Touring Old Savannah

This afternoon we drove into Savannah to explore a bit. We parked in what ended up to be a very cheap parking garage (State Street Parking Garage on State and Broughton…a buck an hour).

We walked around and ended up walking past Lady & Sons (Paula Deen's restaurant) and we'd heard mixed reviews but thought for lunch it wasn't much of a gamble so we put our name in (45 minute wait) and walked around some. We wandered a bit in the historic district (loved it) then headed town to the riverfront and walked the length of that (touristy, but not crowded so not too bad), and then back up to the restaurant.

More moss:

Cobblestones:

Huge loaded ship on the Savannah River:

Lunch was good, not spectacular, but good. The way they do the whole seating thing, however, is not awesome. You go to the little podium outside and put your name in and then come back when they tell you to. Then they send you into the gift shop (!!) and tell you they'll call your name from inside. Just inside, past the the gift shop there's a seating area (we went straight there) and they called our name about 4 minutes later and gave us a little yellow ticket. We were ushered past the buffet and upstairs to the third floor where they took our little yellow ticket and seated us over by the window. (There's a buffet on every floor…$15.99 for lunch). The interior is kind of rustic, the staff was nice but not super friendly or warm, and overall if felt a little like we were being processed through the system. 

We ordered some fried okra, a wedge salad, crab cakes, and some seared scallops. We also ordered peach mint juleps, and when I ordered mine, the waiter said "You know there's bourbon in there." Um. It's a mint julep, isn't it? So funny. 

After lunch (early dinner, really, since it was 4pm) we decided we'd probably get a lot out of one of the trolly tours so we hopped on the 90 minute Old Savannah Tour that left at 4:30. It was great, and we got a ton of good information about architecture, history, people, ghosts…and even the food our tour guide ate while he lived in Germany. Our tour guide was fun and entertaining (they called him "Mojo"). Here are some photos from the trolley.

Here's the gorgeous Mercer Williams house:

I couldn't get a good photo of the First African Baptist Church where Martin Luther King first practiced his "I have a dream" speech because it was on the other side of the trolley, but here's the First Baptist Church (I guess it's the non-African version):

Architecture:

This building was built during a time when property was taxed on the number of doors, so they just made the windows big enough to walk through:

Graffiti on the Old Savannah Theater:

Tile entry of the theater:

Owens-Thomas house (side):

Cathedral of St. John the Baptist:

Here's our trolley:

We got back to the parking garage and had a lovely view from our parking spot:

We drove over to the Bonaventure Cemetery but the gates close at 5pm and the sun was just setting so it was a bit too dark for photos. We may go back over tomorrow.

The sunset, however, was incredible. The cloud cover made the entire sky change color. This is straight out of the camera. 

Incredible. It just got redder and redder as we made our way back to the campground: