Tybee Cat

The rental

1103 2nd Avenue

A 6-bedroom, 4-bath house from 1930, one street behind Butler Avenue in the 1100 block. It goes by Coast A While on the booking sites.

Bringing a dog? Read this before you book

The house is pet friendly. Tybee's beach is not. Dogs are prohibited on the sand island-wide — no leashed exception, no early-morning exception, no off-season exception, and a minimum $200 fine. There is a dog park by the campground and the neighborhood streets are fine to walk, but if your plan was a dog on the beach, that plan does not exist here. The full rule →

1103 2nd Avenue: a raised white beach cottage with a screened porch and a wide concrete driveway
Screened porch with a hanging swing bed and green rocking chairs
The screened porch. This is where the week actually happens.
Back deck with a brick fire pit ringed by turquoise Adirondack chairs
Fire pit and a fenced back deck.
Living room with shiplap walls, a white brick fireplace, heart pine floors and wicker chairs
Shiplap, heart pine, and a fireplace nobody needs in July.
Ground-floor game room with a full-size ping-pong table
Game room downstairs, for the third rainy afternoon.
Second screened porch with wicker seating and aqua shutters
There is more than one porch. This matters with fourteen people.
Second sitting room with wicker armchairs and a doorway through to a bedroom
A second sitting room, so two groups can be apart.

Photos from the Tybee Vacation Rentals listing.

Booking

Coast A While.

That is what the house is called on the booking sites, so that is the name to search if you go looking for it. Tybee Vacation Rentals manages it — calendar, rates, keys and anything that goes wrong at eleven at night.

It also turns up on the big travel sites, which generally add a service fee of their own on top. Booking through the manager is the shorter path.

5.00/5 across 9 guest reviews — on the listing

Southern Belle Vacation Rentals

Former manager. Their old listing for this house is out of date.

Tybee Vacation Rentals

Manages the house. Island office on Highway 80, and the biggest inventory on Tybee.

The honest version

What the 1100 block is actually like

2nd Avenue runs one street back from Butler, which is the trade every Tybee renter makes without knowing it. A block closer and you are on the main road: quicker to the sand, and louder at eleven at night in July. A block further and you are walking further with a cooler. This is the middle.

The beach crossover at 11th Street is about a fifth of a mile east — four or five minutes carrying a cooler. The pier and the Marine Science Center are both roughly two-thirds of a mile south, a quarter of an hour on foot. Back River Beach, on the other side of the island, is a little over a mile. The lighthouse and North Beach are 1.6 miles north: a forty-minute walk, a short bike ride, or five minutes in a car you then have to park.

BUTLER AVE 2ND AVE 11th St 16th St ATLANTIC OCEAN BACK RIVER Lighthouse & North Beach 1.6 mi · 40 min walk Coast A While 1103 2nd Ave Beach crossover 0.2 mi · 4 min walk Marine Science Center 0.6 mi · 13 min walk Pier & Pavilion 0.7 mi · 14 min walk Back River Beach 1.1 mi · 23 min walk ¼ mile
Where the house sits. Positions are projected from OpenStreetMap coordinates, so the distances and the scale bar are accurate; the coastline is drawn schematically. Times assume walking pace with something in your hands.

It is a 1930s island house. That means real character and real quirks — old houses on barrier islands are not new houses. If you want a place that is quiet, walkable to the sand and big enough for two or three families to be in the same building without being in the same room, this is a good one.

The driveway is worth more than it sounds

There are four off-street spaces. On an island where every public space costs $4 an hour from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., every day of the year, that is about $48 a day per car you never pay — on the order of $330 a car across a week, and the house parks four.

The arithmetic is rough, because nobody leaves a car metered for twelve hours straight. The point is the shape of it: a rental without a driveway quietly adds a few hundred dollars to a week here, and that number never appears in the nightly rate you compared. It is the first thing we would check about any house on Tybee, including ours.

While you are here

The rest of the island.