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.

Leaving Florida

Monday, July 11 - We had a busy day today and fortunately got off to an early start.  We were on the road by 9:00, continuing our scenic drive along the beach on A1A.  We went through the historic town of St. Augustine.  We drove past the remains of an old fort but didn't stop.

We drove on through Jacksonville and opted to take the St. John's Ferry to stay with A1A.

  Parked along the bank here was a good-sized boat that I was told is the one that discovered the Titanic.  This one is named Atlantis II, and I have not verified that story.

This route took us along marshland, rivers and bays.

We even saw a turtle on the highway along here -- it was in the outside of the white line so we declared it non-suicidal.  Along one beach where they had a turtle nesting site roped off, three women were fiercely digging right in the site.  They didn't look official but they were hard at it, so we assumed they knew what they were doing and that it was legal.  This was a pretty drive, with trees making a canopy over the road, and little traffic.

We got to Fernandina about lunch time and Joe found a parking spot right at the city park on the beach (with an ice cream snack bar), so we enjoyed our lunch with a great view, then walked down to the beach, where we spotted a pod of about 6 dolphins.

I, of course, had to sample the ice cream.  Then we were on our way.  We crossed into the State of Georgia about 1:30.

We stopped at the Visitor's Center and picked up some information on Georgia State Campgrounds, Savannah and Augusta, then continued on our way.  We drove up Highway 17, marked as a scenic highway, and it continued through swamp and marshlands, with big live oak trees lining the road.  We crossed one really big bridge just south of Savannah, with a great view.

We chose Skidaway Island State Park to spend the next two nights, which was about 12 miles off the highway.  It is a barrier island billed as having Spanish-moss draped live oak trees, and I would have to say it lives up to its billing.  It's a beautiful park, with very large campsites, and in addition to water and electricity, it even has cable TV -- a first for a state park we have stayed in.  We got here about 5:00 p.m., so that was a long day for us, and Joe drove 245 miles. 

We are planning on "doing" Savannah tomorrow, but the heat index here is predicted to be 111, and the tour we think we want is an open trolley, so we are not sure about all that.  We plan to go directly to the visitor center in Savannah and check out all the options before we commit to that hot ride.  We've sadly left the beaches now, although Tybee Island is only 20 minutes from Savannah, and it is on the ocean.  We may have to seek that out if we do the trolley tomorrow.

Daytona Beach

Sunday, July 10 - I forgot to include in yesterday's blog that we finished our marathon day on Friday,after the shuttle launch and our naps, by going to the movies.  We saw Larry Crowne (Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts) and we liked it.

Today we debated about staying here at this state park another day or moving on, and didn't seem to be motivated either way, so we stayed here.  We drove back down to Daytona Beach this morning and did the shops and the boardwalk and the beach.

 This wasn't quite how we remembered it from 1974 -- apparently a lot has changed since then.  But you can drive on the beach here, so of course Joe had to do that.  We drove a 6-mile stretch right at the boardwalk, and another small section later.  They have sections of the beach marked off for traffic and no traffic, so you can just drive between the sections.  Joe did mentioned that by driving the beach we weren't getting much exercise, but we were seeing more beach.

It looked like a storm was brewing so we didn't get in the water here.  And sure enough, we heard the beach patrol gal blowing her whistle and clearing the beach, and then the patrol jeep came through.

Because there was lightning, they made everyone get beyond the traffic lane.  So here's the empty beach and the clouds.  It did rain for a while, but not very hard.

As we drove along the beach, we saw a couple of pretty good sand sculptures -- a turtle and a mermaid.

We stopped for lunch and then the grocery store, and then headed back to camp.  We actually did some housekeeping, I vacuumed and Joe shook out rugs and checked the batteries.  Finally, we decided we should go walk the beach since it was only 80 degrees outside, so we put our swimsuits on just in case we braved the water.  The tide report said the water temperature here  at Flagler Beach is in the mid 70s.  We finally decided to get wet, although Joe whined the whole time he waded out, then a wave took him down so he got completely wet.  It was a little brisk out there. 

We are heading out of Florida tomorrow.  We've been in this state for 6 weeks and we have really seen a lot of it, done a lot of things, and had a great visit with John and Bridgette.  And we got to see our nephew Mike and his family, so we'll leave Florida with very fond memories of our time here.