A small island vs. the big football game

Although we had rented a house here for a while, my husband and I had never experienced the notorious "Georgia - Florida Weekend" here on the island. Every year the football teams of the University of Georgia and the University of Florida meet at a huge stadium in Jacksonville, which for some reason is considered neutral territory. The tailgating surrounding the game is known as "The Largest Cocktail Party in the Country" and the partying traditionally starts here on Saint Simons Island the day before the game. Students at UGA don't have school that day, and for the last few years over 10,000 of them have spent the day on our beach in a bacchanalia, which is a euphemism for some truly awful and dangerous behavior, apparently. The students board charted buses to ride to the game the next day, and ride back afterwards to continue their celebration of a hoped-for win. This year, however, there was a crackdown on misbehavior... and it was well-publicized both here and at UGA weeks ahead of the event. We had heard that forty of the chartered buses had been cancelled, and that there were still hotel rooms and rental houses available days before the event. Unheard of! When the day arrived, we found a beach and the nearby areas swarming with police, who were monitoring less than half the usual number of partygoers. Local restaurants suffered because the locals were scared away by the warnings of roadblocks at every main intersection, which had also scared away UGA alumni who also traditionally stay here for the game. The good news: there was no trash on the beach (last year there were tons of trash) and no one got hurt. From a personal point of view, this weekend was historically the busiest of the year for our little bar and restaurant; we had been counting on the revenue to offset some of our remodeling costs; and we were greatly disappointed. And the University of Georgia was walloped, which didn't help our morale, either.