Herb River to Savannah (Downtown dock)
I'll start with this, Savannah is a very cool city. I wish we could spend more than a day here but we had a great time today.
We were anchored last night and it took us more than an hour to get the anchors up. Between tides running at a good clip and really heavy wind, the anchors were set really well both bow and stern.
We ended up having to power the boat to get the rope a little bit loose on the stern anchor and then take it with the dingy and drive up on it to try and pull it loose from the muck. Once the stern anchor was in it was much easier to pull the anchor off the bow. I still had to power to get over the anchor in pull it in with the windlass and then tie it off and use the engines to pry it loose off the bottom.
On the way into Savannah we saw cruise ships and giant freighters hauling cargo from all over the world. Savannah is a giant seaport. On the tour today they said it was now the biggest seaport on the East Coast. I've heard the same about Charleston and New Jersey. I did observe there are a ton of freighters coming in and out of here....
Once we got to Savannah we took advantage of a free city dock right downtown on River drive. With power!
There are confusing signs that say there is a cost and who to call but there's no one around and they don't answer the phone and the voicemail is full...
So we packed up and went to visit the city.
This is where we docked for the day and the night...
As we left our dock and headed onto River Street we came upon this sign. We figured it must be an instruction to ladies walking on the dock... Really there's a story about a lady who's boyfriend left because his true love was the sea and so she spent the rest of her 40 plus years waving to sailors from the park.
In southern terms they say she was a bit touched. But 3,500 sailors showed up for her funeral to pay tribute to her....
The cobblestone roads here are really rough. Apparently before seawater was used as ballast they used to use rocks from various places all over the world. The rocks would be unloaded at the seaport and dumped into large piles. This gave the town of Savannah a lot of granite, marble and other rocks to use for construction. The square bricks got used to make walls, the rounded rocks got used to make roads. The roads are pretty rough but they last a really really long time... Of course they don't have to plow and they don't get freeze thaw like we do.
Like many of the towns we have visited, history and stories are a big part of their identity. Take this house, for example. This house is where the girl scouts were created and it's still a girl scout facility today. In fact it's the only place in the whole USA where you can buy cookies from the girl scouts all year round.
We paid for tour bus tickets again here in Savannah. It is usually a good way to get around because you can get on and off at various stops all over town. That said, I wouldn't recommend doing it during spring break. It seems the town was overrun with people and the trolleys couldn't keep up. We had occasions where we were told the driver needed to take a break and everyone had to get off only to see the driver in less than 5 minutes come driving out from behind the building with an entire load full of paying passengers. Apparently they turned her around without a break and filled her up with other passengers. We then were asked to wait in line for 45 minutes while trolley after trolley came and picked up a few people with all of the remaining passengers staying on board. It was quite annoying.
We had another instance where the line for the trolley was going to take hours after we visited a church so we walked to another trolley stop where we knew not many people would get off or on only to not see a trolley for over a half hour and then the next two trolleys that came were full and no one could get on. I wouldn't pay for the trolley system again on a busy day.... For the $120 we spent we could have just ubered where we wanted to go...
Of course some people paid for hearse trolleys. Not us ..
Our journey for today was relatively short because we wanted to spend most of the day in Savannah. 17 miles.
One of the museums we visited was the prohibition museum.
Georgia was a dry state long before the national prohibition. The debate over alcohol continues to this day. It was interesting to see the positions of both sides and realize that some of the same arguments are being used for marijuana in our world today. There are certainly lots of ills related to both substances and the human behaviors that sometimes associate with their use. It is interesting also that there are arguments in both cases for medicinal use of the same substances. That's very much the case today as well.
I did find it particularly interesting to understand that 40% of federal taxes were paid as excise taxes on alcohol before prohibition and that the income tax was instituted at the same time prohibition was passed in order to replace those federal revenues. When one 'improvement' is made there's often a set of trade-offs or side effects. The arguments were made that banning alcohol would eliminate poverty, crime, and domestic abuse. It would also eliminate the black market which was making organized crime wealthy. Of course it did none of the above. Crime rates rose, the black market adapted but one thing that really happened was that hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs in agriculture, distribution, and sales.
It was also interesting to see that some of the industries that produced the alcohol pivoted into other industries in order to survive.
The historical architecture in Savannah is beautiful.
And some of the old trees are gorgeous...
The Forrest Gump bench is now in a museum but there are lots and lots of benches in the town that look just like it.
There are also some breathtakingly beautiful churches here...
The stories of the history of this place are fascinating. There are people buried in the graveyard here and with homes here that were friends of George Washington as well as British royalty. There are stories of duels and political betrayal. When we were in St Augustine the stories were typically about Catholic people restricting the freedoms of Protestants. Here in Georgia you were not allowed to be of service in the military if you were Catholic because they thought that if Spain ever invaded from Florida the Catholics would side with the Catholics in Florida who were Spanish rather than the Protestants from Georgia who were English.
It turns out that theory never got tested. The duels however, happened fairly regularly. Also at the end of the civil war the officers from the North had a little bit of fun in the graveyard and rearranged tombstones, changed engravings and generally made a mess.
This is one of the largest graveyards I've ever seen. Not as big as Arlington but with tons of history. There are people whose headstones read they lived a thousand years, 3,000 days. There are headstones on graves that don't correspond to the people buried there. There are individual graves that entire families were buried in and then the tabletop tombstone was used as a fine dining table for high society dinners. They would always set a place for the deceased as well. Very strange.
There are monuments displayed as tributes to Confederate generals...
And literally just a little ways away churches built by former slaves that were used in the underground railroad, centers for protest in even places where Martin Luther King Jr wrote his I have a dream speech.... (It was a sermon here before it was a speech in Washington...)
When Atlanta hosted the Olympics they didn't have water suitable for rowing or kayak so those events took place here in Savannah.
We finished the day going out to eat with fellow boat friends who are also looping. We've seen the loopers from these two boats at a number of cities over the last few weeks and have gotten to know them.
It's good to have friends on the loop going through the same thing we are.
Tonight we sleep tied to a free dock with free power. It doesn't get much better than that. Tomorrow we try to make the journey to Beaufort South Carolina. Yes we intend to finish Georgia tomorrow....
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