Shivering in Savannah

We arrived in Savannah, Georgia, last Monday. The plan is to stick around here for about a month before moving on. However, if the weather doesn’t improve, we might forego any further southern hospitality and high tail it for Hawaii…. or some other warm clime. According to the locals, it was shorts and tank top weather before we got here but since we’ve been here, the low's have been in the 30's and we’re lucky if the daytime temperature breaks out of the mid 50’s. And, insult to injury, it's rained all or part of three days. What happened to the warm and sunny South? Anyway, the long range forecast is for it to get continually warmer from now on so we’ll see.

Savannah is a beautiful city. As originally laid out almost three hundred years ago, the city is built around 24 park like squares. Huge stately old oak trees dripping with Spanish Moss are everywhere and many streets are lined with them creating tunnels of trees the likes and amount of which are unsurpassed anywhere else in the country that I know of. So beautiful is the city that it was one of the very few towns that Union General Sherman spared from the torch during his march through Georgia. So enamored was he with the town that he offered it to President Lincoln as a Christmas present after it’s capture in December of 1864.

Another interesting feature of the city is the abundance of the Wisteria plant. There is so much of it, in fact, that surely Savannah must be the home town of the TV show “Desperate Housewives” because just about any street could be the infamous “Wisteria Lane”.

One of the first days here we got an education as to the crap shoot that is the quality of tour guides that you get when you sign up to take a bus tour around a city. We took a Gray Lines tour lasting about an hour and a half with “on and off” privileges. Over the course of several hours we were on buses with three different driver/tour guides and we were amazed at the differences in the tours depending on the individual interests of the aforementioned guides. The first guy had an overriding interest in plants and trees. Consequently, we learned just about everything we didn’t really want to know about them and not a whole lot about the houses and history of the city. The next person (probably the best one) seemed to have something to say about just about every manmade object we passed. The third one was somewhere in between. But, between the three, we came away with a pretty good idea of the city and what we wanted to go back and see on foot at a more leisurely pace. With the size of the main historic district being almost exactly one square mile, it is a very walkable city. Now, if it’ll just warm up a bit, it’ll be a much more pleasant walk.

Pictures in the Current Pictures Gallery.