Day 28 - St. Augustine to Savannah

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St. Augustine to Savannah - 39°c

After waking up in good time this morning and mercifully not finding any cockroaches in my room as Nathan and Tim had next door, I made my way down to the coach and even managed to log onto the internet whilst waiting on the coach for others to arrive - the wi-fi signal obviously strong enough where the coach was parked.

It was a beautiful morning and made for a lovely start to our journey as we left St. Augustine and headed towards Savannah. We stopped off in Jacksonville around 10am for a brief half hour stop during which time I loaded up with some more snacks from a grocery store. Kristina made a joke about the fact that the back half of the bus (where I’m usually sitting) is getting like a buffet, since everyone back there has got so much food between us!

We continued for another couple of hours before we arrived in Savannah around lunchtime and after a brief drive around the city on the coach, we were dropped off at the hotel, but couldn’t yet check in since it was just a bit too early. So Kristina let us have a wander around Savannah for a few hours, telling us to be back around 4pm to check in when our rooms would all be ready for us.

I headed off with Marnee, (Aussie) Michelle and Lauren around some of the shops, before we caught up with a load of the others including Nathan, Tim, James and Joey in Subway where we stopped for some lunch.
After lunch we continued our walk around Savannah, and following our maps we managed to locate the area where a large portion of ‘Forrest Gump’ was filmed. - The area where he sits on a bench and talks to people about his life’s story throughout the film. From there we walked right down to the seafront and had a look around some of the tourist shops and took some photos down by the sea. With the humidity rising throughout the day, as we were down by the sea watching an enormous ship literally scrape under a bridge there were 3 massive bolts of lightning accompanied by deafening thunder, before torrential rain all came out of nowhere. It was quite an incredible and impressive sight, and we stood for some time under a shop porch just looking out onto the storm that was overhead. Thankfully it didn’t last too long and we were able to continue having a look around.

It soon reached just before 4pm by which time we had wandered back to just a few minutes walk away from the hotel anyway, so made our way back to pick our bags up from the coach and into the hotel. Not long after doing so, did the skies open again and the thunderstorm continued with full force. I bumped into a few people down in the lobby when I went down to try to access the internet, and we watched the TV in the lobby area bring up warnings of the storm going on outside around us and also warnings of the strong possibility of flash flooding.

I managed to get some washing done and hung it around my room to dry, and also had a brief nap before it was time to meet everyone down in the lobby and for Kristina to take us over the road to our spot of nightlife for the evening, a gay bar with karaoke! Everyone had been so looking forward to the night after Kristina told us that it was one of the most popular evenings on her other tours. I’d been getting ribbed all day about how tonight was “about me” and how everyone was “expecting big things from me”, in reference to the possibility of me meeting someone in the bar! However, although the music was good, the bar was nice and the drinks were exceptionally cheap, it was near enough empty aside from the 50 or so from our group who had descended onto it!

When I reached the bar, I immediately noticed that the woman serving was from England, and chatted to her for some time about how long she’d been living over here, where she was originally from and how much she enjoyed living in the U.S. I think she took quite a shine to the few of us who were from England and made sure that she ‘looked after’ us in particular.

Before too long, the karaoke started up and the first person from our Contiki group was Tim, who did a very memorable version of a Killers track. After that the floodgates opened and one by one more and more from our group did a track or two with some hilarious results, especially (Brit) Danielle's version of Madonna's "Like A Virgin" which I think will forever be etched into my mind, not least because she came off the stage area, out into the crowd and groped me rather suggestively! Kristina and a few of the girls did a couple Spice Girl songs, which were also brilliant and got not only them, but everybody else dancing along too.

As the night progressed I started to feel a bit unwell (to say the least!) and around 1am had to leave the bar before I managed to get up and sing. - I’ve since been told that Lauren and I were being called up to do our duet of “Islands In the Stream” as I was leaving, but with the room appearing to suddenly start spinning and my stomach doing likewise, I knew I had to get out and get back to the hotel room which was thankfully just a stone’s throw away before I passed out on the bar floor and made a fool of myself! Not particularly the night I’d imagined, but at ‘Day 28’, unlike nearly all the others on the trip who’ve had many occurrences of similar nights before, it was the only night so far that I’ve felt so unwell, so I don’t feel too embarrassed or ashamed of how my night ended up!

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