Savannah

Savannah’s old city is located on a bluff on the south side of the river. The bluff protects it from flooding. It is a beautiful city, at least its historic downtown, the part we saw. It was laid out in a grid with small parks cutting into the corners of other blocks, every three or four blocks. Each park, or square, is named after a historical figure, including Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia, allowed by the Crown as a buffer to Spanish Florida. Oglethorpe’s views forbade slavery, but once he passed from power and the cotton gin made the growing of cotton so profitable, the white landed citizens demanded slavery, which was introduced.

Monuments stud the city: to Irish immigrants, Vietnam war dead, Jewish doctors aboard a ship which arrived in time to save the city from an epidemic, native son songwriter Johnny Mercer, etc. Oglethorpe shares his square with an Indian chief who helped the struggling colony from the beginning.  Juliette Low, founder of the Girl Scouts, was born and raised here and her home is one of about a dozen that are open for viewing.  Paula Deen, a star of the Cooking Network, has her own living monument “ Lady & Sons” restaurant, as well as tours of it, and her cookbooks and memorabilia are sold everywhere.

We walked two miles to Economy Feed and Seed store with our virtually empty propane tank and took a cab back when it was full. Cab fare exceeded the price of the propane!  Here, unlike St. Augustine, we did take the Old Town Trolley tourist experience, which is a bus not a trolley, and lets you off at any of 15 spots, and back on again on the next trolley, which run every 15 minutes. 

Live oak trees with Spanish moss seem to epitomize this place.

We did not stop at each of the 15 places and there is a lot more to see than we could handle in three days.

The Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum is focused on ship models, many of them named "Savannah", the history of the former Savannah Overseas Shipping Co. (with the unfortunate initials “SOS”), ships in bottles and a bit on Savannah’s naval participation in our Civil War.

The Owens-Thomas house is a beautiful example of Georgian architecture and with indoor plumbing no less. It was owned by a prosperous merchant who went bankrupt, run for many years by the bank that took it over as a boarding house, and acquired by the Mayor, who was later a long time member of the House of Representatives in the age of Jacksonian Democracy, and whose last surviving heir gave the house to the city with enough money to endow its maintenance. The house's main claim to fame is that on the 50^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Lafayette gave a series of lectures around the nation, cheering on the still-fledgling democracy, and delivered his speech in English, and to a Haitian contingent in French, from the balcony of this house in which he and his entourage were put up and feted.

How do you like this scallop shaped ceiling molding, in both the Owens Thomas and the Telfair houses:

At another historic house, toward closing time, I heard a lecture by a docent in period costume to a group of Girl Scouts and their mothers on tea, which was then followed by a tea that I’m sure the girls enjoyed.

We stopped at the City Market area, filled with restaurants and galleries. I visited the Telfair House, another of the old homes now a museum affiliated with South Carolina School of Design, beautifully restored with a collection of 90 percent American artists, with 90 percent of the work created during the period 1890 to 1910, of which I recognized only one name: Childe Hassam. The curator at that time also collected full size plaster casts of sculptures of the renaissance and ancient Greeks from European museums, for the school's students to sketch.  We also paid a visit to the Savannah History Museum.

But we are probably the only tourists in the history of the Old Town Trolley to stop at Savannah’s largest park to purchase and schlep back bags of groceries from the nearby Krogers supermarket. We did not take the horse drawn carriage ride here.

Our dock, the town dock, its manager specifically told us, "is not a marina.” It had no services whatsoever: No staff to help us with our dock lines when Lene steered us right to the dock, no showers and no toilette-- just a dock. We had to find the office, inside a large municipal parking garage, to pay our wharfage bill.  What they are selling for $1.50 per foot is a parking space. 

But there is an extra benefit: we were right alongside River street where hordes of tourists pass every day, especially on the weekends. We were right next to the River Queen stern wheeler replica, which takes tourists out on river cruises. Note Alphie on the floating dock. At high tide, shown here, she also jumped from the floating dock to the tourist plaza.

It is exciting to be so close to so many people, and Whitty and Alphie’s images are on many people’s cameras. It is nice to hear your boat being praised and I love to talk to people about my boat and our journey. But the downside is that the tourists and the music from facing restaurants and buskers on the street is loud and on weekends lasts till late at night. There was a big shrimp boat at the other end of the dock.

 Our last day was devoted to a visit by Marc and Pam.

They had been members of our congregation and I brought Marc to the Harlem years ago when he purchased his first boat from the Club, which had acquired it through a lien. Mark is a joiner, an active committed member and a leader in all of his organizations, having served as treasurer of the Harlem and sung in the choir and now in a barbershop quartet group. He also invited me to join him and two other men he knew for a week’s bareboat charter in the BVIs, my first taste of Caribbean cruising. Who could have foreseen what that week would lead to?  Marc and Pam moved to Augusta from the New York area to be near her mom more than a decade ago. He now sails a 30 foot sloop on a nearby 22 mile long reservoir. The day had been planned with possible touring in mind but we all had fun just schmoozing and eating, including dinner at Huey’s.
These two cats from Kilkenny, fight, but love each other.

 

Posted from Beaufort, SC.