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| Savannah to St Augustine
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This was a short driving day, 170 miles, to allow time
for us to visit Savannah and St. Augustine. We spent three hours in the morning
seeing Savannah. The city has some old treed squares, with huge live oaks
hung with Spanish moss. However, the general air is surprisingly run down and
poverty stricken, with poor blacks sitting on chairs on the sidewalk in front of
their sagging row cottages and dilapidated tenements, and poor whites in
trailers. The economy has been up and down through the years, but now there
appears to be some gentrification of the old cotton warehouses along the river
port. We did of course enter on the poor side of town and we hear from others
that there is another area where the wealthy live in grand old houses. |
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riverfront is quaint with a cobbled pavement with the old railroad tracks
running along it. Some of the cotton warehouses are still decaying but most have
been converted into a mixture of apartments, gift shops, coffee houses, and
pubs. On the river side of the road there are nicely landscaped gardens A lavish
Westin Hotel is on the island across the river, linked by a new cable stayed
bridge. |
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| We continued south along I 95, and stopped at the Florida
Welcome Center, which was crowded with wrinklies snapping up pamphlets. Peter
found a special section on Daytona Speed Week, including a schedule. The day
after, Sunday, Daytona would be on our route south and Peter persuaded Joyce
this would be a good thing to visit. She thinks he knew all about this before we
left home! |
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We continued on to St.
Augustine, which is a nice city with a
lovely bay and an old castle. The city was founded in 1565 by the Spanish, and
was attacked several times by the English, until 1763 when, at the end of the
Seven Years’ War, Spain ceded Florida to Britain in order to regain Cuba. In
1784, Florida became Spanish again during the American Revolutionary war, and
finally became American in 1821. We drove around the old city and visited the
Spanish Castillo de San Marcos, constructed in 1672 – 1695. The Motel
was a rip off ($75 with no breakfast, no newspaper). |
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