Vacation! Part 2: Atlanta and (part of) Savannah

Back to the vacation recap. I've been negligent in getting this finished!

Days 4-5: Atlanta, Ga. -- We arrived in Atlanta in the early afternoon, and we were happy to stay with and catch up with my college roomie Ashley and her fun hubby Anthony. Their house is so cute and comfortable, and Rob loved introducing them to geocaching (right, Ant??). We had a great breakfast-for-dinner at The Flying Biscuit Cafe. Mmmm. Wish we had one here!

Days 5-8: Savannah, Ga. -- After leaving Atlanta, we drove the four hours to Savannah. After we'd checked in, we set out on foot and did a walking tour from our guide book. A lot of the sites we saw were from the movie "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil", which I loved! We had lunch -- and more importantly, bread pudding -- at Express Cafe. We went down by the waterfront to check it out, then headed back to the hotel to cool off.

We'd researched some places to eat dinner and had chosen a bbq place, so we got directions and started our walk there. There had been some light rolling thunder, so we took our rain jackets along. That was the smartest thing we did the entire trip! Just as we got to the bbq joint -- which was closed on Mondays! -- the heavens opened up, lightning started flashing and the rain poured down. We were probably about a mile from the hotel at that point, so we just started walking toward our second dinner choice. But with the rain coming down, the streets flooding almost instantly (literally, it was up above our ankles at the street corners) and our clothes soaked, we decided to go back toward the hotel. I was terrified by all of the lightning! We grabbed some cheesesteak subs at a local place across from our hotel, took hot showers and ate our lovely dinner in the hotel room. Luckily, it cleared up and we ventured out after dinner for some awesome ice cream. Rob says this will probably be one of our strongest memories from the trip!

Tuesday after breakfast, I headed over to get in line at Lady and Sons, Paula Deen's Savannah restaurant. My friend Leann told me to be in line at 8 a.m. (they start giving out dinner reservation times at 9:30 a.m.), and she was right. I was the fourth in line, and by 8:30 a.m., the line was down the street and wrapped around the block. Crazy!

We'd decided to do one of the Trolley Tours during the heat of the day, but we saw a horse and carriage tour and decided to do it instead. Our carriage driver told us about all sorts of stuff and we rode around the historic district for almost an hour. We saw the park where the beginning of Forrest Gump was filmed, saw General Sherman's house, learned about the Live Oak trees and a bunch more. It was really interesting and fun.

That evening, we headed back to Paula Deen's for dinner. In my opinion, you go here more for the experience than the food, although it was all good. It was laden with butter, just as we'd expected.

Okay... this blog entry is long enough. Rest of Savannah and all of Charleston -- plus photos! -- coming soon...