Last month, my husband Jeff and I traveled to Jekyll Island, Georgia, to attend a five-day Road Scholar course. The name of the course was “Ragtime, Tin Pan Alley, Jazz & the Blues: A Millionaire’s Retreat on Jekyll.”
Here’s the official description:
“Spend a week with two of the country’s leading authorities and performers in the field of Ragtime, Dixieland, and turn-of-the century popular music. Learn about great musicians like Scott Joplin, W. C. Handy, Irving Berlin, Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, and others, and immerse yourself in the music with live piano, flute, and vocal performances of the tunes for which these artists are best remembered. Also explore Jekyll Island—one of Georgia’s southernmost barrier islands—home to the famous Jekyll Island Club, the exclusive and lavish resort where families like the Morgans, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts once wintered.”
The leading authorities mentioned above were none other than Jeff and Anne Barnhart. I had received an e-mail from them back in the summer about this course, and we decided that it would be a nice vacation. I had assumed that Covid restrictions might be lifted by then. I made a down-payment in July, but didn’t really commit until December. We had never done a Road Scholar trip before.
Travel to Jekyll Island was complicated and involved a four-hour drive to the airport, a two-legged flight, a
