MS. GROESBECK: We will get to the speaker.
You have a little half-sheet there. I want to just do a
little orientation to the island. It's a shoe, and that little
river, the Broad Creek, is the shoelace. So whenever you
talk to somebody, they might say, "Are you near the heel?"
And it is actually clearly a shoe, right? Got that? So
we're all at the heel. You see the little number 1?
A couple of things that you wouldn't want to miss this week,
these next few days. Number 2 is the lighthouse. The
lighthouse is around a basin. It's the 18th hole of the Heritage
Golf Classic, which happens every year the week after the Augusta
Open, a beautiful event that happens here.
Number 3 is way, way around the toe. It looks just like
a little Nantucket village, a little seaside village. So if
you get the chance, these are various neighborhoods in the
different colors. The one in pink is called Sea Pines, and
Sea Pines was the first of those kind of planned communities. It
has lagoons that lower if we're going to have a storm. There
are no overhead electric wires. You can travel anywhere on
the island by bike. There are stop signs for the
bikes. It's all engineered. It's a whole island community
engineered for health and well-being. So if you can get from
the heel, number 1, down to number 2 and that lighthouse, you'll
really enjoy that. It is not an ancient seafaring
lighthouse. It was placed here in the late 1960s and they
actually chose which colors were most attractive to
tourists. So think of it as sort of Disneyland for
real. But it is truly lovely, and if you want to see a
community -- you're not in a community right now. You enter
into Sea Pines or any of the others through gates, but I would
recommend that you go to number 2 and number 3, to the harbor town
and then to the toe, to South Beach.
Then if you walk up a little you see a little number 4 and
that's the lie of Hilton Head Preparatory School. It's
surrounded by acres and acres of a forest preserve on the one
side, and the Atlantic Ocean on the other.
There are nine miles of totally gorgeous beaches along the
sole of the island. The sole has sunrise, and the instep, on
the other side, gets the sunset. That's your
orientation.
The Gullah folks live in the interior of the island because
they were given one-third of the island to continue to own, and
then decided no one would live at the beach. Oh, well.
Bad choice, I guess.
Now I'd like you to look quickly at this schedule. I
just want to do an overview with you of where you're going to
head. Of course, tonight's dinner, after our keynote.
We're going to have a signal that cocktails are over and that will
drive you into dinner. It is the Hilton Head Preparatory
School drum line and you will not want to miss that. They will
usher you in to dinner.
At dinner, we have a lecture by Nicole Seitz. Nicole is
a graduate of Hilton Head Preparatory School, has a wonderful
book, The Spirit of Sweet Grass. You'll enjoy that.
The terrific conference lectures are in the morning.
Tomorrow afternoon there is a beach walk by a member of the Prep
biology department. Sarah Benedict will give the guided beach
walk. You can also sign up either for the Hilton Island bus
tour or the bike tour. I know that the bike tour has a lot
of you athletic people.
In the evening, at dinner, the Hallelujah Singers and Marlena
Smalls are going to be singing to you. This will be a
show-stopper.
Then Tuesday morning, really a phenomenal schedule of
speakers. I commend the committee on that. In the
afternoon, again Sarah Benedict will lead this guided beach walk,
or you may do the dolphin watch, which a lot of you have signed up
for. Many of you have also signed up for the antique and
consignment stores. They're going to take a tour of the
shops on the island. So there will be stops along the
way.
Dining out goes two different ways on Tuesday night, and two
distinctly different feelings. At the Harbour Town Yacht
Club, it's membership only. You'll be on the fourth floor,
and you'll be looking right at the lighthouse. It's more of
a roast-beef elegant dinner and you should dress accordingly.
The other group is going to hop on a bus and go out to
Bluffton. Now, where is Bluffton? It's in that little tiny
corner. You just go off the island to the town of
Bluffton. This is the Bluffton Oyster Factory. It is
on the national registry. We'll take you to Eccentricities
and to the Episcopal Church, which is a beautiful church in
Bluffton, and drop you off there. Three of the shops will
have wine and cheese, and they will stay open and you just walk
Calhoun Street, and then you'll go to the Bluffton Oyster Factory
for more of a jeans-and-sweatshirts affair, and I think the
Headmistresses of the Northeast Kingdom girls should just whip out
their sweatshirts and hats. It will be fine. It's a
much more casual event. But you will get wine and cheese at
the shops, and then the dinner.
The other thing that I noted is that this is a large group
that usually likes a lot of spa treatments. The spa here is
beautiful, exquisite. You might find that it gets full. The
spa shares the same parking lot with the Barony next door, which
has an equally beautiful spa, so don't be frustrated. It's
directly next door. So don't be saddened if you can't get
into this one. It's just ten feet away, and they'll be happy
to see you there.
I live here. Welcome. I'll, of course, hang
around. If there's anything you need to know, if you need a
doctor, if you need to find something, by all mean, I'm here to
help. Thank you.