Turning Right on Red: Savannah Memorial Day 2015

My friend Thomas came to visit for the long Memorial Day weekend along with Maya’s friend Noga from Chicago. I hadn’t checked out Savannah since going there with the Macalester tennis team before I was of age and had been meaning to get out there since we moved to ATL. I wasn’t sure we could top off the New Orleans jazz festival trip from a few weeks ago but we made a good effort.

Our trip’s theme song was Mark Ronson’s ‘Uptown Funk You Up’ and we listened to it at least 4 times a day. We stayed at the Thunderbird Inn (amazing retro. place) and enjoyed popcorn and lemonade upon arrival along with 1960’s-70’s soul music playing in the background. Besides Krispy Donuts for breakfast both mornings, we also enjoyed a short 10-minute walk or so to River Street and the nightlife.

The nightlife is surprisingly vibrant in Savannah. It’s a very good place to barhop. We started at Dubs, which had ping pong, and nice cheap beer, moved on the Smiles Dueling Piano Bar. I’ve heard of other piano bars and kind of doubted how much fun they would be with all of the bros and annoying sing alongs. But this place was fun and had a good vibe with some talented piano players. I also am sick and tired of getting a hard time from Thomas about drinking these girly drinks like the frozen strawberry daiquiris I ordered. I really don’t care about assigning gender roles to drinks and/or conforming to norms. If I like the drink than that’s all that matters right?

So we moved on from there to a cool dance club 500 feet away and then Chuck’s, a gay bar with $1 jello shots. We sang a horrible karaoke rendition of the horrible Meatloaf song: “I would do anything for love.” Our delusional friends thought it went pretty well though (I am pretty sure the DJ laughed us off) but that’s sort of the point of karaoke I think. We ended up a noodle bar with $1 drafts at about 2 in the morning, which was great. The nice thing about all of the nightlife in Savannah is that it keeps the prices down and if you know were to look you can find lots of great deals. By choosing to go on Memorial Day weekend though we also had to contend with 8 million bachelorette party’s: They all looked illegal.

We enjoyed Tybee island the next day and a day at the beach. We also checked out Skid-a-way Island which has a really cool little park with marshes and lots of overhanging Spanish moss trees. Along with our friend and dog who live in Savannah, we had our dog Sherlock who loved the park. They ran and played together and made all of the tiny little low-tide crabs scatter.

After a day at the beach with surprisingly warm water I think we had our Savannah trip down pat. It also reminded me that school is finally out. Let summer begin!