Adventures du jour! (March 14-15, 2023)

Savannah trip!…travel when you’re not operating in a fear-based econcomy…Amtrak…Tybee Island Lighthouse

The Savannah trip went super well. This is probably going to be a long post. (Several super long posts, I think!) But to sum up: we had a great time, I took a bajillion pictures, and I thought about traveling quite a bit.

I’ll put the last bit first, because it’s on my mind right now.

Travel is different when you’re not operating on a fear-based mental economy. I was *worried* about being late for the train, for example, but I wasn’t *terrified* about it. The terror of screwing something up was apparently mentally consuming for me, because this was the most laid-back trip I’ve ever been on.

I’ve always liked to travel. New stuff = yes please. I think it’s just the way I’m built, as a “go out and bring back good stuff for the tribe” kind of person. Exploring is my jam.

But previously I was scared of getting lost, scared of car breakdowns, scared of trusting other people for any reason whatsoever, scared of doing the not-ideal thing, scared of doing the ideal thing because it mean someone else would not be doing their ideal thing and getting angry with me for taking up their precious time, etc. Travel was stressful and draining. If I had to be responsible for anything, I’d be angry the whole time, from the stress of worrying that my part would go wrong, that I’d screw it up somehow.

I spent a lot of time getting dragged around in other people’s cars, pretending to have fun.

Now, though.

On the one hand, I’ve done a lot of work on coming back to a less stressed-out state in general, and on the other hand, I have experience taking a lot of photos, so I actually have a practical sense of what I want to explore, apart from what anyone else wants. Taking that many photos will teach you what you like to look at, if nothing else.

During the trip, mostly stuff went well. When it didn’t go well, I shrugged and moved on. Whether stuff went well or not, I was able to enjoy the experience and talked easily to people, made choices quickly, was delighted by delightful things, stopped to rest when my feet hurt or I was getting hungry or my mind was overwhelmed.

Traveling with Ray meant I had to be ultimately responsible for almost everything; she’ll sometimes shut down if things get too far off course or don’t work the way she thinks they should. I pushed her to handle most of the bus stuff; a bunch of it went wrong and I had to take over twice. But previously, she would only take charge on bus stuff at all if she’d been over the route several times first. So this was good.

We did have a conversation about shutting down when stuff went wrong, and I think I got to the root of it: she didn’t really understand that SHE was often the competent one amongst a crowd of people, and she didn’t have to follow all the rules or do what other people wanted her to do; she could just make choices and be the adult amongst children, as it were.

Counting the escape from Colorado, this was her…fourth? big trip with just the two of us, and she gets more independent and confident with each one (although certainly that’s not all due, or even mostly due, to the trips).

One of the choices that I was glad I made was using Ubers and public transportation for everything. The Uber drivers were consistently nuts, pleasantly so, and I just took to sitting up front and chatting with them (which also gave Ray more time to zone out or chime in if she wanted). The public transportation was slow and full of people and gave me time to separate one thing from another, to rest, to zone out and recharge.–Also, the best food suggestions came from the Uber drivers.

Another choice I liked was taking all those pictures. As on my daily walks, taking all the pictures helped me focus on the world outside my head, to literally see the world around me. It also gave me an excuse to stop a lot, both to rest and to give Ray more time to zone out.

People talk about kids these days being on their phones all the time, but it really is the quickest way for her to clear her buffers and not get stuck. Towards the end of the trip I was glad to zone out on social media or a sudoku game, too.

Final good choice: I didn’t wear Crocs, but the Keens that I normally wear out for walks. The new Crocs aren’t ruggedized and are already wearing a bit thin around the soles, even though I don’t do my morning walks in them. When I wore Crocs to Universal last year, I fucked up my toenails to the point of losing two. This year, I did eventually do something to one foot, but that was on Thursday after like ten miles of walking over two days, and then I decided I needed to practice a damn dance move, and ouch. I’m fine now.

…

Tuesday:

I dragged Ray, a night owl, out of bed early and on the road to the Amtrak station…over an hour and a half early. But as usual there were detours, alarums, excursions. We went to McDonald’s for breakfast, fought with stop-and-go traffic, and got turned around at the last minute, missed the entrance to the station, and had to stop and turn around. So we were about an hour early.

The first leg was via an Amtrak-dedicated bus. Even though Amtrack goes through Tampa. Because reasons. It was a nice bus. Just not a train. We rode it up to Orlando, walked up to a Subway inside a hospital, got a MUCH more thorough screening than we did to get onto the bus (or the train, later), got sammitches, and busted ass back to the train.

Loading procedures for the train were Byzantine but went MUCH faster than for airplanes. They had our asses in seats between 1:53 and 2:05. Seats bigger, lots of leg room, gentle movements, no turbulence. Ray likes Amtrak better than planes. I still like planes better. FLYYYYING! We got slightly split up, both of us sitting next to French speakers who were going from Miami to NYC. I of course tried to listen to the phone conversations of the lady next to me so I could practice my French listening skills…then realized I was SPYING ON SOMEONE ELSE’S PRIVATE CONVERSATIONS. Erk. I put on headphones but still managed to catch a bunch of banal chatter about YouTube videos and hot guys. Heh.

I started Book 4 of Blind Date with Death on the train, got about 2K done. In the middle of that, we stopped for a leg stretch and there was some drama about a guy who’d brought a dog on board in a carrier and kept taking him out, and the conductor was like, “I’m not letting anyone back on the train until this gets handled,” so I had to wait around outside with Ray still inside, in her seat. Erk. Eventually I got back on, the train started up, and we went to the dining car.

Walking between train cars is a very cool experience. The walkway is covered, protected from the wind, and yet feels very liminal, like you have to step through an industrial fae portal or something.

The dining car for a coach car on Amtrak is nothing to write home about (although clearly it’s good enough for social media), but we did get coffee and cookies, in honor of a quest that Ray did on a cute video game, Touch Detective.

Back to writing. We passed another train around sunset, and it didn’t look like anything in the movies. More like we were passing a very large snake. We were moving much too fast to see windows in the low light, so it just looked scaly and orange from the reflected sunset off our silver-sided train.

Savannah at night from the train station: dark. We caught an Uber to our hotel, of the clean but “pleasantly scummy” type, apparently my natural habitat. The driver didn’t say one word the whole trip.

This turned out to be the exception rather than the rule. Savannans are the talkiest bunch of people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting, Colorado Springs nonwithstanding.

We unpacked a bit and made plans for the next day. I crashed and went to bed.

…

Wednesday:

I got up early, tried to clear out some emails, failed to get very far. I actually used my grip-bottomed yoga socks for their intended purpose for once. Absent an actual yoga mat, they weren’t too bad on the carpet. My balance was shot to shit, probably from sitting/riding the train most of the day on Tuesday, and I had to take everything a step back down.

Got Ray up and took her to the Waffle House near the hotel. I had NOT taken her to a Waffle House before then, other than the time we got food after the hurricane missed Tampa and turned off all the power last time.

BAD PARENTING.

She was like, “Look! A menu! I thought they just had one thing.” (Waffle House only serves one thing during emergencies.)

She liked the food but didn’t understand diner coffee protocol and tried to stack all the used and non-used creamers together. Nuh uh. I couldn’t risk a Waffle House waitress swooping in and taking the non-used creamers with her, and she was gonna come refill that cup as soon as it got down to 1/3 or less.

Ray really liked being called “baby” by our waitress.

We got turned around and Ray froze up because the stop was *supposed* to be in a certain place, but the map and her head weren’t lining up. I looked at it and couldn’t make heads or tails of it on Google maps, either, so we switched back and forth between programs and patched together the correct location, hoofed it and made it in time for a guy at the bus stop to start talking to us. It emerged that he had gone to school for a while in Tampa but it had been too expensive and he’d come back.

We got on the bus to go to our first desired destination, toward the downtown area. This is where the babble really started. And never did stop. At least one person was talking the entire time, telling some story across the bus at large, until the point where the bus pulled over for engine trouble and we all had to get out. At which point one lady started praying steadily and tooth-grittingly to the spirits to help her control her temper because she had places to be.

While waiting for the second bus, we discovered that our first intended destination was closed on Wednesday, so we replanned to go to the next destination, out to Tybee Island to see the lighthouse.

Despite being a major tourist attraction, there’s no public transportation out to, or on, Tybee Island. I think that’s deliberate. So we called an Uber.

BUT FIRST, I was feeling ornery about getting to see some of the downtown right away, so we got on the second bus that came to pick us up and rode it up to the Cathedral Basilica and Flannery O’Connor’s birthplace, where we walked around the Cathedral Basilica (could they not pick one or the other?!?). Neat place, I took pictures.

Then we called the Uber to go out to Tybee Island.

Our driver was an Uber driver-slash-sailboat tour guide-slash-realtor, and was soon telling us that buying a house on the island was a bad idea: there’s only one way in or out, and during the real high tides (King Tides), the road’s underwater and everything closes.

I asked her where to go (“Where would you go on Tybee Island for food and for fun, as a local?”); she recommended (Treylor) Hitch’s (in Savannah) and a tiny pizza place/arts colony thingy on Tybee Island, Huck-a-poo’s. (She also told us to check out the museum for the lighthouse, but we never did get there.)

She dropped us off at the lighthouse, which is painted white and dark gray, and looks very intimidating from the bottom. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go; I’m scared of heights and I get vertigo. There are only like 178 steps on the thing, though, and I went, “Wait, HOW many steps did you go up on the Manitou Incline before they fixed it? Halfway. 178 steps is NOTHING.” (There are 2744 steps on the Incline.) There’s a landing every 25 steps, so it’s not even like you have to do the whole thing at once.

I batted my eyes at Ray and up we went.

Did I mention I love exploring? I love that we got to go into the lighthouse. It just feels different, more like a cave than anything else. The sound is weird, the light is weird even though there were windows, the sense of being packed in tight is weird. I got to see the Fresnel lamp. It was beautiful, both exactly what I expected and not at all what I was ready for. All the light coming from above, the sunlight through the angled lens glass, felt cold and bright, in a way that the light from the balcony windows below it did not. Light does that. I wasn’t ready for it.

After the lighthouse and environs, we walked out to the Atlantic coast and watched the waves come in for a while. I got hypnotized by the real-life screen saver of it, as usual; Ray eventually sat down and got on her phone, kindly letting me commune with my boyfriend the ocean in private.

After that, we went to the Tybee Island Marine Science Center, a Very Small Museum that was just excellent if you’re at all interested in that kind of thing. One side was all small marine life exhibits, mostly animals that were rescues, and the other side was all marine…dead exhibits? A room full of bones, skulls, and other body parts. Not very large, compared to the size of the building: you’re not really seeing the whole science center so much as helping fund it, I think. They said that downstairs were TONS more tanks for the larger animals, but we weren’t allowed in. Everything we got to see was excellent, though, and made you feel like you were a person in a place, and not a people animal in a people chute, which can sometimes happen in a zoo.

As usual, Ray standing next to the side of a tank = animals needing to check her out. Usually it’s fish, but there it was turtles and alligators. And crabs. The “you can pick these up really” lady was explaining how the crabs never came out of their shells when they were picked up unless you were reeeeallly patient, at the same moment that Ray was giggling because they were tickling her and trying to scoot off her palm.

“Hey there, buddy. Whatcha doing?”

After the museum we took off walking for a bakery-slash-Korean food place but that was closed (they were making kim chee!) so we went to the pizza place that was recommended, Huck-a-Poo’s. The way there went from upscale beach houses and condos to wacky but expensive places on a gravel road, to just the gravel road with frogs singing in a swampy area next to the road, to wacky places but smaller and not nearly as expensive, to weird little sheds that had been pushed together to sell local arts & crafts. The pizza place was back among them, a place on stilts with STUFF nailed down on the walls. Basically if it wasn’t something that would rust too quickly it BUT could be nailed to the wall, it was. Lots of tin signs, license plates, and marked-up dollar bills. After some debate we got the garbage can pizza for omnivores, which a basically a little bit of everything–just no anchovies, which they didn’t have. We both had blackberry cider with it. Ray was mad that she didn’t get carded. It was the kind of place where I felt comfortable leaving graffiti in the bathroom, and did so.

We caught another Uber back, and spent some time talking to Ronald, a Black man who answered the “Where would you go and what would you eat back in Savannah, as a local?” question with all kinds of side stories and questions. It turned into quite the jaw, and he gallantly told me that if he weren’t married (his wife, as it turned out, was an EXCELLENT cook, and there’s no arguing with that), he would take me out on the town and we’d have ourselves a time. I’m a good eater. I did, eventually, get him to recommend a place to eat, a buffet by the hotel that I think is a chain but that had been apparently been taking over by some Actual Southerners, because the food was niiiice.–But that wasn’t until later. I did get Ronald to tell me how to cook pig’s feet. Apparently there are lots of ways to do it but the point is to melt all that collagen by cooking it slow, until it melts. I’ll give em a try if I see any. Ronald was my favorite of the Uber drivers.

We made it back to the hotel and Ray settled in. We decided the buffet was a bad idea because we were still full from pizza. I was okay for a bit, then got restless because I wasn’t completely exhausted yet, so I went out for walk to the nearest gas station to pick up chips.

Dear reader, I did not stop there. I decided to go to a grocery store instead and wandered off to find one via Google Lady Directions. I ended up at a Kroger’s where they had an excellent cheese selection, including–oh yes!–my favorite cheese, Humboldt fog. I bought a bunch of stuff and brought it all back to the hotel room, laughing at myself because it was too heavy and of course I was sick of carrying it before I got out the front door of the grocery store.

But I made it back, following the Waffle House sign most of the way, because my hands were full.