Anniversary Trip: Day 3b, Savannah Food Tour and Leaving the South

Friday July 29, 2022

We woke up and made our way downstairs for breakfast where we met 2 other couples staying at McMillan Inn; one was from Michigan and the other was from Australia. They served us fruit, cheesy bacon grits, strawberry french toast, and fried chicken. It was delicious and I enjoyed all of it. After breakfast we looked around the house some more. We saw an old music box in the basement that was bigger than a record player; it played large metal disks which could be switched out. Unfortunately, the owners told us it wasn't working. Instead, they let us play big, thick discs on a huge phonograph. It wasn't quite a record player, but it was very similar.

The strawberry french toast was almost a bread pudding; it was our favorite.

The phonograph played disks that were about half an inch thick. So cool!

We packed up our things and left our bed and breakfast. First, we stopped by Forsyth Park, which has a famous fountain. Our tour guide for the ghost tour told us that the fountain was actually ordered from a Sears and Roebuck Catalog, and it was originally orange.

The cicadas were sure noisy, except for this dead one.

It's good they repainted the fountain white. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to tell where the statue ends and where Erik begins.

Next, we drove back to downtown Savannah for a food tasting tour. We waited inside Capital Bee Company and looked around at all their junk trinkets. Our tour guide, Country, told us there was a group of six ladies on their way that would join our tour. We panicked. "Is it a bachelorette party?!" No, it was a group of middle-aged women who left their husbands and children at home for a girls' trip. Whew! That was close. Our tour started by tasting several different honeys: frosted, snowberry, holly, chocolate, tupelo, raspberry, and frosted cinnamon. I think the meadowfoam honey was paired with gouda cheese, which tasted really good. We ended up buying frosted, tupelo, and meadowfoam.

Poor Erik was only one of 2 guys in the entire tour group.

The next stop on the tour was Cha Bella. The appeal of this restaurant is that they don't have a refrigerator; they make all of their food with fresh ingredients. They served us a deep-fried rice ball filled with spices and parmesan cheese served over marinara sauce. It definitely tasted fresh, but it was kind of a strange dish. Everyone else on the tour paid extra to order alcohol at every restaurant. I guess we saved around $100 by just drinking water.

We walked around some town squares next. Country told us some ghost stories and some history about the town of Savannah. After walking for a while, we finally arrived at our next restaurant: Zunzi's. It was a South African restaurant, which served us "the best chicken sandwich in Georgia." The sandwich basically had some hot sauce and Caesar salad dressing on it. It was good. We sat outside in the shade, but it was still hot and humid.

For our next tasting item, we walked to a "fancy gas station" called Parker's to sample a fried pork chop. Country told us that she was eating their fried chicken and fried porkchops with some friends. At the end of the gathering, there was plenty of leftover fried chicken, but the fried porkchops were all gone. It was okay.

Next, we walked to Mint To Be Mojito to try some empanadas. Everyone was paying extra for mojitos, so I asked if we could get one without alcohol. We tried the raspberry mock-jito, which was good, but it was mostly ice. I should have asked for little to no ice. The empanadas were good. We ate them in the back of the restaurant in the "speakeasy," which had a hidden door to conceal it back in the prohibition days.

We walked past Oglethorpe Square again, which is where Forrest Gump waited for the bus.

Our last stop was at Leopold's ice cream. We didn't actually go there because the line was all the way down the street. We stood across the street in the shade while Country cut in front of everyone in line and came back with butter pecan ice cream for us. It was good. Country said her boss wanted us to have tutti frutti flavor since it was invented at Leopold's, but there's just something more Southern about butter pecan ice cream.

We didn't try tutti frutti: rum ice cream with candied fruit and roasted pecans.

We walked back to Capital Bee Company while we ate our ice cream and willed the ice to melt in our mock-jito cup, which was now mostly iced mint leaves, limes, and raspberries. We quickly bought some honey and got back into our car to drive to the airport. Our flight flew out of Charleston, South Carolina, which was almost 2 hours away. The Charleston airport was pretty small, so we had no problems getting to our plane on time. We forgot to check in until late the night before, so we were in the C boarding group. We almost thought that we wouldn't be able to sit together, but we found 2 seats together and plopped out butts down on them. Our connection was in Denver, and our layover was 3 hours. We ate dinner at a decent restaurant called Root Down DIA. Erik ordered a bacon cheeseburger with siracha mayo, a pretzel bun, and sweet potato fries. I got the Colombian Griddled Cheese, which was 2 corn cakes with gouda, poblano pesto, crema, and pico de gallo. It was good, but it was overcooked on the bottom. We sat and charged our electronics while we waited for our late flight back to Salt Lake.