After a long winter in
Baltimore, with trips
to
Montreal
and upstate
New York doing little to thaw the bones or warm the skin, the prospect of a
change of scenery with a few days down south was eagerly anticipated. The
meatball and I wanted to do something a little special on my penultimate visit
to Columbia this year, and as that final trek will be to celebrate her
graduation (I’m so proud of her!), this was our last chance to get out of town
for a day trip.
There was much to do
before that, however, including ignore her while becoming engrossed with Friday
Night Lights when we arrived at her house late Thursday night after my
flight into Charlotte. My main complaint, unsurprisingly, is that there isn’t
enough football in the show, but considering I walked into a house full of
girls in the middle of the third season of a show I’ve never watched, I think I
managed to follow along with the plotline fairly well. I think Tyra giving up
on her college dreams to follow the cowboy into the wilds of Texas was a huge
mistake, but what do I know?
We woke up Friday and resumed our
rivalry at the university’s gym, playing spirited games of Around the World
and one-on-one before challenging each other to free throw and three-point
shooting contests. Gina then abandoned me to work on a project with classmates
at the business school – and by abandoned, I mean I encouraged her to leave so
that I could ask the guys on the practice court next to me if they needed
another person to play a pickup game, which we did for the next hour and a half
before calling it quits.
After showering and
changing into something a bit less disgusting and sweaty, I picked Gina up and
we made our way to dinner at Cantina 76,
an excellent Mexican-inspired restaurant and bar on Main Street in Columbia.
The chicken pesto, chicken teriyaki, and BBQ shrimp tacos I had were washed
down with a Corona, and Gina just had a veggie taco and the chips and queso she
split with me since she and her partners took advantage of the value menu at
Wendy’s earlier that afternoon. Choices, choices.
That night we went to a soirée
hosted by Gina’s friend, and the birthday boy, Owen, a very cool guy to whom I
wish I could’ve gotten to know more in my visits to Columbia over the past few
months, but the timing just hasn’t worked out. People got dressed up, to some
extent or another, and it was a fun time filled with delicious cookies made by
Gina’s roommate Kristy for the occasion. Instead of continuing the night
downtown, though, Gina and I headed home a bit early with our expedition the
next day in mind.
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| My hot date for the night! |
There were really three choices for our trip – Asheville, North Carolina; Charleston,
South Carolina; and Savannah, Georgia. I had some of the best few months of my
life in the summer of 2012 as an intern at the Asheville Art Museum, spending
many nights watching the sunset over McCormick Field and eating macaroni
and cheese at the Southern
on Lexington Avenue, but I also went back just last summer and Gina and I have
our own plans for the mountains this summer. I’ve heard great things about Charleston, but as one of its most
significant selling points is the beach and nothing but rain was expected that
day, the desire to visit just wasn’t there. Selfishly, the minor league
baseball team there didn’t have a home game that night, so that obviously ruled
Charleston out for good.
In fact, the Charleston RiverDogs were playing a couple hours to the south
in Savannah on Saturday evening, and
going to Savannah also meant we could meet with a friend of mine from college
who I hadn’t seen in a few years. Hannah just started working as the Catering
Sales Manager at a fabulous boutique hotel in Savannah, the Mansion on Forsyth Park, and
Gina and I made the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Columbia in time to amble
lazily around Forsyth Park itself, taking in beautiful, leafy squares and
residential side streets before meeting Hannah and her boyfriend Morris for a
short tour around the hotel, followed by lunch at a noodle restaurant on
Broughton Street, the commercial and retail hub in Savannah today.
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| Walking into Forsyth Park |
We then bid adieu to Hannah and Morris
for the day and walked to River Street, a bustling riverfront environment of restaurants, bars,
and little shops today but was originally constructed as the docking site for
the port that made Savannah one of the most strategically important cities in colonial
America. Even today, Savannah is still home to the fourth-largest port for
shipping container traffic in North America. Savannah has a fascinating
history; it was first established in 1733 as the capital of the British
Province of Georgia and later became the first state capital of Georgia. It was
the birthplace of the University of Georgia, today located in Athens. It was
home to the first Girl Scout headquarters in the United States.
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| Savannah City Hall |
Savannah was originally built around four open squares each with eight
surrounding blocks that allowed it to expand over time, and today there are 22
squares within the city. Gina and I didn’t get to see all of them, but we did
stumble on what I later discovered was the first and largest of them – Johnson
Square, which was named for Robert Johnson, the British colonial Governor of South Carolina and
friend of James Oglethorpe, the British general who founded the colony of
Georgia in 1732. Johnson Square, located just a couple blocks from Broughton
Street, has two fountains and, most interestingly to me as a history major, a
monument that contains the remains of General Nathanael Greene, a Revolutionary
War hero and Rhode Island native who died just outside Savannah. Greene began
the war as a private in the militia and worked his way all the way up the ranks
to lead the American forces in the Southern Campaign and became the second-most
important military commander in the Continental Army, under only George
Washington.
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| Nathaniel Greene's monument in Johnson Square |
After waiting in line for what seemed
like an eternity but was probably only twenty minutes in reality, we gorged
ourselves on ice cream at Leopold’s,
which has been around since 1919 and appears to be something of a local
tradition in Savannah, at least judging by the wait to get in. I had one scoop of
honey almond and cream and another scoop of chocolate chewies and cream, and
Gina had chocolate raspberry swirl.
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| Yep |
This April day was perfect for ice cream, and Savannah is
an ideal town to wander around the cobblestone and brick streets, cone in hand, and lose yourself in the sleepy
pace of life that characterizes so many Southern cities. With that said, no
amount of green space or shade could mitigate the brutally hot and humid summer
days there, and no amount of ice cream could pacify me into living amongst the
slow pace of life exhibited by locals and tourists alike, and their lack of any
sense of urgency whatsoever.
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| Gorgeous streets of Savannah |
We finished the night at Historic Grayson Stadium, which has been around
since 1926 and is home to the Savannah Sand Gnats, a farm team of the New York
Mets since 2007. The Sand Gnats were hosting the aforementioned Charleston
RiverDogs, and I brought my handy notebook and three different-colored pens to
diligently keep score of the game. Around the third inning, I felt a pat on the
back from a patron in the row behind us to ask what major league team I was
scouting for, to which I disappointingly had to admit that I just really like
baseball and was doing it for myself. My ego was then restored in the eighth
inning, when the mom next to us, who put in a superhuman effort in keeping two
very young boys in check by herself for over three hours, asked me if I worked
for the Morning
News, the city’s daily newspaper. Again I was forced to admit that no, I
was doing it all on my own. The visitors triumphed
on this evening, winning 6-4, and Gina found a new boyfriend
from Texas.
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| Historic Grayson Stadium in all its glory |
Sunday was quiet and rainy all day; we stayed home and made a nice dinner
with bourbon-glazed salmon and asparagus. We braved a tornado watch on our
drive back to the airport in Charlotte to drop me off, where the TSA agent
called for me to step forward through the scanner before complimenting me on my
Union Jack-patterned socks. After getting through security and stopping at a
bench to put my belt back on and gather my things, I received another pat on
the back from an older gentleman who asked if I play professional sports,
because his kids are into soccer and he saw my socks and the Liverpool FC
jacket (thanks Davey!) I was wearing. Gina says I’m annoyingly approachable,
and I suppose I must acknowledge that it’s true.
I’m back in Baltimore now, and should have a relaxing next couple weekends
before making my last visit to Columbia in early May. I’m very, very proud of
Gina for how hard she’s worked for four years – interestingly enough, we both
had lives before the nine months that she and I have been dating – and am
excited to spend time with her family and celebrate a big occasion in her life.
I’ll get to see two of her roommates graduate, too, so it should be a wonderful
time overall. More then.
