Pre-vacation excursion.

A couple of weeks ago, we went on vacation with my family to Universal Studios. That was fantastic, and I do plan to write about it. However, it'll be a long post, so until I get it done, I thought I'd post a little bit about our stop in Savannah, GA.

Brad and I decided to break our trip to Orlando into two days (yes, we drove rather than flew), and we spent the night a little south of Savannah. Ergo, we needed to stop and see some sights in Savannah. Obviously.

Due to the time of day we would be going through Savannah/the lack of a good nap/the fact that it was HOT and HUMID, we decided to spend about an hour looking around and then find a spot to eat a picnic dinner (I'm a big believer in not throwing out food, so I packed whatever was in our fridge into a cooler, and we ate on it all day while traveling). I found this list of free things to do in Savannah, and we picked a couple of things to try out.

We headed down to River Street, parked the car for an hour ($1/hour), and started strolling. It was slow going at first, given that the street was very cobblestone-y, and we didn't realize there was a nice PAVED walkway running parallel. Oops. We picked up a map of the historic district at a very conveniently located visitors desk (that was next to a bathroom!) and made a plan to check out a few of the historic parks located close to one another. Now, we went up (from the river to the main streets) the hard way, but we learned a better way to go down: right next to the Hyatt, there is a public elevator. MUCH better option than pushing a stroller uphill on cobblestone streets. Bless us.

We found a Black Dog shop on River Street. It's a New England thing, so it made us wistful and nostalgic. At least it made me those things.

This is what most of the streets looked like down by the river. Rough on the feet and the stroller, guys.

The Savannah Cotton Exchange and the Free Mason meeting hall. Also, the first Free Mason guild of Savannah was started by Bostonians.

The gate surrounding the shrubbery in the picture above had a different famous silhouette on each section. This is Jefferson. Looks just like a nickel.

Spanish moss everywhere.

The Savannah College of Art and Design is sprawling. Just everywhere. This is the prettiest of the buildings, by far.

Check out those fishy drains!

I had no idea that the Wesleys were all entrenched in Savannah's history.

I told Claire to come over for a picture, and this is what I got...

The Secret Garden, I think.

We hung out for a while in the War Memorial park. It was really beautiful and thoughtfully designed.

There were quite a lot of these quaint little bridges. If you look, you can see another tourist to the left of the greenery arch. She was rather annoyed that we were on the bridge, spoiling her picture. I wasn't crazy about her being in MY picture. Hmph.

Within just a few blocks, we were able to wander through several of the parks listed on the Historic District map. We probably would have enjoyed doing more, but again, it was HOT. Sweltering, even.

After roaming around for a while, we headed back to our air conditioned car and headed to Forsyth Park to eat supper. It was a gorgeous park. If we lived in Savannah, I'm pretty sure that Brad would go there everyday to study. And run. And eat. Basically, he would live there. 

Maybe on future trips to Florida we will be able to explore more, but we thoroughly enjoyed our short little excursion in Historic Savannah. It was a beautiful place to see...and let our toddler run out some energy. :)