Savannah

Thursday we spent a fantastic day in Savannah. It's about 90 minutes from here. The visitors center was very easy to get to and that's where all the tour companies were. The visitors center gave us basic information. The Historic area was based on 24 squares and all the tour companies are required to go to the same basic places. The differences are in where they stop and how often the buses return if you get on and off. We talked to each of the companies and picked one. We just did the tour so we chose Old Town Trolley Tours because they did the whole River Front Area. The link will show you a map and some of the places we saw. We learned a lot about Savannah and it's history. The city was home to many authors and parts of it are in lots of movies and it was the inspiration to many books. We saw the home of Juliette Gordon Low - there's a special girl scout badge you can only earn in the city of Savannah! I think every square has fountains and/or statues. The statue of the Confederate soldier was made in Canada and then was shipped to Savannah by boat because it would be defiled if it touched Northern soil. We saw the mail order house where all the windows were put in upsidedown. We saw the "Pirate's House' , now a restaurant, it has tunnels from the bar to the waterfront and was the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" . You can still see the tunnels and we were told to threaten not to pay our bill if we were not shown the tunnels. (It's on our list for a future trip). The next time will do the on and off the bus tour so we can explore more of the squares.
After the tour we asked about parking near the waterfront or if it was within walking distance, etc. The visitors center was great- they told us about the free bus service. So we took the bus to the RiverFront and walked around a bit then stopped at 'Kevin Barry's Irish Pub' for some refreshment before walking around more.
We went to dinner at 'The Lady and Son's' (Paula Deen's). The food was fantastic! The atmosphere was not what we expected- very crowded and noisy.
We asked the waiter to double check our directions for getting to the bus stop. The stop was less than a 5 minutes walk. We had to wait about 10 minutes for the bus. We missed our stop so the bus driver went around the block for us. We were one of the few cars left in the lot.
I definitely want to go back and see more. And everyone we talked to was very friendly and helpful.
We had no trouble getting back to the highway but the construction on Rt. 95 S made the trip home about 2 hours.
It was still a great day.