Savannah

Tuesday, July 12 - The campground was quite smoky this morning, from a fire down in the Okeenokee Swamp, but when we got into the city, it seemed to have cleared up.  We made our way to the Visitor's Center building although we never did actually go upstairs to the Center.  It is housed in a railroad museum, and all the tours were set up outside.  We selected the open air tram through the historic district, and off we went.

Savannah was originally designed with "squares" for each section which now are parks with lots of statutes of the city's historic past.  Our first square was Forsyth Park, famous for the Forest Gump movie, where he sat on the bench waiting for the bus with his box of chocolates.  This is one of the larger parks, 27 acres.  Lots of movies have been filed in Savannah, including Julia Roberts' "Something to Talk About."

There were ultimately 24 "squares" here, but 2 were lost to urban development.  Most of the huge buildings surrounding the squares have been restored, and some are now museums, bed and breakfasts, etc.  Horse-drawn carriages are part of the tours here too, and we past a few of these.  I even made friends with a couple of these guys when we stopped.

All the parks were beautiful, with huge live oak trees, statutes.  The name "live oak" means that the trees are always green.  When a leaf falls, another one opens, hence the name. All the streets surrounding the squares end at the square, creating round-abouts -- possibly the first ones.

Savannah also calls itself "America's most haunted city," and there were ghost tours offered.  There is a very old cemetery here, dating back before the Civil War.  Legend has it that the soldiers created a lot of havoc on these graves, and many of the tombstones are not in the right spot.  There's even a wall of tombstones they didn't know where to put back so they mounted them on the back wall.

Savannah is very proud of their trees and even has a city department in charge of them.  When one is removed, two more are planted.  There's a bell in one of the squares, "Big Duke" that was the fire alert.  Each square had a number, so if there was a fire in square 4, they would ring the bell 4 times and everyone was supposed to head over to Square 4 to fight the fire.  It now only rings on 9/11.

The street leading down to the river was made of cobblestone, and is pretty bumpy but pretty.

Along the river is a nice statute called the "Waving Girl," with a story about a girl who welcomed passing ships -- for 44 years!  This is the Savannah River that separates Georgia and South Carolina.  There was a huge ship crossways on the river while we were there.

The state capital could be seen from here, which has a top of 23 karat gold, so it shines brightly in the sunshine.

Savannah is also famous for the birthplace of the woman who started the Girl Scouts (Juliette Gordon Low, which we passed on the tour) and Paula Deen, cook, Emmy award winner, and author, who lives here.  We finished our tour about 11:30, and it wasn't too hot yet.  We decided to tour the train museum, so we watched a video there, then had lunch in a train car.  Then we got to go on a short (very short) train ride.

This was a maintenance yard and had an operating turntable to turn the trains around so they could park the engines in the roundhouse.  So they backed up the coal-fire engine and our traincar a little ways, then pulled it back up and pivoted to another track, then backed us up again.  The historical group here is very active in preserving the train history, and future plans include the restoration of these train bridges that go over the highway here.

We finished our tour and headed back to the car so we could drive past some of the squares on our own.  They have huge, beautiful churches here, this particular one was being fumigated so we didn't get to go inside but it was very pretty.

Then we decided to drive out to the beach at Tybee Island.  By now, it's drippy hot, and we passed a thermometer that read 100 degrees.  The beach here was really crowded, and I waded out but the water was bathtub warm, probably mid-80s, so we didn't go put our swimsuits on.

When we got back on the highway, we were on Butler Avenue (Joe's mother's maiden name is Butler), so that was worth a picture.

We drove around until we found the lighthouse, but it was closed, which was just as well since it has 178 steps inside.  It was originally built in 1732.

AND THEN, we decided to check out Ft. Pulaski, a National Historic Monument.  This was a good tour, with a video that gave you some good background on the battle fought (and lost) here in 1862.  The Union Army successfully tested a rifled cannon during that battle.

This was a beautifully preserved historic site.  But is was miserably hot by now.  We did see a container ship pass by on the river, reminding us of the importance of these river locations during our history.

A ranger was doing a muzzle demonstration (5:00 p.m.) fully decked out in military garb of the day.  They kept shooing us off the wall along one side -- Joe wondered what kind of shot she was since we couldn't seem to get far enough away.

Finally, we headed back to camp, very hot and sweaty.  But it was a good day, and we felt like we saw a lot of this beautiful city.  And just outside of the campground, we saw a DEER, the first we've seen in forever.