We visited the Savannah riverfront and two historic cemetaries today.

First, we visited Bonaventure Cemetary, which is out on the Savannah River. We actually passed it on the river when we were out in Nonchalance. There were lots of old graves with markers dating from the 1830 and 1840s when the downtown colonial cemetary filled up and "new arrivals" had to come here. Some of the memorial stones carried very poinient sentiments and some sones were carved beautifully and artfully.

There also was a veteran's section with many WWI, WW2, and some Korea and Vietnam era veterans. I found this little sign to be a bit out of charactor with the feeling, but I guess there's always room for a little marketing message.

Savannah's downtown riverfront area is very old and quite interesting, the only problem being that this is high tourist season and there's a constant traffic jam and no parking available. Of course, cotton was king in the early days, like 1800 to 1860. This is the Cotton Exchange where cotton bales were bought and sold before being loaded onto sailing ships bound for Europe and the northern states.

This is the charthouse, now a restaurant on the riverfront. The cobblestone streets here and some of the buildings were made from the ballast stones carried here in sailing ships that needed extra weight to sail here empty to pick up cotton.

All along the riverfront, there's a nice mixture of tourist shops, restaurants and downtown businesses.

Some of the really big ships sail right past downtown on their way to the Class A seaport. Larry thought this might be a natural gas transport ship.

After lunch, we visited the Central Market which was a few blocks of street with pedestrian traffic only, lined with mostly art shops and art studios, mixed in with a few fudge shops and t-Shrit shops plus the horse drawn carriage tours. The horses were very tolerant of tourist's kids patting them on the forehead. I liked the shop that had many carved wood birds, including this American Bittern, doing it's bitern thing, looking like a vertical stand of reeds.

In the afternoon, we visited the downtown colonial cemetary (the one that filled up about 1840). It had the graves of some famous colonial and revolutionary Americans like Button Gwinnett, signer of the Declaration of Independence, Archibald Bulloch a staunch revolutionary supporter and member of the 1775 Continental Congress where he won John Adam's praise. He was also Teddy Roosevelt's great, great, grandfather.

This is the grave of 3 Habersham brothers that all served as officers in the Revolutionary War - Joseph, John and James. John Habersham was also a member of the Continental Congress, Collector of the Port of Savannah and firts trustee of the University of Georgia.

This evening, we dropped off Julie and Larry at the airport for their return to Houston. They rented their car for a week and were here 6 days so they gave us the car for the 7th day, which really comes in handy. It was nice to have them as fun guests on the boat with us.