Day 97 - From Girl Scouts to Pirates

The bad weather and tornados sweeping the country brought us some heavy rain off and on throughout the morning.  We assisted a trawler in docking and the captain told us he had been blown around and run aground in the ICW.  He thought he had something wrapped on one prop so he was docking on 1 engine.  As he said, he made a bad decision by venturing out in that weather to begin with.  On board, the resourceful Captain Randy rigged a temporary switch to turn on the shower sump until we could get to West Marine for a new one.

The rain stopped just before noon and we walked to the Maritime Museum which is located in a historic home.  We walked the entire afternoon visiting the beautiful squares in Savannah, toured the birthplace of Juliet Gordon Lowe (founder of the Girl Scouts), saw the Lowe house, art museums, Battlefield Park, St. John’s Cathedral, and more. Parts of the movie Forrest Gump  were filmed here and the bench that Forrest sat on with his famous box of chocolates was located in Chippewa Square.  The bench is now in the history museum, but we sat on another and took pictures.  The shot of the feather around a steeple was also filmed here.  Savannah has a free shuttle bus, DOT, that we rode at the end of the day to see more of the city.

 

 

 

 

On the way back to River Street we strolled on the Factor Walkway, where the cotton traders were located in the early to mid-1800s, when cotton was the South's most valuable export.  The Cotton Exchange building was the first to be built over a street (River Street).  Today the Factor houses shops and small restaurants.  After all the walking, we definitely needed refreshment and Captain Randy whipped up a batch of his famous rum runners back on the boat.

For dinner, we chose the Pirate House, the oldest standing building in Georgia built in the 1730s.  The original structure is called Herb House and there are several more rooms that have been built around it, featuring dark paneled walls and plank flooring.  Greg commented that eating here reminded him of dining rooms in England or Scotland.  There is a “hole” in one of the floors and it is rumored that it connected to a tunnel leading directly to the nearby harbor in case the pirates had to escape quickly.  The food was excellent:  warm biscuits and cornbread, She-crab soup, spinach salad, shrimp, pasta and ribs.  We waddled back to the boat after a very full day in Savannah.