PHOTO: LAUREN BELL / GETTY IMAGES
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Valley views in Valle Crucis, North Carolina.
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“The first time I saw Valle Crucis, in 2015, I was speechless, which had nothing to do with not knowing how to pronounce the name,” writes G&G contributor Mark Powell. “My wife and I were riding with a friend down the twisting ribbon of Highway 194 out of Banner Elk, North Carolina, when a sweep of green opened below us.’” But it’s more than just the views that make the tiny mountain town special. Every Friday from May until September, locals and visitors alike gather in the park with their families, picnic baskets, and dogs for an evening of music and fellowship. The free concerts became a beloved tradition for Powell’s family, but they’re an invitation for anyone to celebrate the serenity of summer and become a part of the close-knit community, if just for a night.
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Jekyll Island, Georgia. For quiet springtime escapes, my family and I love Jekyll Island. This Golden Isle maintains a strictly regulated balance between wildlife conservation, historic preservation, and modern amenities. And during the slower off-season, the former exclusive resort for Gilded Age titans of industry can feel like your own private island.
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Catch the driftwood: The island features ten miles of clean shoreline, bolstered by a wall of carefully preserved dunes. For a stroll through a beautifully cluttered stretch of sand, Driftwood Beach is the place to leave your meandering footprints. This popular site for weddings, photo ops, and even movies is chaotically strewn with the twisted trunks and limbs of ancient oak trees, worn smooth as glass by the tides of time.
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Wildlife in and out of the wild: Jekyll is a complex blend of ecosystems, from salt marsh to maritime forest, and it’s home to a menagerie of rare and endangered flora and fauna. At the Georgia Sea Turtle Center, you can get right up to the shells of injured loggerhead, green, and leatherback turtles as they are being rehabilitated for their return to the ocean. Or head up to Clam Creek pier, where saltwater spills into the brackish marsh, bringing redfish, crabs, and shrimp, along with the anglers and winged royal terns that hunt them from above.
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A sense of history: While the island is one large terrarium of natural history, it also contains a time capsule from a fascinating period of America’s past. Jekyll was once one of the most exclusive hunting clubs in the world, with Rockefellers, Morgans, Pulitzers, and Vanderbilts all calling it their seasonal home. Today, you can stay in the spired Jekyll Island Club Resort, built in 1888, and pursue the quaint shops and galleries that now occupy the surrounding village of outbuildings and cottages, all part of a National Historic Landmark.
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