We took a Grey Line bus tour of the historic district of Savannah. The city surprised us. We expected large estates on lush gardens (a la "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"). The city went through depression in the 20th Century and many (most?) of the older homes were left to fall apart. The downtown area is really run down. It seemed like almost half of the houses were for sale or for rent. Some neighborhoods were in very bad shape, worse than we'd seen anywhere on our trip, even the bad parts of New Orleans.

In recent years there has been renewed interest in restoring homes to their original state. We were able to go into a house that is being restored as much as possible to its original state (it's about 200 years old). This includes replacing the ugly air conditioning ducts with almost invisible ports, and painting the walls in period colors.

Savannah was originally planned around a series of squares, and most of the original ones have survived. They are like mini parks, each with a garden or a monument of some kind, and you use them like square round-abouts. In some of the nicer squares we did find a few grand old homes more like the ones we'd been expecting.

Sidenote: While we were in Savannah, they decided to modify their state flag, which is currently dominated by the confederate flag.

We left Savannah, drove through South Carolina without stopping or even looking at the AAA book (although we would have stopped at a plantation had we had the time) and got to Seema's (a college friend of Lawrence's) in early evening.