I never thought I would say this...(me being an East Coast city girl and all) the South has really grown on me. I was talking on the phone with a friend the other day and she told me that I was losing my Northern accent. Imagine that? I almost started crying. :( Now, I almost welcome the change. Life here is very different. It's hectic but nothing like up North.
I'm speaking so fondly because I spent the weekend(6/13-6/15) in Savannah. This is the same place where they filmed the movie "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil". It is a GORGEOUS city. The people are eccentric and I loved it. The hotel we stayed at was downtown in the tourist area called the Mulberry. The staff was friendly and very accommodating.
The first activity was the pub crawl. The city allows you to have open alcoholic beverages in public as long as it's in a cup. They don't call it drinking it's called being in your cup. If you have too much to drink, you don't say you're drunk...they say you have the Savannah flu. The tour guide has a Confederate uniform on and tells you the history of each bar. Allegedly, each of these bars we went to is haunted. The stories are fascinating and the town people are quite friendly. My last drink was from a local; he thought I was cute. Who am I to turn down a FREE drink?
Saturday, we went to Tybee Island. For those of you in NJ, it's like going "down the shore". It's 20 minutes from Savannah. We had lunch at a restaurant called Stingrays. All the fish, shrimp, scallops, oysters etc. are caught fresh daily. They had the most AMAZING hush puppies. Lunch was FANTASTIC!!!! Y'all know that I love to eat!!!! I was bursting from the seams because there was so much food. We walked to the beach and spent 2 hours there. This beach was spotless, with huge waves. I sat along the shoreline and let the waves come to me. I can't swim so I wasn't as adventurous as my other compadres.
After the beach, we took a trolley tour through downtown Savannah. Our tour guide was really nice. He told us the history of the buildings and the stories connected to them. The architecture is UNSURPASSED!!! We passed an iron wrought gate that was hand carved. That was the status symbol back in the day....iron. Some of the stories he told we creepy especially the one about the cemetery. During the civil war, the union army occupied the city. The soldiers moved bodies from one grave to another, changed dates on tombstones and burned fires in the mausoleums to stay warm on cold nights. They did some twisted stuff. Once the war ended, people didn't know if their loved ones were buried in the same place because all the records had been destroyed. {War is an ugly thing but we won't discuss that in this post.}
We had dinner at the Pirate House. This is the place that inspired the book "Treasure Island." Pirates would bribe the bar maidens to get the local farm boys drunk. The girls would slip something in their drink. The pirates would kidnap them by taking them through a tunnel that was in the basement that lead to the riverfront. Next thing you know this poor smuck wakes up on board a pirate ship. Some guys never made it back. That SUCKS!!!!
I did some last minute sightseeing Sunday morning. Bought some souvenirs for the family, got back on the bus and came back to reality. If you like history, architecture and ghost stories this is a great trip to go on. The weather is perfect, the food is EXCELLENT and the locals are friendly.
Till we meet again amigos. Same time, same bat channel..........
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