Savannah, Ga

A friend from work got married on Tybee Island a couple weekends back and I decided we should spend some time in Savannah since we'll probably never be down that way again.

I was excited in particular about three things:
- seeing Spanish moss hanging in trees
- eating some good seafood
- the history of the city and all the squares  The cemeteries are supposedly pretty cool, but we didn't go check them out.

We woke up at 5:00 am left the house a little after 6 and drove 4 hours to Savannah, Georgia.
The route from here to there takes you through Macon where Bryce lived and worked in a past life so we decided to drive by his old apartment there.  He didn't recognize the place at first - they've upgraded it a bit and there's a really nice shopping center/strip mall across the street and they've added more roads.  He thought it would still be all trees and fields just like it was 7 years ago.

It was Bryce's lucky day because we had somewhere to go and we'd be driving back on Sunday so there would be not time to shop at the cute shops...

We checked in and walked through City Market to scope things out and then headed down to the cobblestone 'Riverwalk'.  There's a neat replica of a pirate ship and we watched some ships come up and down the river.

We just barely missed the wiener dog races (bummer) but decided to stop for lunch at The Cotton Exchange.  Awesome food.  I had shrimp and grits and Bryce had talapia with noodles, shrimp and scallops on top.  We also both had our first fried green tomatoes.  Delicious.  I started to take pictures of the food, but I couldn't make it not flash so then I was embarrassed and Bryce was probably even more embarrassed so I stopped.

We decided to walk down to Forsyth Park and so we grabbed some gelato from City Market (spotted on the first walk through) and on the way hit a couple of the smaller squares that are scattered through Savannah.  One we walked through had a Bride and her Bridesmaids getting their pictures taken before the guests arrived to sit in the pretty white chairs by the fountain.

Forsyth Park is very pretty.  It was the first park created in Savannah and styled after Paris with broad boulevards and has a fountain that's a copy of the one in Place de la Concorde. The fountain was placed in 1858.    The park was 10 acres set aside by Oglethorpe as a park and is the only bit of land (from which I understand) that was set aside for this purpose in the early days of settlement and has stayed the same and hasn't been broken up or rezoned.

Plus the houses around the park are really cool too.

I really liked the feeling of the historic district. 
We walked through the design district and then happened upon a street of shops so we wandered around those on the way back from the parks.

That evening we headed out to Tybee Island to the oldest lighthouse in the south (the first one built in Georgia since it's at the mouth of the Savannah River) and watched my friend get married on the beach.