Savannah Georgia, Beaufort, South Carolina

Here we are again, heading north and hopefully following the warm weather.  So far, so good.  After we left St. Augustine we headed north toward Savannah, Georgia.  The waterway and the scenery changed dramatically again.  We are now traveling through a waterway that has marshlands on both sides.  It twists and turns and if you look at the picture below you will see as we turn the sailboat ahead of us looks like he is stuck in the weeds.  He really is traveling up the same waterway we are on.

This is the waterway and if you look really carefully you can see the red marker way off in the distance.  These are very important to a boater as they tell you where the deeper water in the channel is located.

We anchored down river from Savannah as the Savannah River has a lot of high tides ( 9 feet) and strong currents.  We were watching the weather as we always do and a weather front was approaching so we wanted to be in more protected waters.  The storm passed north of our anchorage and these are two photos of the storm clouds we saw.

It was fascinating to watch the clouds lite up for an hour or more and later that evening (about 1 a.m.) we too got rain, but luckily no wind.  It can be a little unsettling with the wind gusting high when you are anchored.

The next stretch of water showed that there were several inlets that lead to the ocean and we started to see shrimp boats and more of the oystering boats that we had seen on the gulf side of Florida.

As we entered the Savannah River we followed a tour boat that provides day trips to the tourist to see the river.  The white boat is the tour boat which is quite big compared to our boat.  Well take a look at the cargo ships!  They were huge compared to the tour boat and we are the peanut boat.

From outside our door at the dock in Savannah

There is a city dock at Savannah which is located right in the heart of downtown.  We stayed there and thoroughly enjoyed watching all the activity at the waterfront and we also did a walking tour of the downtown historic district and took a lovely horse drawn carriage ride.  It was delightful.  We enjoyed some of the local specialties at the restaurants including chowder, crab cakes, and the most delicious eggs benedict.  We loved the entire experience.

Here are some pictures of the many parks that make up the city.  Oglethorphe was the settler that designed the city.  There are now 24 squares that make up the town.  They are lovely parks which usually have azalea bushes.  Because the weather here has been ahead of schedule, like most of the US.  the bushes were already done blooming.  The parks however were still beautiful.

We are in the photo here getting ready to take the carriage ride.

After the carriage ride we spent the a day checking out the entire historic district.  The streets go down to the riverfront.  Here are a couple of pictures of what those cobblestone streets look like.

We visited one of the cemeteries in town, this one had over 700 people who had died during the Great Yellow Fever epidemic in 1820.  Here are some photos of the grounds.

We also saw the Cathedral St. John the Baptist which is a catholic church in Savannah.  It was founded in 1850.  Amazing

This is a picture of a garden of a local resident.  The gardens were always enclosed so that the lady of the house could work in the garden and hike up her skirt without a man seeing her ankles.  If per chance, a gentleman passing had seen her ankles, then he would have to dual with her brother or father.  Not that long ago.

After thoroughly enjoying Savannah we were not disappointed when we arrived in Beaufort, S.C.  We did a walking tour of the city and these are some of the historic sites we saw there.

This is the visitor center which was an arsenal in 1798

Here are some of the historic homes.

We also saw a couple of the churches at Beaufort.

The is the Baptist Church of Beaufort

We toured the St. Helena's Church which was began in 1742.  They will be celebrating their 300 anniversary this year.  

I think what surprised us the most was the giant trees on the streets at Beaufort.  Here is a picture of Erwin standing at the base of one of those giant trees.

Reunion with our river buddies

Hello to all of our faithful followers.  We traveled to Daytona Beach and had a wonderful visit with our friends.We made the river trip down to the Gulf of Mexico with them.  We traveled off and on with these two couples from the first of September 2010 to December 2010.  It was such fun to catch up with both of them.  We did have a few glitches along the way.  We were late for one of the dates we had set up because there just happened to be an event in Daytona that you have heard about.  It is called "bike week".  There were about 200,000 visitors to the city and many of them were on their Harley motorcycles.  Well needless to say it does make for a lot of interesting folks and the traffic can be a hassle.  Of course, we had no camera on us at the time, so we just have our memories.  Here are the folks we got to get together with.

 This is Woody and Judy Post from Rockland, Maine.

This is Larry and Dorothy Rand from Harbor Heights, Florida.

We hated to part company with all of these great people, but we have built lifelong friendships with all of them and know that we will be seeing them again.  Each of these couples has already completed the Great Loop.  They totally understood that we had to take off and push North back to Michigan.

This boat was just north of Daytona.  It may have suffered from a high tide or it may be the result of a hurricane, either of which is never good.

We traveled a long day, but were able to make it to St. Augustine.  This city was settled in the 1500's and has so much history.  We did our own walking tour through the city.  These are some of the sites that we thought were interesting.

These are of one of several churches in the downtown area.

These next photos are an important part of the history.

This is one of several clock towers in the city.

These are several pics of the fort that is located at the harbor and also a part of the downtown.

We also walked through the old hotel which was built by Henry Flagler (he also built a railroad here in Florida)  It was very extravagant and was designed like much of Europe.  The stain glass and elaborate wood carvings were especially pretty.  We could only see a portion of the hotel as it is now Flagler College.  I can not imagine attending school in such an interesting historical building.

The many stained glass windows are all Tiffany Glass.

There is also a famous bridge called the bridge of lions.  These statues are located by the bridge and here is the bridge itself.

 

East Coast of Florida

This was one of the towns that we anchored near, Cocoa Beach.  It is a charming little town with very interesting and unique shops.  This next picture is the beautiful park at the waterfront of the Intercoastal Waterway.

We had a great time walking around the park and enjoying the town.  As you can see the anchorage was just the other side of the park.  

Here is a couple of pictures of the geckos in the park, they were everywhere as they are in most of Florida, but this park was full of them.

The next town that we visited was Titusville.  It too was an interesting town.  They have a brand new mooring field that opened in October of 2011.  It was a great stop for us as we both need a haircut (and of course I needed to get rid of the gray hair) so we stayed in town a couple of days, but now we both are looking good.  

This is a picture of Solitude on the mooring ball.  We had to take a picture as the water was finally really calm.  We had several days of the wind blowing like snot and we were very happy to be sitting still.  

One of the days while we were walking I noticed that the pond in the park that we were walking through had something that looked different on the bank, yes, it was an alligator.

After we watched him a few minutes, I thought I had spotted a second alligator popping his head up.  Check it out!

Run Mr. Turtle, this is not a good place to catch some sun.  Lucky for him the alligator had eaten breakfast.  He swam away and I was glad that he was not a snack.

We also saw some fascinating animals at the dock of the marina.  The manatee love this area and we spotted several each time we went to the dinghy dock.  

You can see from this next photo that this manatee had a couple of scars on his body from coming in contact with the motor of a boat.

The highlight of our visit to Titusville was meeting our old cruising buddies, Tom and Sheryl.  They have cruised with us for a number of years in Michigan, Washington State, and when ever one of us was cruising, the others would come for a visit.  It was great fun to catch up with them.  We had dinner at the boat and had a wonderful visit.  Here they are enjoying the sunset at the bow of our boat.

The next day we traveled to and anchorage close to the Ponce Inlet.  I got a picture of the the lighthouse there.  It is the tallest lighthouse in Florida at 175 feet.  It was a great sunny day and we enjoyed it.

There is a beach near by called the New Smyrna beach.  It is dog friendly and there were a lot of folks enjoying the sun, the beach, the sea, and we went shelling on the beach.  Isn't it pretty?