We took a couple of days off bookending last weekend to visit Nora & Jim in Savannah. They’ve lived there four years, and we’d yet to visit them, and as they now have a sprout on the way, it seemed best to do it before they were preoccupied by parenting.

Savannah was quite a shock, heat-wise. It was hot and muggy pretty much every day except Monday. The worst was Saturday, which reached 88; Nora, Terri, and I escaped to the beach while Jim was at work. We each got sunburned in unique ways, all related to slipshod sunblock application. While I’d been to southern beaches before, I got my first sighting of a confederate flag bikini top. Tres classy!


The trip was a much-needed bit of relaxing. The Southern pace of life is slower, as advertised, and Nora being preggers sort of set the pace: we did a whole lot of sitting around and eating and more sitting around and gabbing and a little walking and then a little more sitting around and talking. This was much needed.

Much of the lovely eating experiences were semi-improvised dinners at Chez Lewis courtesy of Jim. We also had some superfresh sushi. While we missed the boat on barbecue (through no fault of our own: the allied barbeque joints were either closed early for a catering gig or on vacation), we did manage to have a life-shorteningly decadent lunch of good Southern cooking at Mrs. Wilkes. The family-style dining there reminded me of some of the Pennsylvania Dutch places in Eastern Pennsylvania where you sit with a bunch of complete strangers and pass bowls of food around until you can’t stuff any more in.