After a few minutes of whining, we decided we’d go the beach, just the two of us. The only problem: every hotel we called at every beach we’d ever visited was full. (This was pre-online booking.) A friend at the paper suggested Tybee Island, outside of Savannah, and we started calling hotels there.
Eventually we found a place with a vacancy. Yea!! It was time to pack: sunscreen, bathing suits, skirts, and sandals!
Fast forward a few days. We arrived at a pre-fabricated Rodeway Inn along the island’s busy strip. On the way, we passed dumpy restaurants with big signs advertising fried shrimp specials, as well as convenience stores with racks of neon muscle Ts out front. The motel pool—surrounded by a chain-link fence and an asphalt parking lot— was packed with drunk, sunburned rednecks, men in cutoff jeans, women in string bikinis that should have been retired several years (and many pounds) before.
Now it would have been easy to feel depressed by this scenario (I bet our ex-boyfriends and their new girlfriends are at fabulous resorts right now) but instead Caroline looked at me and said, “When in Rome …” and I said, “Totally.” Though we preferred higher-end beer at home, we bought Budweiser. We wore rubber flip flops for the short but brutally hot morning trek across the highway from the Rodeway to the beach. We sported bikinis sans the cute cover-ups, got drunk every afternoon and finished with evenings of fried-food platters. We naturally had a blast and vowed to come back the next summer.
How It Became a Ritual.
We went back every July, packing the cooler each morning with our disgusting Pop-Tarts and cheap beer. We bought koozies especially for the annual weekends. We found restaurants on Tybee we liked (not exactly the kind of fare we chose at home), and later, after we heard about fine-dining spots, we turned up our noses at fresh pecan-crusted trout. We’ll take a platter of fried oysters and French fries, extra mayonnaise in the coleslaw please. We never worried about how we looked. We didn’t pack makeup.
