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Published: February 26th 2014
Pizza Time in St. Augustine
George, Danielle and family gave us a great recommendation on this place!Fri., Feb. 21 We left Jupiter in the morning and headed north. I asked our GPS for restaurant recommendations and ended up having lunch at Mustard's Last Stand in downtown Melbourne. The menu had three pages of hot dogs. I had a veggie dog with cheese, coleslaw and BBQ sauce; it probably wasn't the smartest choice of food I've made this trip. 😞 We got to St. Augustine @ 3:30 and went right to a Comfort Inn and Suites with our Travel.com coupons. We couldn't use the coupon and were told we were lucky to get a hotel room because it was Daytona 500 weekend. We called our friends Danielle and Harvey and were able to meet them and their three beautiful daughters in their new house in St. Augustine. We had a very enjoyable dinner together at Carrabbas. It's so much fun listening to the girls and catching up with their lives.
Sat., Feb. 22, we decided to walk around St. Augustine even though the weather was a little cold and rainy. I had read about the Pirate Museum and it sounded like a lot of fun. We paid to go in and got a map of the museum
and were told to look for the skull & crossbones where we would find more treasures. This actually was a very fun museum. Jim and I enjoyed it, although it would have been more fun with a couple kids along. Jim made friends with the pirate who walked around giving information and taking pictures with the kids. He seemed to be having as much fun as any of the kids. We then walked across the street to the Castillo de San Marco where we were once again able to get in free with Jim's senior pass. Danielle and Harvey and George (Danielle's dad) highly recommended, rather, they insisted, that we have lunch at Pizza Time in Old St. Augustine. It turns out that this pizza place is run by displaced Brooklynites and they definitely make great pizza! For dessert, I got a Hyppo Gourmet popsicle and out of all the exotic flavors, I chose avocado coconut...sounds horrible, but was surprisingly good. We did a little shopping and then drove to Brunswick, GA for the night. This time, we were able to use the Travel.org coupon we got at the Welcome Center, even though it was very busy with a wedding
party. As we were pretty tired, we opted for plain old Subway for dinner.
Sun., Feb. 23, we left for Savannah and got there early in the day. We couldn't check in to our hotel, The Inn at Ellis Square (another find we got from the Georgia Welcome Center) yet, so we left the car parked in the lot and went in to speak to the concierge to get ideas about what to do and where to go. The weather was overcast, but pleasantly warm so we decided to just do a walking tour of Savannah and went first to River Street and had coffee and beignets at Huey's. The girl at the Welcome Center told us that we HAD to have ice cream at Leopolds so, of course, we found our way there. I can highly recommend the butter pecan! Savannah's streets all wind around the many park-like squares and most are one-way. I'm so glad we parked at the hotel and decided to walk, even though our feet hurt at the end of the day. Spring was definitely making its way to Savannah as we saw several flowering redbud and tulip trees. We saw a man watering
his ivy covered wall, stopped at the SCAD gift shop and found Chippewa Square where they filmed parts of Forrest Gump. Later on, we browsed through some antique shops, walked around City Market and went back to Huey's for dinner where I had shrimp and grits.
Mon., Feb. 24, we left Savannah around 8:30 AM hoping to get to the South Carolina Welcome Center by 9:00, but between Jill (our GPS) and me, we got us very lost and ended up losing about an hour. We did manage to stop at the Welcome Center and got a map and a very good discount coupon for the Days Inn in downtown Charleston. We got to Charleston around noon, checked in and started right out walking. First on our tour was The Market where we saw beautiful sweet grass hand-woven baskets, wooden bowls and benne wafers. My friend John, who is from Charleston originally, gave me his brother's phone number and suggested I ask him for suggestions of where to go and what to see. I called him from Waterfront Park and he suggested we go to The Battery and walk along Chalmers St. with its original cobblestones street and Church
St. to see the beautiful old homes. He also suggested we take a carriage ride to get a good overview of the city, but we never got around to doing that. We did go to the Old Slave Mart Museum on Chalmers St. That is a very interesting museum about the slave trading business before the Civil War. About five years before the War, Charleston made it illegal to sell slaves outside, so they brought them inside at that location. We found the museum to be very interesting and very poignant. We walked down to the Battery and then walked back uptown on Church St. and East Bay St., where we saw many beautiful old homes - it made me think about Gone With the Wind and how Rhett Butler was originally from Charleston. We walked back to Waterfront Park and spent some time sitting in the sun and enjoying the beautiful day. Kings St. was a very fun street to walk down. It has many of the same stores as New York's Fifth Avenue, but with a decidedly southern flavor. Tom recommended Husk or Rutledge Cab Co. for dinner but we would have had to get in the car
and drive a ways, so we decided to take John's recommendation and went to Bocci's, an Italian restaurant around the corner from the hotel. We shared a glass of a very good Italian red wine, I had seafood scampi and Jim had pork chops with mushroom risotto. Tiramisu for dessert completed a wonderful meal. At dinner, we compared the two cities and I decided that I liked Savannah, but I could live in Charleston. It's kept its antebellum flavor, but still seems like a bustling and viable modern city. We debated staying another day, but decided we needed to move on and, after a butter and cream filled breakfast at Toast, a well-known little restaurant next to our hotel, we left for Florence. We took a little detour and drove along Hwy 17 past Mount Pleasant where we saw several little shacks displaying the Sweet Grass weavings that the area is well known for. We did stop at one of the shacks and spoke at length with Elijah who told us how he started weaving and showed us his beautiful baskets. Along the road to Florence, we noticed many trees with broken branches and limbs. It reminded us of the
road to Idabel, OK, where the man told us they had been damaged by an ice storm. I guess these were the victims of the ice storms they had in this area not too long ago. We made it to Florence by noon where we'll stay for a couple days.
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