Savannah, day 1

After he signed out of Fort Bragg, Mac and I headed down to Savannah around 9 am as we had a 1:30 lunch reservation at The Lady and Sons (Paula Deen’s restaurant). The food here is fantastic, and they now take reservations over the phone. Last time I was there, you had to stand in line to make reservations. Yes, it’s three stories, and each floor has a dining room and separate buffet.

We both opted for the lunch buffet. I highly recommend it. The selection of food is great, and the buffet is basically the same food at all times but cheaper at lunch. I tried the fried chicken, mashed potatoes, creamed corn, macaroni & cheese, and green beans. Mac also sampled the baked chicken and barbequed pork. We were each served a lace hoe cake (thin cornmeal pancake) and a garlic cheddar biscuit. The buffet comes with an included dessert: we split the gooey butter cake and the peach cobbler. Y’all, you can taste the butter, but it’s sooooo worth it.

After rolling ourselves out of the restaurant, we walked around the river front. We bought all-day tickets with Old Town Trolley for Tuesday and ghost tour tickets for Monday night. They threw in tickets for Monday because it was later in the afternoon, so we hopped on board and took it for a spin.

Our ghost tour was thankfully tame. Like any Southern child, I grew up reading the Jeffrey ghost story books at my schools’ libraries. But I’m a huge wimp and am really jumpy (like a dog walking into my shot while taking a picture scared me). During this tour, you ride around in a trolley while the costumed guide points out the houses and narrates the associated houses. You make two stops. The first is at their trolley facility, built where a triple murder once took place.

The orbs are ghosts, so they tell me.

My camera was having a hard time adjusting with the dark facility and the bright light, so the result was the strangely bizarre and awesome photo. The red light apparently means that little kid found a ghost.

The other stop is in a converted cotton warehouse that now stores old sailing gear. Here, a costumed actor comes out and tells a few more stories in the dark with lighting and sound effects. To be honest, the lighting really hurt my eyes, but I enjoyed the stories.

We decided to grab some food afterwards at Spanky’s, home of the original chicken finger. We spilt a plate of nachos and an order of the original chicken fingers. The food was good, service wasn’t terrible. Someone started shooting fireworks out over the river, so we headed outside to watch them. After that, we finally headed over to our rental guest house and called it a night.