Plains to Savannah, Georgia

We left Little Ocumglee State Park and the searingly obvious hostility between the park rangers in their pick ups and the management company staff in their golf carts (I know who I’d bet on in the long run) and headed north to Dublin just so I could say I was there. 

Then we skipped onto to I16 and we were in Savannah in two hours. We’re staying in a State Park on Skidaway Island. This time the Spanish moss is draping down from enormous live oak trees (they don’t lose all their leaves in winter) and the undergrowth seems to be comprised mostly of exotic palm trees that have escaped a botanical gardens somewhere. The azaleas have disappeared. Other than that the landscape is very like our own beloved Eastern Shore. Mud flats and grass tussocks and little ridges of pine and lots of water.

We headed into the city and took the trolley tour around the various squares and districts to acquaint ourselves for tomorrow’s all day walkathon. Nette was our driver and tour guide. She drove a large unwieldy trolley round the narrow streets and squares of the city like it was a mini all the while reciting the tour in a flat monotone drawl, born of 7,000 recitations.

The city was founded in 1750 by a grant from George II, who wanted some settlers in place to protect the existing port of Charleston from the Spanish further down the coast. The city was planned in England to be a series of twenty squares laid out in a grid.

Many of you will know the city from ‘Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil’. Nette showed us the room in the house on where the murder/ not murder took place.  You might also know Chippewa Square as the site where Forrest Gump pronounced that life’s like a box of chocolates.

If neither of those cultural references grab you, Savannah is the city that gave us Paula Deen, and you can do a Paula Deen trolley tour with buffet dinner at Lady and Sons restaurant. Nette pointed out the restaurant.

She also showed us the two guns captured from Cornwallis’ army by George Washington, which were presented to the city after the Revolutionary War.

Different Cornwallis I know, but we could for sure borrow one and blow up that goddamned statue down by the train station in Halifax and be done with it.