There are people, legions of them, who book Florida each winter with the unblinking surety of a call to the accountant or hairdresser. They zero in on the Palm Beach-Miami littoral, the Gulf Coast, the Keys or Disney country, and in so doing they pass up a pungent 50-mile stretch of barrier island and beach front in the northeast corner, just out of Jacksonville.
Life here is as much influenced by the down-home ways of south Georgia as by the glitter of the Gold Coast. Certain Southerners have mined the area for years, but to others the names Amelia Island, Fernandina Beach and Ponte Vedra may barely register from some tennis or golf tournament caught on TV. Modern times have produced a few polished resorts and trendy cafes, but this is still a place to order a plate of fresh shrimp and hushpuppies and watch the trawlers come in, to sit at a crossroads diner and be asked to choose: sweetened or unsweetened iced tea. Either way, a full pitcher will land on your table.
Winters are a tad brisk for baking on the beach, but with temperatures in the 45-70 range, you can play golf or tennis without wilting, stroll the historic lanes of Fernandina and St. Augustine in uncrowded peace, or jog, bike, hike, fly a kite or collect shells on the remarkably long and hard-packed beaches.
I launched my exploration of what some call the First Coast (for St. Augustine’s 1565 founding) by heading straight for Amelia Island, a 40-minute drive from the Jacksonville airport. Amelia, a narrow, 12-mile spit separated from the mainland by the Amelia River and a soaring causeway, is an island in flux. It has the easy moss-hung charm of the Hilton Head of 25 years ago, but modern resort life has reared its head with a spanking new Ritz-Carlton and the sprawling Amelia Island Plantation.
Backwater benefits
Amelia has managed to preserve its sense of remoteness because it’s not particularly on the way to anywhere and because its only settlement, Fernandina Beach, got lodged in a time warp 100 years ago and has 50 blocks of movie-set Victoriana to show for it.
Fernandina thrived in the last quarter of the 19th Century when it trafficked in lumber, phosphate, naval stores and tourists. When Standard Oil magnate Henry Flagler chose to bypass the town with his north-south Florida railway, the noble brick office buildings and gingerbread mansions were left to moulder. In the mid-1970s, a federal grant launched a revival. Centre Street, the historic promenade, redone now with benches and shade trees, shops and cafes, cuts a handsome path through downtown, ending at the trawler-thick harbor.
There is more to old Fernandina than Centre Street. A turn up any street yields sudden pleasures and contrasts: turreted mansions behind wrought-iron gates, tacky cedar-sided Victorians cloaked in a midday darkness cast by massive, low-bending oaks.
Brett’s Waterway Cafe is the spot for broiled shrimp and a harborview of passing trawlers, bounding porpoises and the odd loggerhead turtle. Serious beef, weighed at your table, is served at the 1878 Steak House, which occupies a stolid brick office building a few blocks from the harbor.
Easily the most ambitious and contemporary food is served at the Beech Street Grill: gumbos and blackened fish, New England chowders and bisques and a wine list dense with California chardonnays and cabernets. I liked the cheerful little Allen’s, run jointly by Sarah Allen, a onetime Broadway actress, and her daughter, Leslie, a former touring tennis pro. The tools of their trades are well displayed: Playbills, old tennis rackets and autographed posters. The food is soulful and Southern-shrimp done four ways, sweet-potato pie for dessert.
If atmosphere counts, the Palace Saloon gets five stars. Opened in 1909, the Palace touts itself as the oldest saloon in Florida. It serves burgers, salads and shrimp done four ways (fried, smoked, boiled or blackened), but it’s the scene that counts: a pressed-tin roof, a bluegrass plucker in the corner, and a large, ornate wooden bar carved in Germany for the 1904 World’s Fair.
“In the heyday of tall ships,” a bartender said, “Fernandina had 20 saloons, and this was the ship captains’ bar.”
Overnight options
Lodging around Fernandina and Amelia can range from plush resort to historic bed and breakfast. Out along the beach a few miles from town, the two main choices are Amelia Island Plantation and the Ritz-Carlton.
The Plantation rambles for 900 acres across beach, marsh, forest and fairway. Golf is a big draw, and the 17-court Racquet Park, shaded by live oaks dripping Spanish moss, may be the prettiest tennis compound in the South.
The Ritz-Carlton Amelia Island, of dun-colored stone and blue-tiled roof, looms above the beach like a modern remake of a long ago resort hotel, maybe the Breakers in Palm Beach. It has golf and tennis and lawn games and a curious stateliness not seen before on the First Coast, but my favorite feature is the beach, miles of hard-packed sand patrolled by low-flying pelicans.
For something closer to home, there are a half-dozen well-run inns and B&Bs. The Bailey House 1895 is a yellow Queen Anne mansion in old Fernandina, with a gray plank veranda and lots of period furnishings: brass beds, fringed lamps, claw-foot tubs. On the beach end of town, the 1735 House is a six-suite Cape Cod overlooking the ocean and done in nautical style.
There are two ways to strike south and see the rest of the First Coast. Go back to the mainland and shoot down Interstate Highway 95, or take the slow, scenic and historic route down the spine of Amelia on A1A. I tried the latter and stopped first at the state-run Kingsley Plantation, a slice of 19th Century Florida frontier life.
Marooned at the end of a wooded road, the white frame plantation house looks out on a marshy river. It was owned by Zephaniah Kingsley, once the richest man in Florida, a slave owner who married an African princess and numbered among his descendants some of Jacksonville’s poshest families.
It’s an honest peek at history-no hooped skirts, no fudged facts. You come away from a tour of the handsome but simple main house with an impression of hard times and steaming summers.
“Romantic lifestyles?” asks the brochure. “Not hardly.”
From Kingsley Plantation it’s a mile to the ferry landing on the St. Johns River and then a five-minute crossing on the hardy little Blackbeard to the mainland and the tiny shrimping town of Mayport. You can buy a bag of boiled peanuts on shore, and munch your way across.
A1A leads south through Atlantic Beach, Neptune Beach, Jacksonville Beach, little settlements that are suburbs in name only. If it’s anywhere near mealtime in Atlantic Beach, check out the Ragtime Tavern and Seafood Grill. This feverish bistro is always a 20-minute wait at night, even with reservations, but there’s a funky bookstore next door. The food blends New Orleans and Old Florida-blackened pompano, red beans and rice, Cajun shrimp and hushpuppies with every dish.
Posh Ponte Vedra
The coastal road bisects Ponte Vedra, a sandy and stylish enclave that is home to several substantial resorts, Ponte Vedra Inn & Club and Sawgrass, both heavy with golf and tennis. From here it’s 20 miles down a lovely oceanside two-laner to St. Augustine. On the left are soaring dunes that slide down to uncluttered beach; on the right, a primitive tract of marsh and forest. Halfway between Ponte Vedra and St. Augustine is Guana River State Park, perfect for a picnic stop or long beach walk.
The unspoiled coast stops abruptly at the town of Vilano and suddenly you’re crossing a bridge into St. Augustine. I suppose it’s too much to expect a city that calls itself the oldest European settlement in the U.S. to be free of billboards and a Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum. Still, the historic section of town has the look and feel of American antiquity.
Walk the breezy ramparts of the 300-year-old fortress, Castillo de San Marcos. Prowl the narrow, pedestrians-only St. George Street, with its shops and museums and cafes. At No. 29 St. George, behind a high wall, the Spanish Quarter museum is a cluster of gardens and outbuildings, shops and demonstrations depicting the early Spanish presence in Florida.
Two of St. Augustine’s most impressive buildings, both bankrolled by Flagler, were built as lavish resort hotels at the end of the last century. The grandiose Ponce de Leon is now home to Flagler College and is open for informal touring. Across the street, the onetime Hotel Alcazar houses city offices, the police force and, behind a courtyard, the Lightner Museum, with its curious trove of Victoriana. The crystal, dolls, shells, early medical equipment and music making machines were collected by the late Chicago publisher, Otto C. Lightner.
Crossing the line
If you can budget the time once you’ve seen Amelia and Fernandina, Ponte Vedra and St. Augustine, I heartily endorse two side trips just across the Georgia line: Okefenokee Swamp and Cumberland Island. The east entrance to Pogo’s swampy home is only a 45-minute drive from Fernandina/Amelia.
You can tour a visitors center with displays of swampland creatures and visit a restored Georgia homestead, but the main event is a guided trip aboard a canopied boat into the 200,000-acre wildlife refuge. Alligators are less active and accessible in the winter, but otters and migrating birds are likely to make appearances in the cypress-lined channels and watery, lily-filled prairies.
Cumberland Island, most of it protected as a National Seashore, is what Amelia would be without commercial development. You make the 45-minute ride to Cumberland by a National Park Service ferry from St. Marys, Ga. A single sandy road runs down the interior of the island, 12 miles of dune-backed beach piled with prized shells, wild ponies huddling in the dunes, a restored mansion (and the eerie ruins of another) and the nine-room, white-columned Greyfield Inn, which harks back to the days when the Carnegies and other tycoons wintered on Cumberland.
I don’t know where today’s tycoons like to winter, but it’s not south Georgia or northeast Florida. For that matter, even the budget-conscious snowbirds treat the First Coast as flyover land. And now you know what they’re missing.
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For information on Fernandina Beach and surroundings, the Chamber of Commerce can supply all the necessary maps and literature from its office, the old brick railway depot and adjoining caboose across from the Fernandina harbor: 102 Centre St., Fernandina Beach, Fla. 32034; 904-261-3248.
