From April 21 to April 24, 2025, the Newport senior class visited Tybee Island, Georgia, for the class trip. Despite the planning and initial interest, only seventeen seniors attended.
The trip down was long and arduous for the students. Leaving at 5:00 AM, we were all crammed together in two vans, shoulder to shoulder with little room for bags. Multiple rest stops were made to partition the twelve hours spent in the van into reasonable segments, including a lunch break at South of the Border in South Carolina. South of the Border is a small Mexican-themed place with restaurants, an arcade, and a few trinket stores. After that, the van ride continued until we reached our hotel in Tybee Island. Everyone was glad to finally step out of the van, and we soon headed to the beach for a little while during and after sunset.
After waking up, most of us went back to the beach to watch the sunrise. It’s unique to watch the sun rise out of the sea. The next thing on the agenda was a boat tour of the archipelago of uninhabited islands adjacent to Tybee Island. The smaller boat my group was on was the smaller one, which I relished because it gave each person more room. The other boat was larger and had the majority of people. We spent some time looking for dolphins and picking up a crab trap from underwater, before landing on one of the islands’ beaches.
On the beach, there were numerous instances on the sand of what I thought were simply very round rocks, but as I stepped on one, it squished underneath my foot. The beach was covered in clay. Unbeknownst to us, we were about to embark on a walk on the beach. We trekked through wet clay, sand, and mud, and tried not to fall over as we were guided to the other side of the island. Absolutely everyone walked out of the clay with the dirtiest shoes imaginable. According to our guide, these muddy globs actually consist of oil leftover from several disastrous spills.
After that, we had a sand art competition. My group made a fish, and outlined it with pieces of clay from the beach. We left that island and got back on our boats, spending the rest of the time spotting dolphins and boating around until midday. At this point, we had spent more time there than we had meant to, so we had to rush lunch in order to make it to our scheduled surfing lessons on time.
Surfing is genuinely pretty difficult, but fun. To do it right, you have to position yourself correctly on the board, point with your feet toward an incoming wave, start paddling with your hands a little before the wave hits, and once it does, you need to get up onto your knees before standing.
Everyone was tired after a long day in the sun, so we returned to the hotel before having dinner at the Treylor Park restaurant. We enjoyed our food outdoors, but some of the selected dishes were a bit fancy for us.
The next day, we embarked on a kayaking tour of another island area. Unfortunately, I had come down with a fever that morning, so I missed kayaking. Ryan Bange said, “It was fun to get to explore the islands and be on the water for a while.” Fortunately for me, I was feeling better by noon, so when we all left for the shopping and restaurant district of Tybee Island, I was able to go along. We explored some stores and different groups ate at a few different restaurants. That night, we had dinner at the restaurant Wet Willie’s, in Savannah, which is a city about half an hour away from Tybee Island. Later that night, we visited a candy store called the Sugar Shack.
The following morning, everyone was ready to go home. We all got back into the vans and returned to Newport, with few notable incidents, but we could not rest, for the very next day was the Top Golf trip.
