors.
> Sadly, there are a lot of backlashes against it.
I went to New Zealand last year for 3 weeks. It was the most beautiful place I've visited in my life. And not just visually beautiful, but audibly beautiful too. The ambience made for an incredibly serene experience like none other.
Nothing ruined those experiences more than when someone with a drone showed up to drown out all the noises of nature.
I live in the South of New Zealand, hearing the bird song is one of the big perks of being here.
Drones, I don't really have much of an opinion on to be honest. There is certainly good and bad outdoors etiquette; if it were in vogue to play a trumpet outside in a beautiful wild place, I'd probably not be a fan of the person playing it, but I don't mind the instrument in the right context.
There does seem to have been quite a backlash against drones here (see rules 11 and 12: https://www.airshare.co.nz/rules), though I don't know how much of that is driven by the general resistance to new things here, or privacy concerns, or how much is the spoiling of public spaces as you mention. My guess is that it's roughly those issues, in that order.
All that said, the sound of a bell on the neighbour's cat is offensive to me, for the fact that I'm hearing it and not the birds it's killed (we also have invasive rodents, which do harm bird life but some are also eaten by cats). It makes me wonder about shifting baseline syndrome too - what would it be like here if we could get rid of most of the the human-introduced predators? https://cacophony.org.nz/
Right there with you. I recently got a DJI spark as kindof a toy, but was blown away at the incredible videos and photos I was getting with it.
It made me a little sad to find out that some cities in my metro area have ordinances banning me from using them there. So for instance: I can't fly them at family gatherings to take videos of us.
The fear of 100 drones in the sky of every neighborhood, and neighbors shooting them out of their backyard if they cross the property line thankfully hasn’t come true yet. And we’re a few years into consumers buying pretty powerful toy drones like the Magic Pro.
I have seen more no-drone signs up at National sparks such as Joshua Tree, but that’s fair enough in spots like that.
Hopefully the positive trend of human drone harmony continues!
Well, the Kaiser is out and the War is over! If it weren't for the flu in Spain (although I've heard it showed up in other places...) then it would be a good end to the year.
Regardless, I thank God we'll never see such senseless bloodshed again.
These are really beautiful photos, and now I am damn well hiking a barrier island this weekend. Being a lifelong lowcountry South Carolinian, it's nice to see the Georgia coast getting some love (Y'all tourists really should visit there :) ).
These pictures from home are great to see on a California morning! It really is a special landscape and I'm glad to see it getting some attention.
I was extra excited to see the pictures of the Satilla River since it's a blackwater, something I feel like a lot of folks are unfamiliar with [0]. It's a really interesting feeling to swim or float down a blackwater that is clean and pure and full of fish and turtles pecking against your legs but whose tea-colored waters don't admit even a yard of visibility through.
The anecdote about geography that's summarized in the title isn't as interesting as the photographs themselves. They're magnificent. One of the tasks of great photography is to show an interesting or unique pespective. Composition is everything. These drone photos are awesome.
This question reveals much about the state of basic US history classrooms in Florida. How do you learn about the civil war and not hear about General Sherman's march to the sea? Especially if it happened in your basic area?
Every pump in the UK is pay after pump, unless it’s pay at pump then you are limited to £99 usually but it’s just a hold, it only charges when you reseat the pump handle. It freaks me out in Europe and the US when I come across a pay first pump, I don’t know how much it’s going to cost to fill up and then I need to go back in to get my change, ridiculous!
If you want to pay cash, sometimes you have to go in and give them money, then they have some way to tell the pump to only put out that much gas. And if you don't pick the right amount, you have to go back in and get your money back.
With uMatrix in default config I see only a blank page. I really, really wish people that make websites wouldn't do this. Load what you need from your domain, don't include a lot of stuff off-domain, so I don't know what I need to enable just to see the text you wrote.
So your examples are a political faction that disappeared in the 1700s and a train in New Zealand?
Why would either of those things be bitter?
Even if you want to talk about Georgia vs. Georgia, the US state is almost 3x the size (in population) and the nation was "Republic of Georgia" as recently as the 90's.
Further, 60% of native English speakers are in the US and also this is the exact headline used by a website for/by US Southerners.
Should the headline have been, "Georgia, the state in the United States, has a coastline?"
Is this really a harmful or inexcusable example of US-centrism? Should publishers in the country of Georgia always explain that they're referring to the country and not the US state?
Not if you want to observe animal life too. Jet skis are very loud, and not all that comfortable either. You'd be better off with a flat-bottom boat, like in that one photo. Whether you have an airboat or a small outboard motor, they operate a lot more quietly and give you enough space to bring along whatever supplies you'd like.
Airboats aren't quiet at all.... maybe you mean a canoe/kayak with an electric trolling motor? Newer PWCs aren't all that loud as long as you aren't going full throttle.
I work on St. Simons Island and enjoy the environment completely; great place for a vacation.
I would also like to plug Jekyll island which is just south over the bridge - there is a fee to get onto the island and passes are available. Beaches, a water park, hotels and a largish island to explore. Good times.
Used to live in Brunswick, now we're living in middle Georgia but my wife and I still love to fly our C182 down to grab some BBQ at Southern Soul (or cheesesteak at Skinny Pete's) every month or two. SSI is gorgeous and the airport is in a great location and staffed by some great folks.
Yes, I live on the island mentioned in the article. This place gets insane with tourists during the Summer months, but gets much calmer during September. The weather is also nicer, with the highs averaging in the mid-80s(F). The summer months are generally hot and humid -- this is the deep South after all.
I'll have to defer since you live there, but I'm from South GA and my sisters live on SSI and I'd think September would be hotter than that & October would be nicer (my favorite month in GA overall).
Also, if you happen to live in the Northeast, I recommend a visit to SSI in the early spring to cure that endless winter misery that you get in March & sometimes April.
Fall in general is great. My perception (which I’ve not validated) is October is generally wetter. That may just be from anomolies the last yew years than the actual climate, though.
Just don’t come the weekend of the Georgia-Florida football game in late October. 10,000 (newspaper’s estimate, not mine) Georgia fans flock to the island and get drunk. We’re not at all equipped to handle that many college kids all at once.
Perhaps it was lumping all southerners together and calling them all inbred racists that resulted in a bad time for you. I think a lot of people would like to explore Georgia as a Florida alternative
All the barrier islands are beautiful - Cumberland, SSI, Jekyll, Tybee and they aren't too busy (well, except Saint Simons during the GA/FL weekend which is a blast in and of itself).
I love runs like mosquito creek. Seadoo used to make a small 4 person jetboat (now it's basically a floating mansion for towing boarders) that was so quick and nimble and we would negotiate a similar area in the Virginia tidewater region during high tide. As teenagers it was how we learned where the apex if a turn is and the very important "no throttle? No turning" aspect of jetted water vehicles. Both of which served us well when we starter throwing motorcycles around Virginia International Raceway.
I have visited the Bulgarian side of the Black Sea and found it quite fascinating, there was a time wild dolphins came not far from the coast. For sure I would love to visit the Georgian coast as well, have heard good things of the place and have never met a bad Georgian.
Yeah, the Atlanta area is home to a lot of movies and TV shows at this point. There's even a huge movie studio built south of Atlanta (Pinewood, opened in 2014).
Most of the recent Marvell movies were shot here.
Recent films shot in Georgia include: Godzilla: King of Monsters, the Ant Man movies, Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, Black Panther, Pitch Perfect 3, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House and Spider-Man: Homecoming.
Some television shows shot here: Stranger Things, Ozark, The Walking Dead, MacGuyver and Atlanta.
There's definitely a booming production industry in the Atlanta area.
Of course this is all due to a financial/tax incentive for movie studios. But it seems to have produced a volume of productions: in 2016 more feature films were produced in GA than in CA.
Wait they called their studios Pinewood? As in the same name as the famous British studios where they film James Bond and stuff? Come on Atlanta get your own studio name!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinewood_Studios
20% Tax credit with an additional 10% if they include that filmed in Georgia logo in the credits. There may be more but that is the big one I am aware of.
It's not Orlando, It's not Miami, it's not even Jacksonville. It's a tiny little spot with decent beaches, a long history that's reasonably-well-preserved, and quiet relaxation.
The marsh that's pictured in this article (labelled "boardwalk over marsh") looks like the Bloody Marsh [0], the site of the battle that was the "last straw" for the Spanish in their attempts to claim land further up from Florida (which used to extend a bit farther north than it does today).
The colony of Georgia was chartered by Britain around this area in part as a response to that "invasion", in an attempt to protect the important British port of Charleston up in Carolina (before the NC/SC split). Of course, the other key motivation was to have a whole bunch of land to use as an alternative to overcrowded debtor's prisons, so there's that.
This is in part why Savannah (another beautiful historic coastal spot in Georgia, though a much larger one) was so significant to the state for so much of its early history: it was the first planned city in the state, as evidenced by the fact that it's home to the oldest still-standing building in the entire state (a gardener's shed built in the early 1700s, now part of a tourist-trap restaurant).
All this to say: yes, Georgia definitely has a coast, and it's worth seeing (in this HNer's opinion), and worth preserving.