Georgia On Our Minds

We spent a couple of days in the Savannah, Georgia area. In the historic district we took a 90 minute trolley tour which gave us a lot of information about the city. We then walked around and enjoyed the sites. The city was built around 22 squares that are parks honoring various famous people. Each park is filled with gnarly old oak trees that are cover with Spanish moss. We visited the Telfair Museum to see the Bird Girl statue that was made famous by the story "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil". We also went to the Jepson Center for the Arts, a new museum, to see an Ansel Adams photography exhibit. One of the statues in the city is of Florence Martus who for 44 years waved at every ship that sailed by on the river. The city is built on a high bluff overlooking the Savannah River. Because the city is on the bluff the river front buildings are all three or four stories tall. The lower floors on the water were warehouses to store goods being shipped in and out and the top floor was the offices with the front facing toward the city. There was an street call Factory Way that served the middle floors on the city side so in order to get to the offices you had to cross a bridge over that street. While we where down along the water a huge ocean going container ship sailed up the river. Savannah is one of the largest ports for this type of ship in the US. The next day we went to Tybee Island which is right on the ocean. We climbed the lighthouse and toured the museum. The lighthouse is the one of four along the Georgia coast. It has a nine foot tall First Order Fresnel Lens which is made from many prisms to concentrate the light so it can be seen farther out at sea. There are not many of these lenses in the US that are still intact. The museum was in an old concrete artillery bunker that was part of Fort Screven which was built during the Spanish American War. It was used until WWII after which it was sold to the town to be turned into a resort. Some of the houses are the old military buildings. Some people have actually turned the old bunkers into foundations for clubs and homes. They are quite unique with walls that are several feet thick.