Bucket List # 1 - A Ride on the Orient Express

Some time ago, I had a game that involved pretending that you traveled on the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul.  While other details of the game have long since faded, the game left me with a lasting impression of the luxury of the Orient Express, and a lingering desire to experience it for myself.

The Paris - Istanbul route of the Orient Express is one of the longer ones - in the game, it ran from Paris to Milan, Venice, and finally Istanbul.  I'm not sure how realistic the route was, or if the Orient Express ever actually made that route.  I did a little research and found that I can replicate the majority of the route via the existing Paris-Istanbul route.  That train runs from Paris to Bucharest, Budapest, and ends at Istanbul.

I'm not entirely certain why the Orient Express has this appeal. It's certainly one of the world's iconic trains, and has an air of luxury and pampering.  I think perhaps the more appealing aspects are the promise of the nostalgia for a bygone era when travel was more than just getting to where you were going, and a sense of Old World Europe. 

The Orient Express

The Paris - Istanbul trip takes 6 days and 5 nights, and runs $9,000 per person as of this writing.  That's a pretty hefty sum.  I'd probably be willing to do shorter trips, but would want to at least experience a couple of nights on board the train.  Another option is Venice to Brussels, which is 5 days and 4 nights.  It also allows you to choose whether you want to go to Brussels via Budapest or Vienna, with only minor pricing differences, and a total cost of (at most) $3,560 per person - so a substantial discount to the Paris - Istanbul itinerary.  Venice to London and Venice to Paris are similar itineraries and similar costs, so overall, for more than an overnight trip, it's anywhere from around $3,200 to $4,000 for the 5 day/4 night itinerary.  While that's a bit of a splurge for me, I'm putting it down on my list anyway.

If you're interested in doing your own research into the Orient Express, you can find their website here:
http://www.vsoe.com/web/vsoe/venice_simplon_orient_express.jsp

The Bucket List

Recently, IrishFrog and I were having a discussion, and she brought up the fact that she had seen a bucket list somewhere.  I don't remember all the points that we discussed, but the basic requirements for the list were that it had to be 100 things.  The next question that came up was whether I could come up with a list of 100 things.

I felt reasonably assured that I could.  While bucket lists typically contain everything from spending time with family to unique experiences, I thought I would simply try to come up with a travel bucket list.  Some of these things are the things that I originally had in mind when I started this blog, and since, of late, I've felt that my posts needed a little more "umph", I think this will be a good diversion.

While the travel bucket list is, in and of itself, probably not that unusual, I also want to take the opportunity to explore and figure out exactly how much it will take to complete the list - in some cases, it's probably not that hard - in others, it's probably a significant layout of funds.  At least this way, as I complete the list, I will also be able to assess which ones I can afford to do, and when.

The next thing is that the list is not necessarily in any sort of order, other than the order that I happened to think about these things.  While that does mean that some things are probably higher on the list than others (i.e., they are the ones that I thought about first), I imagine that as I go through, I will find that many things are probably approximately equally appealing from my perspective.  I'm just going to number them in order of posting, and maybe at some later date, I'll organize.  Maybe.

So, next post - Bucket List item #1.

21 Fun Things to Do in Paris

There seems to be a growing fondness for lists - 10 hotels with the best pools, 10 best bars in New York City, 10 rooms with views to die for.  If you're any sort of regular travel reader, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.  So it wasn't particularly surprising when Lonely Planet Traveller published an article last month entitled 21 Fun Things to do in Paris.

The main difference between this list and many of the others is that it actually happens to be things that interest me.  I've been to Paris before, and I've done the typical tourist route - there will be more on this later, as we proceed through my travel history.  But, and this is something that most regular travellers know, but need to be reminded of from time to time, many times, the best moments come from unexpected and out of the way pleasures.

That makes this list a nice departure from the typical travel list.  This, at least on first read, is a good collection of possible adventures and activities that would take you off the typical tourist trail for a little while, and open your eyes to a broader Paris than that of the tour guides.  Usually, the writing you get in most magazines that goes off the beaten path is focused on food, or high-end spas, or some other type of specific activity.  This article provides a wide variety of activities across an array of interests.

I'd love to cover the article in more detail, but unfortunately, this is where all those copyright laws come in, so I'm not entirely sure what I can say.  Lonely Planet Traveller can be bought in the App Store, if you have an iPad, iPhone, or similar device.  Alternatively, they have subscriptions online.  If visiting Paris sometime soon, I encourage you to check it out.

That's a long way around to saying that although I've been before, I'm putting Paris on the 'round the world' (RTW) itinerary, and maybe I'll do a few of these things when I go. 

Online photography storage

Usually, upon returning from a trip, you will have hundreds of photos that you need to save.  You can simply store them on your computer (risking a computer crash), or you can store them, and then back them up to somewhere else.  If you want to share your pictures, an online photo storage site is definitely worth considering.  This particular post looks at a couple of the top places for photo storage, and provides a little compare and contrast.

For my purposes, I'm mainly concerned with storage capability, file size limitations, and ability to download the originals when I'm done.  Although many of the sites offer other abilities (such as the ability to edit photos, or to share with friends, etc.), I have photo editing software, and am not particularly interested in the social aspects of the sites.  That said, your preferences may differ - but I am mainly interested in whether I can store all of my photos, whether I can store the full photo (full resolution photos can easily top 5MB nowadays), and whether the site stores the original file, and if I can get it back without too much effort.

Flickr (www.flickr.com) is one of top photo sites, and with good reason - a free terabyte of storage, no limit on file sizes for uploads, and you can download your original photos at any time.  You can set your account to only be accessible to you, your friends, or everyone, and there are further privacy options available if you only want to share select photos, for example.  Flickr has mobile apps as well, so you can upload from your phone or email, and you have the ability to tag or otherwise categorize photos.  The one downside that I can see is that you can only download one photo at a time, although there may be user created programs which have a way around this.

Shutterfly (www.shutterfly.com) is another popular option.  I don't like it as much as Flickr, for reasons that will become clear shortly.  It wins on the storage front, as they offer unlimited storage.  They also do not restrict file size, so that's easy, and they also offer multiple ways for uploading.  The point which concerns me most is that you can't download your original photos, you have to pay Shutterfly to burn a disc and send them to you.  You can share for free, and you have the ability to put photos into albums, but the fact that I have to pay to get my own photos back is a bit of a deal-killer, especially when compared to Flickr.  As full disclosure, they do allow you to download compressed versions which should still be suitable for printing in sizes up to 8 x 10, but at this juncture, I'm simply more concerned with the ability to restore.  You may consider it worthwhile, as the rest of the options are free.

Picasa is the Google entrant to the field, and it may very well be worth a spin.  I was initially put off by the insistence that Picasa be part of the Google+ experience, and in the end, surprisingly, it may be the lack of clarity in the interface and how exactly the whole thing works that ends up being the biggest negative. I say surprisingly, because Google, of all companies, ought to know better, but seems determined to make your photo storage a social experience.  From what I can tell, Google allows you to upload the original file at full size and download at full size, but only provides 15 GB of free storage, after which you have to pay.  In this day and age, that's peanuts.

For the time being, I'm voting for Flickr. 

Travel photography

My intention is to post here every other day, but I missed yesterday.  That's partly because I've gotten a little behind in my blog drafts, but a lot of it has to do with the chaos that was created late yesterday when we discovered that some of the pictures that we have saved on CDs were irretrievable.  So, while this post isn't exactly about travel, it is travel related.

I shouldn't say completely irretrievable, because in the end, we were able to get most of them back.  We did have a few casualties, though.  Fortunately, these were relatively limited.  However, it made me a little nervous about the rest of our photos.

Back in the day, you went around with film and camera, and took whatever shots you took, hoping desperately that your pictures would come out okay, and at the end of a trip, you took your film in to the store, paid an exorbitantly high price to get them developed, and then you could finally look through and see what you got.  That often led to interesting discoveries - reference prior Jamaica posts for an example.  Since pictures were limited based on the cost of film development, you chose your shots more carefully - our first trip to Ireland, I think we took slightly over 100 pictures in about a week. The more recent trips we've taken, we've probably taken 100 to 150 pictures a day.  (To be clear, it's IrishFrog who is the shutterbug, not me.)

With the advent of the digital camera, things changed immensely.  At first, you bought multiple storage cards to handle the increased volume of pictures that you were taking.  Now, even that isn't a necessity.  I do think that we brought two storage cards on our last visit to Europe, but that was partly because we knew we wouldn't be removing pictures from them until we got home.  So, originally you just transferred your pictures to the computer, and that was it.

Enter the failure of computer drives, and the need to find another, more reliable place to store digital photos.  I've had one computer crash on me, and although I was able to recover some files, much of what was on there was lost.  Since that time, IrishFrog has been fairly diligent in backing up the photos to CD.  We now have over a decade worth of pictures stored on CD - and as computers have come and go through our house, we've backed up, checked to make sure they work on other computers, and filed them away in a giant CD holder.

Until now.  As I mentioned, yesterday, we tried to open a couple of the disks only to find that not all of the photos were accessible.  We already have an external hard drive which I'll be using to transfer the photos to a safer place, but I'm also looking at online storage as another option.  I'll let you know what I find out next time.

Sanibel & Captiva Islands

A part of me hesitates to continue on the stories of my travels, because there are some places that I would love (selfishly) to keep to myself.  The islands of Sanibel and Captiva fall into that category.  I'm honestly not sure if they were "undiscovered" in 1996, when I first went there, but since then, Lonely Planet published a small visitors guide, and the islands have been featured in the Wall Street Journal within the last month.  The islands have even made it into 1,000 Places to See Before You Die.  And yet, the last time I visited, the years really hadn't changed the islands all that much.

There are plenty of things that appeal about the islands, enough that I've been back multiple times, although there are certainly closer beaches.  That said, I'm not certain that I can capture specific places we visited on each trip at the date of this writing, some 18 years after our first visit to the islands.  There's a few places that were there that aren't around anymore.  The main one that comes to mind is McT's Shrimp House & Tavern.  I've done a little digging around, and apparently it had taken a turn for the worse before closing, but back in 1996, it was a good choice for a meal.  I do recall eating at the Jacaranda on this trip as well, but I can't say that I recall too much about it.

The two main things that I find to be so appealing, though, are the shells, and the secluded feeling.  I'll start with the second part first.  I grew up going to the beach, and while the beach has never been deserted, beaches today are a far cry from the beaches I remember.  This is the whole point of the Wall Street Journal write-up on Sanibel and Captiva - they've maintained the "Old Florida" feel.  The islands aren't overrun with condos and high-rise hotels, and while there is shopping to be had, you won't find huge discount outlets there either.  So, if that's your idea of a week at the beach, you will be sorely disappointed by what you find.  There are several good dining options, but the islands also aren't overrun with restaurants and fast food joints.  What you will find is clean beaches, with unbelievable amounts of shells, and a small beach community feel.  Even today, there's simply not that much "to do" on the islands, which, in my eyes, makes them all the more tempting.

If you haven't been there, it is almost impossible to explain the shells you can find.  When you hear the waves crash on the shore, there is a musical tinkling sound, like someone diddling around on the high piano keys very lightly.  That diddling happens to be the sound of thousands upon thousands of shells being pushed back and forth by the waves.  Simply strolling along the beach you will find hundreds upon hundreds of perfectly shaped shells.  Stay for a week, and even if you didn't think of yourself as a "sheller", you will have caught the fever, and you will have spent at least one day stooped over, digging through the sand for your next piece of treasure.  We ended up bringing back a bucket full of shells the first time we went - after getting rid of another couple of buckets.  It seems like every time we go back, we come back home with another bucket.

I'll do some searching for photos to see if I can add a few - I'm not sure I'll be able to do the place justice.

Booking sites

There was an interesting article in Money magazine this month about the best flight booking site.  In the end, it suggested four sites.

Kayak was recommended for people for whom price was the main factor, as well as for people who were planning multi-city trips - although the deciding factor for the multi-city trip pricing was ease of use.  In my past, I've used Kayak extensively for flight searches, so I'm not terribly surprised by the pick, nor do I think that it will be new to most travelers.

The two picks that did stand out, in my reading, were Adioso, which allows you to do an incredibly flexible search based on plain language, and Vayama, for international travelers.  While I haven't had the chance to use either yet, the article points out if you have extremely flexible travel plans, Adioso can give you better prices just because of its flexibility - for example, you could do a search for "New York to Seattle in March", instead of doing the typical +/- 3 days.  I might have to do my own research on it and compare results.

The article doesn't provide a lot of detail about Vayama other than saying it was best for international travel, and I will say that my own experience with international travel booking leaves something to be desired, especially if you want to do multi-city international travels.  That's probably a post for another day.

The last site mentioned in Momondo, which searches regional airlines, a definite plus if you are traveling internationally, as my experience shows that US airlines, while good at getting you to a single destination in a foreign country, are usually not so good about getting you around within the country or continent once you're there.

I'll think about doing some testing of the sites for either an upcoming post or a future trip.

Savannah - Final recap

Final musings on Savannah, and then we will move onto something different.  I'm not entirely sure what yet, especially as it seems that I've been writing about Savannah for a long time now, but I suppose I'll go back to my original reviews of trips past, mixed with coverage of potential travel spots.

I mentioned in one of my earlier posts that I made a mistake on my first day in Savannah.  I'm writing an article on that which I hope to have published, so I can't share everything in it, but the quick down and dirty is that Savannah is not a city that you "do".  There are things to do in Savannah, but Savannah generally refuses to let you see her on your terms - and at least part of my struggle on day one was the attempt to "do" Savannah.  By running through the squares and parks, I missed out on enjoying what was there.

Savannah does show up in 1,000 Places to See Before You Die.  I don't know that I'm qualified to determine whether it is one of the thousand most impressive places in the entire world, but I certainly enjoyed my trip there and would generally rate it highly in several categories.  The antebellum homes are beautiful, as are the parks, and it makes for pleasant sightseeing.  Savannah does have several good historical tales to go with it, so learning about the city is enjoyable as well.

The food scene in Savannah is surprisingly good.  We really only had one mediocre meal the whole time we were there, and the meals were both good and inexpensive, which can frequently be challenging to find.  Quite frankly, I don't feel that we came close to exhausting our food options, and we didn't even go to the more highly touted locations.

Although I said that the sights were somewhat limited, there is no dearth of historical tours, ghost tours, pub tours, and other ways to see the city.  To boot, if you do get tired of Savannah, the beach is not that far away, and you could always go there for a quick retreat.  Our tour was fun, and I think if you come with the right attitude, most tours would be.

In my recap of Jamaica, I stated that I was thinking about coming up with a rating system for places I had been, but I'm still not sure that this would even be useful if I were able to come up with something.  So I'll summarize my thoughts with this:  My experiences put Savannah into one of the more better cities to go.  I think the city is worth two to three full days, possibly more if you want to do some visiting of other local attractions outside Savannah.  I'd give yourself a day or so just to wander historical Savannah, and plan on taking at least one of the many tours of the city - whichever one happens to best suit your interests.  Forsyth Park and Bonaventure Cemetery are my first picks for places to see, and the previous posts contain all the food recommendations, which may not be your cup of tea, since my picks are at least partially based on whether I think the kids would like it.

In the next post, we'll finally move on from Savannah.

Fodor's Travel App

After I went to the book store, I subsequently discovered that essentially all of the information in the Fodor's Savannah guide was available free in their 'City Guides' app.  While I'll specifically be talking about the Savannah part of the app, there are a total of 22 cities that you can choose from.

First, Fodor's didn't ask for my email or ask me to establish an account, which is a nice plus.  Second, the Fodor's listings are curated.  That means that there were editorial decisions made in what to include, and what to exclude, and the listings only contain those things that Fodor's found of sufficient interest to warrant telling you about.  The listings are separated into categories (sights, restaurants, shopping, performing arts, nightlife, and hotels), but there's also the "all" category, so in a bind, you can always revert back to seeing everything.  This means that you have less items listed in total than in open-source apps such as Triposo, but it also means that you don't have bad listings.

When you find something that you are interested in, you simply click the heart icon to add it to your favorites.  Once added, the favorites can be viewed on a map.  I did find that map locations were not necessarily fully accurate.  For example, I missed Bonaventure Cemetery the first time around because the map location made it look like it was somewhere else.  Listings contain the same blurb that is in the published travel guide (and once the app is downloaded, this does not require wifi access), in addition to website and contact info.

The app also allows you to make bookings at restaurants (using OpenTable), tours (using Viator), and hotels.  While I didn't use any of this functionality, I'm already familiar with both OpenTable and Viator.  I did like the ability to see community ratings and reviews within the Triposo app, so that would be something that I would consider as a point for improvement in this particular version.

The app is essentially self-contained, meaning there's no additional website for the app, although there are the external links from within the app that I've previously mentioned.  Another nice bonus is that the app contains the "Greater Savannah" area, which means that it includes listings for places in the general vicinity, and not just Savannah itself.

The app was well designed and easy to use.  It's simple enough to mark your favorites, see places on the map, or just find the nearest restaurant.

So between the Triposo app and Fodor's, Fodor's gets my vote.  Fodor's takes up less space, and is generally more intuitive.  I also think that Triposo's open sourcing leads to issues, as I mentioned in my prior post.  I prefer the curated listings, and I also like that it means that the quality of the descriptions I get for any location are reasonably consistent.  Although Triposo did add a few things to my "want to see while I'm in Savannah" list, these were not significant enough to warrant heavy use.  One final point  before I go - both apps were battery heavy when using the map function.  On longer days, this led to a few problems in the evening when my phone was essentially dead because of battery usage.

Next time  - one final Savannah summary, and we'll move on.

Triposo Travel Guides

Of the things that I consider to be a trip necessity, the iPhone has to be one of my top picks.  While you can use it for phone calls, it also comes in handy finding that place that you wanted to see, but you can't quite seem to figure out where it is.  With the right app, you can call a taxi, or book a dinner reservation.  You can post pictures of your food, rate sights and dining experiences, and be as social (or as anti-social) as you like.  With all this potential, I continue to search for an app that will deliver a well-rounded travel experience.

Going forward, as I make individual trips, I plan on "roadtesting" at least one travel app per trip.  Some travel apps are meant for specific uses, and so on some trips, I'll be able to test multiple apps.  For Savannah, I chose to test out a couple of apps which will each receive their own write-up.  The first one I'll cover is Triposo.

Triposo is essentially an opensource database of places.  The website gives an explanation of how things are pulled together, (http://www.triposo.com/about/how-we-do-it/) but here's my brief overview.  Triposo essentially scours the web for travel reviews and data, and compiles it into one big database.  The resulting listing of places is combined with picture tags and other info to tag places to maps, and voila!  That said, now let's dig into details.

Triposo starts by asking you to set up an account.  The account setup process is simple.  As part of the process, they ask for an email address.  I'm not sure whether this will end up with me receiving multiple spam emails or not, but I'm also not sure why they couldn't be content with just a user name and password.  Still, this is probably a minor inconvenience at best.

At least initially, the Triposo app is like most other travel planning apps.  It groups destinations into different categories (sightseeing, eating out, nightlife, other), and then you can scan through for things that interest you.  One benefit of the open-sourcing of information is that I was able to find a few points of interest that I found nowhere else.  Once you've found something that you are interested in, you simply save it to your list.  This can be done through the app, or, alternatively, you can go to the Triposo site, sign in, and add things via the website.  The website organization leaves something to be desired, as I can't figure out how to sort the listings (alphabetically, by general location, or by cuisine/tag, etc.).  Unfortunately, this is also where the ugly side of open sourcing comes in as well.  I find multiple restaurant listings for the same place (The Olde Pink House and Pink House Restaurant, or Moon River Brewing Company), as well as Tomo-Chi-Chi's Grave Monument included in the restaurant section.

The website gets worse after this - after the main sightseeing, eating out, and nightlife sections, the "Other" section is essentially tags that have been collected from across the web.  Clicking on one of them shows you all the places with that tag.  This results in tags such as "Chocolate Chip", "Spicy", and "Muffin".  And, of course, again, the tags are open-sourced, so the "Bank" tag has a couple of churches listed.

The app itself is somewhat better - items have more categories and you can sort the listings, so there's better opportunities to find specifically what you were looking for, however, the mislisting of items continues.  Another minor frustration - the app is for the entire state, and to get it to show your list of saved items, you have to navigate to the specific city you saved them in.  As we crossed into South Carolina, the app became worthless as soon as we crossed the South Carolina state line, which is both somewhat understandable, but also a little annoying, given that some of the places we went were only 30 minutes or so from Savannah.

If you're using the app during the planning phase, there is also the possibility of booking your hotel or tours from within the app, which potentially could be a neat feature.  I didn't try it on this trip, but maybe in the future.  Once you've added places, you can look at the list, and tell the app whether you're "planning", "traveling", "local", or "been here", but I couldn't tell any changes in the functionality or usefulness by changing the status.

The app also allows you to see places on the map, but doesn't allow you to filter by type of sight, which would be a nice feature.  If you select a particular spot, you can show it on the map, or in one neat feature, add it to a walk.  I also like that it shows aggregate Yelp reviews for a particular location, as well as pretty good descriptions.  Once you've visited a location, you can mark it "done", which prompts it to ask you whether you would recommend it, and any tips that you might want to give.  This does get a little annoying after a while, but I suppose this is also how they continue to evolve their programs.

As stated before, this is one of two apps that I used on the trip, and we'll talk about the second in the next post.  After that, I'll give my final assessment on the winner between the two.

New Orleans

Returning to the past travel recaps:  We made two major trips in 1996, the first being to Sanibel and Captiva, the second being our one year anniversary trip to New Orleans.  I had been to New Orleans previously, but only on business.  Business travel is a different world from regular travel, and even though you might go to some neat places, you rarely have time to explore.  Most of the time, your experience is limited to a few nice views, accompanied by a good meal or two.

Being young, and not having lots of funds, we ended up staying in a hotel that I believe has long since closed.  We had one of the only rooms that had an in-suite bathroom, so that probably helps you understand at least part of the cause.  As a second point, the hotel was ideally located for tours of the New Orleans cemetery, which meant that we were several blocks from Jackson Square, Bourbon Street, and most of the French Quarter in general.

I know we brought the camera, but I am going to have to hunt for the pictures.  My recollection is that we took a picture or two of us soaking our feet after all the walking we did.  I don't remember everything we did, but we did two walking tours in between all the other walking - and if you've ever been to New Orleans, you know that it is a walking city.  As I recall, both of the tours were good - one was of the New Orleans cemetery, and the other was a ghost tour.

I mainly remember eating.  New Orleans is justifiably known for its food, and we had meals in places all over the French Quarter, ranging from Maspero's Cafe to Mr. B's Bistro, to The Court of Two Sisters.  Even with the vast amount of walking we were doing, I'm still not sure that we walked off all the food.

We rode the streetcar into the Garden District, and found the home of Anne Rice, and just generally explored, ate, walked, ate, listened to music, ate, and then ate some more.

New Orleans falls solidly into the category of one of my favorite cities.  It is grungy at times, can feel more than a little edgy, but definitely a worthy city for a visit.

Savannah Wanderings, Part II

For our final day in Savannah, we skipped the free hotel breakfast and went to Goose Feathers Cafe.  When we got there, the line was out the door, but it moved along quickly enough.  If you happen to go to Savannah, brave whatever line there may be - it was well worth the relatively short wait, in my opinion.  Goose Feathers serves breakfast and lunch, and although we ate breakfast there, I would have been more than willing to eat lunch there as well.

After breakfast, we began the second day of Savannah wandering, and went to City Market, where we purchased a carriage tour.  We had a little bit of time before the tour began, so we did poke around a bit in the City Market shops.  There are a few little art galleries nearby, and the Savannah Candy Kitchen drew our attention as well for its wide variety of sweets.

Our carriage tour was fun, and over far too quickly.  My general experience with carriage tours has been the same whereever I've been, and Savannah is a city that is ideally suited for a short history lesson via carriage tour.  It's also a good way to give your feet some respite, and to entertain children, should you have any.  The tour took us through a few squares and by some other points of interest.

After the tour ended, we walked down Broughton Street, which is the main shopping thoroughfare in old Savannah, and found ourselves at Leopold's.  Leopold's originally got a vote for one of the best places to eat, but I overruled the vote, since we only ate ice cream there.  That said, Leopold's makes their own ice cream and has been around since 1918, and I can attest that they are doing something right.  Everyone thoroughly enjoyed the ice cream, and the atmosphere isn't too bad either, walls covered with posters of various films and film paraphernalia scattered throughout the shop.

Leopold's even has the cool old-timey sign.

Re-energized after the ice cream, we made our way to the Owens-Thomas house for a historical home tour.  The family pricing in this case turned out to be a bargain.  A family of four was $40, which included entrance to the Telfair Museum and the Jepson Center.  The tour was interesting, although I do get aggravated by the "no pictures" mandate that many such places have.  Still, even the kids enjoyed it, and the house had several unusual features.

The garden of the Owens-Thomas House.

Unfortunately, my wife (who will henceforth be known as "Irish Frog") fell and hurt her ankle, so after the house tour, our activities were somewhat limited.  I went back to Broughton for a few last shopping visits (our favorites on Broughton were the Paris Market, which has an interesting variety of knick knacks, books, soaps and lotions, as well as food goodies; and The Savannah Bee Company, which has honey and mead tastings, and a number of goods made with honey or beeswax.  Unique shops, and recommended if you visit the city.

We closed out the day with a trip to Desposito's, which is outside of historic Savannah on the way to Tybee Island.  Low key doesn't begin to describe the place, but the food is good.  As far as I could tell, the only way you would find it would be to know that it was there and you were looking for it.  Finishing off our trip with a round of Savannah seafood seemed to be the right thing to do, and with that we headed back to the hotel and packed for home.

Hilton Head and Hunting Island

Our third day wasn't spent so much in Savannah as on islands close to Savannah.  Getting off to a late start (as usual, although anyone who's tried to move a family of four around on anything approaching a schedule, especially on vacation, will understand the challenges associated with an early start), we made our way towards Hilton Head.  The goal of the day was to see a few lighthouses.

Hilton Head is home to a picturesque lighthouse, that, as far as I can tell, is not actually a lighthouse except in name.  I have to admit that the story isn't entirely clear, but there's now a lighthouse there apparently because someone simply decided that a lighthouse would be just the thing for Hilton Head, and what do you know?  They were right.  The lighthouse is surrounded by an upscale shopping area, which, although we didn't explore it too much, struck me as the same sort of stores you might find in any upscale beach shopping area.  The lighthouse fees here were much more reasonable than Tybee - a mere $16 for the family, so we climbed to the top of the lighthouse and looked out across the marina.

Hilton Head Lighthouse

After visiting the lighthouse, it was already time for lunch, and we headed to The Salty Dog Cafe, which got the final vote of our party for best place to eat.  The margarita was the perfect beach margarita, eminently drinkable, and the Salty Dog Amber was quite tasty.  Although we stuck with sandwiches, the sandwiches were first rate, and much better than I had expected.  The hushpuppies were different than any I have had before, with a sweetness, and texture similar to a heavy doughnut.  Once buttered, it was hard to stop eating them, although running out leaves you with few options.  I went to the shop and got one of their t-shirts, and then we struck out for the Stoney-Bayard ruins.

The ruins are literally just that, ruins, and there's not much left to what was once a plantation home and a couple of other buildings, including slave quarters, and a kitchen.  The most interesting part from my perspective was the construction, which was tabby.  Tabby is a mixture of oyster shells, sand and water to make a sort of concrete, which formed the plantation walls.  While interesting, I don't recommend going out of your way to see them, although if you're in the area, it's worth a short visit.

Hopping back into the car, we headed north towards Hunting Island.  Hunting Island struck me as the sort of place that beaches used to be probably 50 plus years ago.  There's a few restaurants, but they are really little more than shacks, and the lighthouse that we were hunting was in a state park.  Because of the drive, we didn't make it in time to see the interior of the lighthouse (full disclosure: the lighhouse also charges an additional fee over and above the fee charged by the park, which I thought a little ridiculous).  Nonetheless, we wandered the grounds, ogled the lighthouse, and then walked the beach for a bit.  The whole area seemed somewhat surreal to me, like we had inadvertently transported ourselves into a tropical forest that just happened to be located on the coast of South Carolina.  The kids joked that we were in Jurassic Park.

Yes, this is South Carolina.

The drive back to Savannah took a while, and so we opted for a little Mexican joint in the strip mall next to the hotel.  All finally concurred that it was the food lowlight of the journey, so I won't spill further ink  on it here.  With that, we headed back in to rest up for our final day in Savannah.

Spooky Savannah

As I mentioned previously, in the initial planning for Savannah, a few clear themes started to emerge.  One of them, mentioned repeatedly, were the ghost tales about Savannah.  This was the clear focus point for our second day in the city.

After waking and having breakfast, we headed to Bonaventure Cemetery.  Bonaventure is probably currently best known for the "Bird Girl" statue which graced the front of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, although there are myriad interesting statues throughout the cemetery.  The "Bird Girl" statue is now in the Telfair Museum to protect it from vandalism.  Bonaventure isn't too creepy by day, but you could see how when night starts to fall, this is not the place you'd want to be, what with the Spanish moss hanging low from the trees and the silent tombs all around.  Even if you're not the sort to frequent cemeteries, this one is worth a visit for the spooky atmosphere and the unique collection of statuary.

One of the many unusual vistas in Bonaventure

Unbelievably, by the time we got done in Bonaventure, it was time for lunch, so we continued over to Tybee Island for The Crab Shack.  The Crab Shack is highly recommended for kids, and still highly recommended even if you don't have kids.  This was the other location chosen by the kids as their favorite, although I'm not certain it was for the food.  In addition to the old-style beach shack type architecture, there's a pond out front with live alligators, a collection of cats that roam the decks, and a bird house with tropical birds rescued by the restaurant.  To boot, the food was a solid choice as well, and the views from our section of the deck were nice.  I could easily see killing a few hours here on a summer evening.

The gator pond at The Crab Shack

After lunch, we finally headed on towards the Tybee Island Lighthouse.  Although I didn't hear any ghost stories specifically about the lighthouse, I don't doubt that there are a handful out there for the intrepid explorer to find.  I did find that the lighthouse fees were overly steep - they wanted $32 for a family of four to enter.  While that includes entrance to the lighthouse and museum, since all we were really interested in was the lighthouse, we passed on paying the fees, and took pictures from outside the fence, which worked out well anyway.

The view from outside the lighthouse and museum

We spent a little time wandering the beach, which allowed the kids some time to play, before heading back to Savannah for dinner at Moon River Brewing Company.  Moon River Brewing Company was the spot of a Ghost Adventures episode back in 2009, and the waitress was kind enough to let us go into the basement, where some of the strangest parts of the episode occurred.  The beer selection was good, although I think misleading, since almost everything is called a "pale ale", when there actually seemed to be only one pale ale style in the whole collection.  The food was also good, and they serve barbecue from Angels BBQ, so I ended up getting my barbecue fix anyway.

After dinner, we headed south to the Sorrell-Weed House, site of the Ghost Hunters investigation circa 2005.  We had booked a ghost tour there, and we toured both the house and the surrounding neighborhood with our guide, who was superb.  I'll confess that the reviews I found on the web were less than stellar for the tour, but my experience was excellent.  It was a bit chintzy, to be sure, and I would have appreciated a smaller tour size, but all in all, it was an enjoyable time, and the kids had a great time exploring the dimly lit basement with their EMF detectors.

Maybe there's a ghost here or maybe there isn't.  Who's to say?

The tour ended around nine that evening, and so ended our second day in Savannah.