🔊 Listen to this

We arrived in Savannah, Georgia, around 7:45 pm on Thursday. (If you can imagine such a thing, we left the House o’ Canines later than planned. Indeed, The Stepdaughter and Stepson-in-Law had themselves already left the premises on separate errands of their own. So there was no trumpet fanfare or weepy hanky-waving to see us out the gate — just a few “Have a nice trip!” farewells from the staff.)

The drive — pretty much all I-95 — was mostly uneventful, with some fierce but brief rain and ominous clouds to see us off at the Florida-Georgia border. one stop, for gas and snacks. En route, The Missus was busily researching one thing and another — about Savannah (places to eat *cough*), Charleston (things to do, or not do), the road ahead (gas stations? speed traps? weather conditions?). Gotta love an iPad which doesn’t depend on WiFi, right?

After checking in, we changed clothes and prepared to head out for dinner. By now it was 8:45-9:00 and, The Missus feared, we would not be able to get seated at The Olde Pink House — her first choice for the evening’s meal. (It was just 2-3 blocks from the inn, so the convenience was hard to argue with.) In the event, though, we were able to get a small table in a corner of the basement tavern. (The Missus may have melodramatized our desperation and longing a bit.)

The basement was certainly, er, basement-like. In the photo at left, you can get a sense of the dim lighting — but it was actually even darker than it appears here. The only illumination on our side of the area came from a small candle — one per table — which made it almost impossible to read the menus, to read each other’s lips, and so on.

But it was so late, and we were so tired, and the service so sluggish (personally, I think we were almost literally invisible to the staff). We each had just a drink or two, a bowl of she-crab soup, and an appetizer. And then we called it a night.

Around noon Friday, we checked out, had a very light breakfast snack, and then got on our way to Charleston, South Carolina. For this trip of less than 3 hours, we were able to stay on a plain old US highway — US Route 17 — for nearly the entire distance. I’d already checked out Rte 17 as a likely way of following the East Coast on up to at least Maryland, so I had some sense of what to expect: some areas it was almost like a limited-access highway, with a couple lanes in each direction, and in some “built-up” areas it had stoplights every here and there. The road surface never quite became primitive, exactly, but you could tell that the various areas got varying degrees of attention from whoever was responsible for highway funding.

On arrival in Charleston, we drove (intentionally) a short distance past the motel, headed straight for the BBQ restaurant The Missus had targeted: the Swig & Swine on Savannah Highway (i.e., Rte. 17). The food had received many positive reviews, and she had also reckoned — rightly — that I’d be very interested in the “swig” portion of the menu: heavily weighted towards beer and whiskey, with a good healthy chunk of creative cocktails — and a sort of “oh, by the way” assortment of non-alcoholic beverages.

And then, finally, we doubled back and checked in at the Sleep Inn. It was only around 3:30-4:00 in mid-afternoon at that point, but it was so damned hot and humid, y’know? We pulled in our overnight luggage and a few other things. And then we spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in the room: refiguring our itinerary and catching up on a little TV and reading.

Tomorrow, August 1: on to Wilmington, North Carolina!

…or first ones, I guess. Depends on how you look at the next two weeks.

The lease on our apartment is up at the end of the month, so — like it or not — by July 1 we won’t have a place to live. In the meantime, I hope to start posting updates here; these probably will not be daily, and probably not very long, but I thought it’d be more convenient (for you and me) to do it this way than by cramming a gigantic email update into everyone’s Inboxes.

One other note: I can’t make any promises (So what else is new?, you ask), but I hope that Toni will occasionally drop her own notes here, too. Odds are very very very good that our impressions of everything — road trips in general, this road trip in particular, points of interest, and so on — our impressions will differ quite a bit. I’d hate to bear the responsibility for representing her side fairly!