It was a sense of adventure that brought Brenda and Jennifer Ewanus from their home in Huntington, W. Va., to a tucked away corner of Jekyll Island on Wednesday.
The mother-daughter duo had always wanted to ride horses on the beach — “one of those bucket list things,” daughter Jennifer, 18, said.
“I’ve always wanted to ride a horse on the beach, as weird as it sounds,” mother Brenda remarked. “I don’t know why. Anytime we’ve ever been to the beach, it’s one of those things you want to do. It’s pretty to me. It’s a different experience.”
Nearby, Beverly Neal, a trail guide with Golden Isles Carriage and Trail, saddled up a group of horses while the Ewanuses watched a brief safety video. After signing the requisite waivers, the two hopped atop their horses, Belle and Hope, and trotted off with Neal riding Red in the lead.
Through lush greenery, the horses strutted slowly as the mother and daughter chatted with their guide. Neal, a 20-year-old radiology student at College of Coastal Georgia who works part time as a trail guide, joked about the time she was leading a group and a man was fishing from a bridge they were approaching.
“He had this big bucket, and it was almost in the center of the bridge,” she said. “I asked him if he could move the bucket, because I didn’t want Stetson (the horse) to think it was a feed bucket.”
As Neal tells the story, the man declined to heed the warning.
“And, of course, Stetson walked right up to it and put his nose down to it, but he didn’t like the smell, and he knocked that bucket right over with all that man’s fish in it. He lost them all. I felt like telling him, ‘I told you so,’” she said to the laughter of the Ewanuses.
Eventually, the dense island foliage parted, revealing a shimmering sunset cast back against the trees by the sea’s reflection. The riders guided their horses close to the shore, reveling in the scent of the ocean and the golden beams of sunlight at dusk. They stopped briefly among the driftwood where Neal hitched her horse to one of the pieces of mangled wood. Taking a cellphone from Jennifer, Neal snapped a few photos of the Ewanuses together, smiling and sunburnt from a day at the beach.
The scene is common on Jekyll Island, said Tommie Crum, who operates Golden Isles Carriage and Trail.
“We take about 5,000 riders out on Driftwood Beach a year, so that’s really cool,” she said at her headquarter stables, Three Oaks Farm, on Thursday. “A lot of these people, I would say about 85 percent, do not live in this immediate area. That leaves another 15 percent of locals that come and do it, but it’s kind of a destination thing.”
Crum said the majority of locals visit the horse trails when they have guests in town.
“It’s kind of a favorite thing to do when people have out-of-town guests,” she said.
Crum has been riding horses her whole life, and now operates Golden Isles Carriage and Trail on Jekyll Island. She also manages the day-to-day of Three Oaks Farm in Glynn County, just outside Brunswick.
“For me, I really love how slow it is here,” she said while sitting in a swing on a front porch at Three Oaks Farm. “It’s weird because it’s fast-paced on Jekyll, and there’s so much to do on the farm, but when you sit out here in the evening time and you look around, and you’re like, ‘wow, there are people who are stuck in offices for seven hours a day.’ It’s rare that I have to be stuck indoors.”
There is, indeed, a lot to do on the farm. In addition to being a single mom caring for her three children, Crum tends to 50 horses, runs a petting zoo at Three Oaks Farm, operates carriage rides on Jekyll Island and still manages to find time to home school her youngsters.
She does have the help on the 60-acre farm, though. Her mother and father live there, and her father handles the maintenance and repair that comes with running a large-scale facility. Her business is much more than the trail rides on Jekyll, she said. The farm also employs more than a dozen people. The farm has stables, a swimming pool and a variety of other facilities, but Crum seems to have a favorite.
“Here at the farm, we have the petting zoo,” she said. “The petting zoo is cool because we have about 13 different kinds of animals, and each enclosure has an educational sign that tells you about the animal. We get a lot of school field trips and stuff like that.”
Having an educational component on the farm is important to Crum, who holds a degree in teaching high school history and English. Three Oaks Farm is a member of the Georgia Agritourism Association, which aims to teach people of all ages about the importance of farming and ranching.
“A lot of kids growing up today, they don’t even know where their food comes from,” she said.
Crum, a Brunswick native who grew up riding horses with her aunt, said the farm is now in its second generation of the family, and she hopes one day to pass it on to her children.
She said she used to ride on the Three Oaks Farm property when she was a little girl, and laughed retelling the story of how her family came to own it.
“I was about 13 years old, and someone told me it was for sale,” she said. “I told my dad, and he said there was no way we could afford it.”
She talked her father into at least looking at the property and going to speak to the man who was selling it.
“I asked him if we could go, and I could use it as a learning opportunity to listen in on negotiations and talking about real estate,” Crum said. “He finally let me go and we went. We sat down and they told us the price, and my dad thanked him for his time.”
Crum’s father politely told the man the farm was “out of our price range,” Crum said
“I asked the guy if he was open to offers — I was, like, 13 at the time,” she said with a laugh. “My dad just gave me ‘that’ look. The guy said he was open to offers, so I threw out a price that was about $20,000 less than we offered on another (smaller) property, and the guy said he’d get back to us.”
About a day later, the man called and said he’d take the offer.
“My dad was like, ‘you just bought a farm,’” she said, smiling. “I’ll never forget it.”
Crum’s family bought the farm in 1994, and has owned it since. While she was in college, it was briefly leased, she said, but after school she came back to the farm.
Back on Jekyll Island, the Ewanuses wrapped up their trail ride as they dismounted their horses and wiped the sweat from their brows.
“It was a nice, slow ride, looking at all the scenery. It was relaxing and my horse was just my speed — slow,” she said chuckling. “It’s just beautiful down here — and Beverly was very informative and friendly, and you can tell she really likes her job. She loves being around the horses.”
For more information on Jekyll Island horseback riding, or Three Oaks Farm, visit www.threeoaksfarm.org or call 912-635-9500.
