Best Hotel Decor: Stephen F. Austin Intercontinental, Austin

The Intercontinental in Austin wins the hotel decor award on account of its sophisticated -- and consistent -- stylings. From the lone star emblazoned on everything from the wallpaper to the carpets, to the cowhide & leather armchairs, everything was extravagantly Texan, but not in a vulgar way. Extra points for the fancy curtain valance over the shower.


First runner-up: Holiday Inn Express, Cortez, CO. Again, I was impressed by how this hotel took a decor theme -- in this case, the American Indian/Southwestern theme -- and maxed it out. Kokopelli (the dancing flute player) and other petroglyph figures appeared everywhere from the room number plates to the bathroom mirror.


Second runner-up: Hampton Inn, Savannah, GA. Kudos to this mid-range hotel chain for such an elegant outpost in the heart of the old South! The spacious breakfast room, with its Louis XIV chairs upholstered in rose and mint, was particularly charming.

Best Overall Meal: Lunch at Mrs. Wilkes

This one was a tough one. REALLY tough. But I have to give up for Mrs. Wilkes in Savannah, GA, and her 10,000 refillable vegetable sides. (I'm told the fried chicken, BBQ pork and beef stew were excellent as well... but I was too busy stuffing myself with the sides.) I am still dreaming of the black-eye peas and lima beans.

Runner-up: Tan Tan in Houston. Beyond the fact that I was incredibly relieved to have Asian food after a week of deep-fried Southern cooking, the dishes here were far above average in taste and generously portioned.

Photo of the Day

This one is for Kayvon, because he says "Sorry, Charlie" all the time. Look what I found in Savannah.

Feel better!!

Lunch at Mrs. Wilkes

Lunch was special. We lined up at 10:45 to get into Mrs. Wilke's, a local institution that has become a tourist destination over the years. Luckily, it completely lived up to the hype!

The restaurant is located in the garden level of a townhouse, where diners are seated at large communal tables. Dishes are all communal, so you are forced to say things like, "Would you be so kind as to pass the rutabaga?" to the strangers next to you. It was all very genteel.

Oh man, the food was good. I think I fell in love with the black eye peas. Some of the other standouts for me included the beef stew and creamed corn. There was also green beans, candied yams, rutabaga, carrot salad, BBQ pork, fried chicken, beets, turnip greens, baked beans, lima beans, mashed potatoes, jumbalaya, white rice, cabbage, biscuits, corn muffins and sweet tea. Dessert was - shocker! - peach cobbler and banana pudding. You can ask for seconds of anything.

SO worth it! I highly recommend for any trip to Savannah.

Day 3: Bonaventure Cemetery

This morning we woke up bright and early and headed out by car to the famed Bonaventure Cemetery. It was kind of the Platonic ideal of a cemetery, a fantasy come true - lichen-covered tombstones and obelisks overshadowed by giant oaks draped in Spanish moss. It felt so... Nancy Drew! Romantic and mysterious and old-fashioned all at once.

It was a beautiful, peaceful morning. Not a soul in the cemetery other than us. We saw some famous peeps' graves, like the songwriter Johnny Mercer's (he wrote "Moon River," among other old standards), and took in the view over the adjacent river.

Some of the graves were quite wee... the graves of babies who had died in infancy. Sad.

Dinner at Geneva Geneva's

By now you might be thinking that this roadtrip was contrived just as an excuse to eat a lot. You would be correct.

For dinner we wanted to do a little better than Paula Deen the night before, so we headed to a totally random-sounding restaurant called Geneva Geneva's that nevertheless scored the top spot on Tripadvisor. It was in a strip mall a 10-minute drive from downtown.

He-LLO real Southern food! This was the real deal. I had shrimp, okra & rice, accompanied by potato logs and collard greens, while Kaii had fried chicken. The okra was seared in a cast-iron pan -- tender and just delicious. For dessert we once again had banana pudding and peach cobbler.

After our meal, Geneva came out and said hello, and told us to go post lots of photos on the internet. Yes ma'am!

The Riverfront

The riverfront is a quaint little area... we wandered down after the carriage tour and popped into River Street Sweets Candy Store to buy some pralines. Yum!

Carriage Tour!

Yay, I fell prey to being a total tourist and taking one of those tours in a horse-drawn carriage. What? Look, it's not like it was Valentine's Day or something.

Well, before we would part with our money, we made the nice tour operator tell us exactly how we'd be getting our money's worth.

"So, do you learn stuff on this tour?"

"Oh yes, it's fully narrated. You learn all sorts of great trivia."

"Like what?"

"Like... did you know the closest relative to Spanish moss is the pineapple?"

I am such a nerd that this completely sold me.

Hey, we did learn a bunch of cool stuff! Like, something else weird about Spanish moss - don't touch it. It will give you chiggers, which are little critters that burrow under your skin and make you break out. I had touched some earlier, but I guess I'm OK. Unless they incubate. Just kidding!

Everything we saw turned out to be sights we'd already seen, but a lot of the explanations were new. All in all, worth it.

Here's our Belgian horse, Hank! The view off the back of the carriage is of Jones Street, proclaimed by House & Garden to be one of the Top 10 prettiest streets in America.

(Second) Breakfast at Clary's

We had lunch -- a second breakfast, really -- at Clary's Drugstore, a popular neighborhood joint mentioned in MITGOGAE (wow that is a weird acronym). I had corned beef hash, followed by a "jumbo caramel sticky bun." Witness the stickiness.

The Owens-Thomas House

Having read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil like every other Savannah tourist (OK, Kaii listened to it on tape on the way down from Ohio and I... started it on the plane), we almost went to the Mercer House, Jim Williams' old place. But we stopped in Midnight's "official gift shop" and they told us, nope, BO-ring! We should tour another house instead, especially if we were interested in architecture.

(Small aside, when Kaii told the dude in the shop that he was from Ohio and I was from New York, the guy misunderstood and went, "You left Cincinnati for NEW YORK?!" I think we were both taken aback. "That's a new one," Kaii said later.)

Anyway, the Owens-Thomas House didn't disappoint. The architecture was lovely, the tour guide was knowledgeable and, refreshingly, there were no ghost stories.

Day 2: The Lovely Architecture of Savannah, Part 2

On our second day in Savannah, we started off by walking around the beautiful squares, of which there are 21. They make the entire historic district remarkably tranquil, as all cars are forced to go around them, rather than through noisy intersections, and they each have their particular charms -- whether rose gardens, or marble obelisks or just grand old trees hanging with Spanish moss.

SCAD

As an aside, I want to mention that Savannah is crawling with students, but that it's a special kind of college town. Savannah College of Art and Design is the resident school, and it has a pretty good rep. After visiting, I'd say it seems like a really pleasant place to go to school...

Here's a nighttime pic of one of the dorms, in an old Ramada Inn. Since it falls in the historic district, the existing motel-like structure couldn't be altered...

Ghost Tour

After dinner, we thought it only right to take part in a ghost tour of one of the old mansions. We found one that was rated #7 out of all the tourist attractions in Savannah on TripAdvisor, and its ghosts were supposed to be as real as they get - featured on Ghost Hunters, TAPS, etc.

Being a total skeptic and a total scaredy-cat at the same time, I don't know if it hurt or helped that everyone on our tour turned out to be teenagers. The kind that whisper, make sarcastic comments and crack themselves up. The tour guide might as well have been leading a school field trip. But it sure made things less creepy. We walked around some of the squares and then toured the house.

The story of the house was certainly tragic - something about how the first wife of the owner died from yellow fever and the second wive threw herself off the balcony after she found him in bed with their house slave, who was subsequently found hung in the carriage house...

The Paula Deen Experience

Post-nap, Kaii and I headed back to Lady & Sons at 8:30. On the way, we wondered aloud why the hell we had to show up a half hour early for our reservation. A brilliant lesson in marketing awaited.

When we showed up, we were told to go ahead and browse the Paula Deen Store while we waited for our table.

"Excuse me...?"

"The Paula Deen Store... it's right next door."

Y'all, there was this gigantic store full of Paula Deen merchandise that opened directly into the restaurant! Every cookbook, issue of her magazine, licensed food product, etc., you could possibly wish for was in there. Her face appeared on every single one. In the corner, there was an amazing lifesize Paula Deen cardboard cut-out.

Luckily, we didn't wait long for a table. Despite having read that Paula is known for her chicken pot pie, we opted to do the buffet to get more variety. The night's dishes included fried chicken, fried catfish, beef brisket, BBQ pork, rice, collard greens, lima beans w/ corned beef, creamed corn, candied yams, black-eye peas, green beans & potatoes and mashed potatoes.

You know what? It wasn't all that. Maybe it was because we did the buffet, but nothing was all that impressive. Some of the sides, especially, were egregiously oversalted. Too salty and a little overwhelming! Just like Paula's personality. Oh, the fried green tomatoes were excellent though - very light.

And as a pleasant surprise, the desserts weren't half bad either. Since they were closing up, we got four instead of two, so we had a go at banana pudding, peach cobbler, butter cake and chocolate butter cake (I think?). Kaii discovered a new love of banana pudding. I was just suffering from abdominal pain.

The Lovely Architecture of Savannah

Oh, should I talk about the architecture?? Love-ly!

My little real estate mind was whirring and clicking as I thought about what awesome loft condos there probably were inside all those old factory buildings and what kind of Regency furniture was in the stately mansions.

Here are some shots of the more commercial part of town... (residential shots to come)

Day 1: Backtracking to Savannah... and Eating with Paula Deen

Like I said, it's Day 3 already, so I have lots of catch-up to do...

It's past midnight and we are sitting around our Microtel in Mobile, Alabama, having just driven TEN HOURS from Savannah.

Ah Savannah... it was just as pretty as everyone said it is. First thing we did after dropping our stuff off at the hotel was to walk into town (the historic district) and make a reservation at Lady & Sons, Paula Deen's restaurant (see above). Kaii reads some food blog that has a regular column called "Paula Deen Is Trying to Kill Us," about her specialties like Velveeta cheese brownies and fried butter balls (or something like that). We were super enthused about trying out this Food Network personality's creations for ourselves.

We showed up at the restaurant around 4:30 and made a reservation for 9, for which we were told to show up at 8:30. OK.

We meandered around the city and, um, started to get sleepy. Boom. Back to the hotel for nappy time before dinner.