Southern Elegance

There really is no place that compares with Savannah, Georgia. It is elegantly, beautifully on its own as a city, and if you can somehow get here one day, do it. This is such a charming place to walk around, with its many and varied fine old buildings, broad-spreading oak trees draped with cloudy fingers of Spanish moss, and a layout of streets and squares that makes it feel like an urban parkland rather than a city. We took lots of photos and here's a tiny fraction of them, about 20 views of this gorgeous town.

Here's a link to the Wikipedia article on the layout of Savannah's streets, but to summarise, the old town area follows a grid based around 24 park-like squares, like this one. Each square is about 30 metres deep but the squares' widths vary from 30 to 90 metres. At the centre of every square there is a focal point, such as this fountain, but other squares have statues in the middle, or a gazebo, or sculptures, or just a circle of greenery plus benches for citizens and weary visitors to rest on.

Each square is shaded by several enormous Southern Live Oaks draped with Spanish moss. These trees are huge, wide-spreading beauties. I paced out the spread of one typical branch on an average-sized tree and it reached out 15 metres from the thick trunk. So some of these squares, though cool and shady, needs no more than nine or so trees to cover the whole area with cool, dappled shade.

The locals use these squares: to sit and chat, others perch laptops or books on their lap and pass the hours, some just sleep. And it also seems that lots of people get married here: we saw two wedding ceremonies in the squares just yesterday – such a romantic place to tie the knot. Close to the main business district close to the Savannah River the squares offer a patch of cool green relief to the workers in offices nearby, but the surrounding buildings down this end of the city are charmless offices and shops. As you move further away from the city the atmosphere changes entirely as the squares are surrounded on all sides by lovely old houses in my favourite higgildy piggeldy style, with very few houses the same as their neighbours.

Let's just look at a few of the houses, such as this pretty little yellow one.

White weatherboards with dark grey shutters, a popular colour scheme.

I can't remember any ramshackle houses anywhere here in the downtown. All were beautifully and proudly looked after.

And not all the houses are grand. This little row of simple dwellings dates from the 1790s.

I like the twin staircases leading to the front door.

Flags and flowers are a common decoration out front, along with countless Halloween pumpkins.

Even the pavements were interesting, often very old bricks from these two companies.

Otherwise the pavements were made from a concrete infused with millions of seashells.

This eye-catching garden used a colourful foliage infill between the neatly clipped hedges.

Pleasingly, many planters were full of life and colour.

These colourful mounding blooms were a popular choice all over the city and feature on many front steps.

A cool courtyard glimpsed through an iron gate.

Beautiful, ornate iron staircases like this one decorated many houses.

Even the local birds seem to be very relaxed about all those tourists wandering around admiring the place.

Later in the day, Pam and I went for a drive to have a look around the city beyond the tourist hub of the historic downtown area, and the pleasant surprise was that the huge oaks with their Spanish moss, and the lovely old houses, stretched out for a few more miles, well beyond the downtown area. Driving out on Abercorn Street, one of the main thoroughfares leading out of town, the stretch of such beautiful neighbourhoods lasted all the way out to 62nd street.

Such a humble, simple plant the Spanish moss, and yet it's the star attraction here. When we saw a huge Southern Live Oak NOT draped in Spanish moss, somehow it didn't seem right.

Trying to do justice to such an extraordinarily beautiful city by showing you just 20 photos is never going to tell the whole story, so I think the best idea is for you to put Savannah, Georgia on your 'must visit' list and come here one day. Set aside a few days at least to see it all. We were lucky in that the weather here has been sunny yet cool to mild (65-70°F), making it very easy to walk around, but Savannah is a subtropical city and it can get very hot and humid here at times.

We walked everywhere, but there are countless alternatives for those for whom walking is not an option. There are buses, trolleys, horse-drawn coaches, rental pushbikes and motor scooters, even Segways. But if you choose the slow pace of walking you'll see all the details, at your own pace.

We also went out to the coast, to Tybee Island, so we could officially say we had made it to the Atlantic seaboard, and that's where our next blog will come from.

Tummy time USA (8)

Woo hoo! We've made it to the East Coast. Savannah, Georgia, one of the most beautiful cities you could hope to walk around, but more of that tomorrow, once we've finished all the walking and been to every neighbourhood. After all the deep-fried southern soul food we've enjoyed over the last few weeks we were actually craving something lighter, fresher and, yes, healthier. Here's how we went.

OK. For starters, one classic Savannah, Georgia photo to set the scene. This really is a town of a thousand delightful neighbourhoods.

In the centre of town, however, the Jepson Art Gallery is an equally wonderful modern space, and it was in the cafe (from which I took this shot) that we enjoyed a much healthier lunch.

Pammy would like you to know that this photogenic Biscuits with Tomatoes, Swiss Cheese, Basil Aoli and Salad was a truly impractical thing to eat. As mentioned several Tummy Times ago, biscuits are a baked thing rather like Aussie scones, but often a bit wider and flatter than scones. When used here as a substitute for a bread roll, they collapsed into half a dozen little bikkies after the first bite. This is a classic of 'it seemed like a good idea at the time'. It passed the taste test (nice) but it didn't exactly shine in the 'pleasure to eat' department.

I had a saintly salad. Well, actually, no I didn't. I had a chicken salad, which featured halved seedless red grapes, sun-dried tomatoes, red onion, cold cooked chicken blended with a herby mayonnaise, Cos (romaine) lettuce and a basil vinaigrette. What a mouthful of a description, but it turned out to be a pleasant mouthful for lunch. All it lacked was crunch...

So I ordered a half-plate of grilled ciabatta bread drizzled with olive oil and scattered with herbs.

After lunch we went exploring the amazing streets of Savannah and along the way we spotted this missed opportunity for Tummy Timers, the 'Shalom Y'all' Festival of Jewish Food, advertised outside the local synagogue. Sounds both fun and yummy.

Last night we dined out at what turned out to be a much more flash restaurant than we expected, but it was a night of interesting food served in a beautifully restored old house. The restaurant is called 'The Olde Pink House' and it's inside an historic mansion fronting Reynolds Square, on Abercorn Street. Somehow I was so keen to get stuck into our entree of a shared plate of a dozen oysters natural that I forgot to photograph them, but you know what oysters look like. The oysters were from just down the coast in Florida (not on the Gulf Coast side) and while, quite honestly, they weren't as good as creamy, superb Sydney Rock Oysters they were still the cleanest, freshest flavour (with a squeeze of lemon) we had enjoyed in weeks. After that fab entree, Pammy ordered the grilled salmon with dill cucumber salad, and they cooked the salmon the way she likes it: rare.

I had a crab-stuffed black grouper, with lightly steamed string beans on the side. Please note, that in Savannah they pronounce the name of this fish 'group-er', and not the Aussie way of 'grope-er'. I did notice the waitress twitch just a fraction when I placed my order. Oh, and it might not be all that photogenic but it was deliciously crabby, with the grouper a mere casing for the crab main, flavour-wise.

As so often happens with goody-two-shoes diners, by the time they have had salad for lunch and fish for dinner the danger period is desserts, and we both succumbed, I am happy to say. I had a key lime pie (not my first this trip) and this one was up there with the best of them, but all of them have been of a high standard.

Pammy lost her head for a moment and blurted out "I'll have the Chocolate Oblivion Torte, please" but she recovered beautifully when this relatively restrained, but deeply chocolatey little slice appeared. She approved on all counts. Got her chocolate fix, didn't overdose.

One cute note to finish on is the dessert menu, or more specifically the dessert drinks menu. We both loved the way they listed all the liqueurs as 'cordials'.

We'll tell you a lot more about this truly beautiful place with a blog posting tomorrow, but Savannah is well known for its food and it's living up to its reputation. On our first night here we were too tired from driving down here to venture far looking for a restaurant, so we went to a local pub, the Crystal Beer Parlor, and even there the crab cakes I had were light and full of fresh, real crabmeat, while Pam's lamb rack was cooked pink, how she likes it. Shame I didn't take the camera, but we didn't think pub grub was going to be all that enthralling. That's a mistake I keep on making on this trip. I forget to take my camera when I dine out and then I wish I had. Just goes to show you that the food here continues to be full of pleasant surprises.