Day 40: Savannah

We woke up for our final morning on Hunting Island. At six nights, this was our longest stay at any place to date. We had a good start to the morning and were on our way by 9 a.m. We were sad to say goodbye to the beach, but thrilled to be leaving the mosquitoes. The other good news is that we were headed to a campground with full hookups, which means long showers!

Today’s trip to Savannah was only 1.5 hours of driving, but we had some stops to make along the way. First, we had to pick up our first Amazon order since the trip started: a couple dehumidifiers (which are becoming increasingly needed as we’re just beginning our travels in the most humid part of the country).

The second stop was the tire store. Our tow car has had a slow leak in one tire for a while now, which required adding air daily, so we wanted to get it fixed. I found a Discount Tires in town, and as luck would have it that is where the leaky tire was purchased from. Given my purchase history with them, they offered us a partial credit for the irreparable tire. We had the car detached, tire diagnosed and replaced, paid, and car reattached in 30 minutes, thanks to their awesome customer service. The boys and I were able to watch them put tires on rims and rebalance them as we waited for our car. Yet another chance to learn and see something new.

As a side note, we’re hoping Cooper didn’t inherit my curse when it comes to bird droppings, but as he stepped out of the RV we heard a splat. It had landed on his shoulder and the pavement, but luckily not his head.

We were finally headed to Georgia. Blessed with a short driving day, we arrived at the Red Gate Campground just before noon. I had frantically pulled over in the campground driveway to get the boys on their 11:50 calls only to later remember that it was Wednesday and they had no school calls. Oops.

We got checked in and then waited for all of the school work and Rob’s work to get wrapped up for the day. It was yet another VERY slow productivity day: five hours to get done what they could actually do in less than an hour, but it did get done. During that time I got through three loads of laundry that were desperately needed after six days at the beach.

It was late afternoon, but we really wanted to head out to see the city since we were only here for one night. We headed to Forsyth Park as a starting place. The large trees with the Spanish moss hanging from them was magical and added a Halloween feel to the air. We were then in search of dinner and opted to walk the 1.3 miles to the restaurant. The walk went fast and gave us an opportunity to walk through the squares in each block with monuments and statues of influential people in Savannah history. There were many street artists and horse drawn carriage tours to keep us entertained along the way.

Dinner was outside at the Moon River Brewery. Our first brewery stop in 40 days! Nicholas won’t stop raving about his cheeseburger and insisted that Rob give the restaurant a 5-star review, declaring it even better than McDonald’s (the ultimate in dining in his mind). During dinner Cooper asked what just happened to my forehead, would you believe I got pooped on too today! It was small, but are you kidding me?

After dinner it was 7:30, but we were just a block from the Savannah river so we went to check it out in the dark. We took a “historic staircase” down to the river, and once on the river we were in awe. A huge bridge that we had driven over to get there, cargo ship, fire boat, river boats, and smaller boats, along with more street artists. The kids loved being out after dark. Rob and I couldn’t get over how high the river level was. It seemed like a few inches higher and the river walk and shops would be flooded.

On our walk back to the car, we walked past a large old cemetery that had all the Halloween creepy feelings about it. It probably didn’t help that we were passed by a couple of ghost tours riding around in hearses. The boys didn’t ask what the hearse was, and they are usually very quick with the questions. Not sure if they just didn’t want to know or already knew. We had a discussion about two “stars” in the sky that I was convinced were airplanes because it looked like they were moving. Turns out the boys were right and it was the clouds moving because what we were looking at was Jupiter and Saturn–oops.

We all agreed it was an awesome ending to the day and we wouldn’t have had this late night experience had they done their school work sooner so it all worked out in the end.

To end this kind of odd evening Cooper asked what the billboard meant when we were driving home (we’d seen it several times earlier in the day). I even tried to phone a friend (Rob) for explanation, but he could barely contain his snickers when I said what the sign said. Let’s just say it took the rest of the drive home to work through it to his liking.