Driving South - II

Our next stop was a city that we've fallen in love with over the years, having made this drive many times before: Savannah, Georgia. A beautiful town, laid out around several dozen squares, each of those surrounded by homes of the most wonderful colonial architectural design. Savannah is one of the east coast's largest ports as well. The promenade along the river of the same name fronts a port that is a working harbor. It's also a tourist mecca, lined with restaurants and tacky tourist shops and mobbed with thousands of tourists who make it a major destination. We had taken our bikes with us and Savannah was one of the places we wanted to explore with pedal. So we checked into a La Quinta motel several miles away from the historic district (vacancies in town were non-existent) and the next morning got on our bikes and tooled around town, pedalling from square to square and just taking in this beautiful old town.


Savannah is not only a beautiful old tourist destination. It's also a working port, visited by colossal container boats.


Beautiful buildings abound in Savannah. Here's where the great Southern songwriter, Johnny Mercer, was born and grew up. (Think "Moon River," "Days of Wine and Roses," and "On the Acheson, Topeka and the Santa Fe.")


A beautiful house on a Savannah Street in the historic district.


A statue of famed Revolutionary hero, Sargeant William Japser, looks over Madison Square, one of Savannah's 22 squares --

"This "noble sequence of wooded and gardened squares . . . form[s] the glory of the city" William Dean Howells wrote almost 100 years ago. The Squares are set out within a unique grid of streets and "lanes" (or alleys) that follows a pattern established by General James Oglethorpe when he founded Savannah in 1733. It is "the most intelligent grid in America, perhaps the world," says the urbanist author and architect John Massengale. Oglethorpe's plan of squares and streets for Savannah is "so exalted that it remains as one of the finest diagrams for city organization and growth in existence," claimed the Philadelphia planner and author Edmund Bacon."- from the Project for Public Spaces website.

The fountain in Forsyth Park, the first large park created in Savannah (in addition to the squares) by Ogelthorpe in the 18th century.


A closeup of the Forsyth fountain.

We biked back to our car, packed up our things and left Savannah, wishing we had more time to spend there. But Florida beckoned and it was a good part of a day's drive. And that's where the next installment will take you ... if you care to join us.