Day 25: Savannah, GA (cont.)

Still in Savannah, GA

Today was a sightseeing day.  Since we saw so much of the town yesterday, we decided to go a little farther afield today.

Our first stop was the Bonaventure Cemetery.  It's huge and we kind of had our eyes out for the statue/monument that's on the cover of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.  We didn't find it and it's a good thing that we didn't look too hard.  We later learned that, after the success of the book and movie, they had to move it to a museum in town.

 

Next, we wanted to see the lighthouse at Tybee Island (at the mouth of the Savannah River).
On the way out, we passed through these amazing tidelands.  Flat island after flat island connected by roads that are subject to tidal flooding.

Tybee is the island that is farthest out.  Here's the lighthouse:

Tybee is also where the locals go to the beach (very pretty beach).

South:

North:

On the way back to Savannah, we stopped at Fort Polaski National Monument.  The Fort was commissioned after the War of 1812.  It was considered to be invincible and was on the verge of being completed when the Civil War broke out.  Of course, the Confederate Army manned it immediately, so, before they had ever manned their "invincible" fort, the Union Army had to defeat it.  Apparently, they fired upon it from Tybee Island with new, longer range, rifled cannons and took the fort within hours.  The Union held it throughout the war but it was pretty much inactive after that.
The fort included a network of moats and draw bridges.  As we approached from the landward side there was this triangular mote around what looked like a hill.  There were fortifications all around the top of the hill connected by an extensive network of tunnels.

The Fort itself:

After the fort, we headed back to Savannah, had lunch on the Riverfront and then went on a trollybus tour of Old Savannah.  We saw a lot of what we'd already seen but heard a lot more stories about it.

-J-