Ohida: Vacation: Savannah

During our vacation we took a little mini-vacation and snuck off to Savannah, Georgia's oldest, "most historical" town.

It was a long drive, a little longer than from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, and there isn't much to see, since tall trees flank both sides of the highway. (Mom warned me of this before we left, and I said, "How could you get bored of trees?" When you're passing a 250-mile unbroken line of trees at 70 mph, it's not hard.)

The Whistle Stop Cafe, famous for their Fried Green Tomatoes and their appearance in the movie of the same name, was along the way, so we stopped off for lunch. Fried Green Tomatoes aren't as good as Fried Yellow Onions, but I liked the cafe.

Georgia loves her counties. According to Google, Georgia has 159 of the 3000+ counties in the US (do the math, an Georgia is hogging more than double her fair share!) There are so many counties that the state constitution was amended to prohibit additional counties from being formed. The upshot of all of this is that everyone gets their own county!

Our downstairs air conditioner gave out just before Todd and Cindy arrived, and I told everyone that it would be cooler in Savannah because it was nearer the water. I couldn't have been more wrong! The temperature hovered around 95 and HUMID the whole time we were there. I was practically a fountain whenever we were outdoors.

Old Savannah is famous for her architecture. Due to a series of fires, not very much Colonial-period architecture is left, but there are a lot of 18th and 19th century structures.

Savannah also has a very famous cemetary, but we didn't get a chance to go inside.

The Historic District is checkerboarded with these small, block-sized parks or squares. Many of them have statues in the center, and all of them have these ancient trees.

Between the Historic District and the Savannah river is the River District.

The River District has the best examples of surviving Colonial Architecture. Most of the original structures, like the one below, were built with the ballast dropped by ships when they loaded up with cotton for the return voyage to Europe.

Cobblestone roads led up at a steep angle from the river level to the city level.

This is the bridge that spanned the Savannah river and connects this part of Georgia to South Carolina. It's such a big bridge we decided we had to drive over it later.

At the edge of the Historic District is a 20-acre park for the rest of the city.

The centerpiece of the park is a fountain ordered from page 5 of a catalogue from New York City.

We decided to take the walking tour of "Haunted Savannah" only to find that almost every tree, building, wall, and roof in Savannah is "haunted" in some way or another.

This was the "most haunted" building in Savannah. The guide encourage us to go up to the front door and knock and take pictures of the ghosts inside. (The building was perpetually abandoned because of its haunts, so we weren't likely to bother anyone living.) Ghosts showed up all the time as "spherical orbs of energy" on cameras, but none of us were lucky enough to see anything.

As we were heading back to the hotel, we stopped off a the Mercer House (made famous in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and definitely haunted, according to the guide), and Kim got a picture of all of the numinal energy surrounding the house.