August 6 - August 11

  

Tuesday - Day Three Charlotte-Savannah, Ga. We eat breakfast at the hotel before leaving Charlotte after the morning traffic. We cross the state line into South Carolina almost as soon as we leave the city, and it's all highway from then on. But not the same highway. We leave this mountain road, cutting across South Carolina towards the coast, and descend quickly to the flat, fertile lowlands, cotton heaven in another, more brutal era. Then we turn onto the old familiar I-95, Florida's interstate, and travel south only a few miles inland from the coast. The road is flat, straight, and lined with mid-size pines. Every mile we travel the vegetation becomes less and less alien. Some of the trees we might even find lining Bahamian highways. Before we know it we are in Georgia, and Savannah is to our left. We miss the main exit, and enter the city from the west, driving in on a main road that leads to the heart of downtown. Savannah, for those of you who do not know this, is the one city in the old South that was spared the ransacking, looting and burning of victorious Union troops during and after the Civil War. When beseiged by General Sherman, Savannah surrendered and let the Yankees in - and so the city is more or less intact. The Historic District of the city is beautiful - laid out around 24 parks, it has a genteel Victorian charm that makes me think of the Nassau of my childhood - people don't seem to rush, but take their time and sit and ruminate under the great oak trees in these parks. Because of all these parks, and because of the trees in them, Savannah, though humid and hotter today than Nassau is (we check all the relevant temperatures in our complimentary copy of USA Today), is not unbearable - when you get stifled by the heat you just move into a park and take a breather. Our hotel, the River Street Inn, used to be a cotton warehouse. It is made out of red brick, and is long and narrow, and the rooms are shaped out of the original spaces that housed cotton. One side of it looks over Bay Street, the biggest thoroughfare of downtown Savannah, and the other overlooks the Savannah River, and descends to historic River Street, a narrow strip that used to be the quay from which cotton was shipped. This street is cobbled, uneven with ship's ballast that has neither been dug up nor paved over, and unimaginably quaint. The entire wharf has been converted from warehouses and moorings into hotels and shops for tourists. Philip and I rest up for an hour or so, avoiding the worst of the heat - Savannah, as I have said, is very humid, and in fact just as we check in and find our way to our room it starts to rain - a nice light shower. When we go out the sun is out and is turning all the puddles to steam. We wander around two or three of the squares, but realize that we don't know enough about this city to do it justice in a single afternoon, and so we go back to the hotel and book us a tour on a trolley car. We have trouble finding the right place to board the car - following the not-so-clear instructions of the front desk clerk, we finally find our way to the tourist information centre, which is just beyond the limits of the historic district, in a renovated railway station, and enter just in time to avoid another shower, which this time is accompanied by some lightning and thunder. If this were Nassau or South Florida, the heavens would have opened and we would have been holed up in the tourist information centre while it stormed around us, but here it just spits rain at us for a while, and then, as we board the trolley car, eases off. This tour is well worth the money we spent on it. We are driven slowly around several of Savannah's squares, and learned about the founder of the city and his peace treaty with the native people of the area, the Yamacraw branch of the Creek Indians (people who, I can only suppose, emigrated to the Bahamas after they were squeezed out of Georgia's low country - we have a Creek and a Yamacraw next door to one another on New Providence). We are driven past several of the great houses, now renovated or in the process of renovation, which are in the historic district, and are told about how Old Savannah narrowly missed being levelled for skyscrapers and freeways in the fifties. (I dream that somehow we can preserve old Nassau like that as well.) We see the Mercer House, where Jim Williams' lodger (live-in lover, what-have-you - see 'Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil') died, and the cemetery, and the lawyers' offices, and the steeple that was featured in 'Forrest Gump,' and the park where Forrest Gump sat on the bench sharing his chocolates. We are entirely charmed. When the trolley car gets to River Street, we get down. We walk to a restaurant I have read about, and put our names down on the waiting list for seven-thirty. Then we return to the hotel to chill out. Philip books our flight home for Saturday at 7:30 a.m; when it's over it's over, and there's no sense pretending otherwise. Dinner is satisfyingly good. Although I am losing my appetite, as I do (thankfully) when the weather is hot and humid, I enjoy the meal, and eat perhaps more than my stomach is ready for. It is the last indulgent meal of the trip - Miami is far more commonplace. We stroll down the riverfront on our way back, and return to our cottony room to retire for the night.

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on to day 4

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