Island paradise takes on a new dimension somewhere between Savannah and Hilton Head, S.C.

Delete any photos in your head of tropical scenes luring you to a place quite unlike your normal world; replace them with images of this little southern sea island.

Daufuskie Island is worlds apart, but feels real and that’s a bonus when you travel.

No high-rise hotels on this beach; I stayed in a gentle yellow two-story Inn at Daufuskie Island Resort and Breathe Spa with croquet and bowling on the back lawn extending to the ocean, and visited cottages in soft pastels on streets lined with live oaks, and no vehicle larger than a golf cart or bicycle in front.

Lawns on my way to sand and surf are lovely, and not the norm.

A few hundred genuinely kind people live here and to get anywhere else they need the same 45-minute ferry ride you do. Cars stay behind.

Could be a key to good manners and civil conversation – they count on one another and the travelers who come to visit.

That ferry ride is just long enough to set aside last week’s worries and switch gears to a new adventure, counting Atlantic bottlenose dolphin along the way.

Some places I pretend I see dolphin when others claim a fin in the dark waters; in the intercoastal waterway en route to Daufuskie Island, I saw a dozen clearly.

Such abundance continued all weekend in many forms – fine food, loads of scenery, lawn games to play, horses and bikes to ride, hammocks to swing, peace and tranquility, plus accommodations both luxurious and cozy, and still more, including three miles of pristine beach.

Parking to catch the ferry is easy at the Hilton Head dock; airport transportation and not parking works well in Savannah.

Either way, pleasant anticipation builds among the passengers, crew and Island residents on the ferry.

I met two people heading for a wedding at the Daufuskie island Resort, and felt like a friend of the family the next day when I watched the bride arrive at the beachfront ceremony in a horse-drawn carriage.

No matter which of the 48 rooms you book in the Melrose Inn, you have a broad view of the beach. Front doors open to wrap-around porches with rocking chairs. The lobby opens to a sidewalk to the sea, but the dining room is on the second floor with panorama views of the ocean and if you’re an early bird, the sunrise.

Friendly place this is. Tourists are fine but I like to meet local people when I travel. Four hundred or so live on Daufuskie; maybe a dozen are descendents of the early Gullah people, descendents of slaves. Ernestine Smith is one and she’ll share some third- generation-on Daufuskie stories if you get a sandwich or sundries at the shop she manages at the Resort, right in the midst of the cottages on golf cart paths draped in a canopy of trees.