Sunday, July 4, 2010

Mini-Golf Domination! (And more food...)

Yesterday we woke up in the frosty air of our hotel room, then sauntered across the vacant parking lot in front of our hotel (where beach parking spots go for 25$ per day!) to the Breakfast Club, supposedly Tybee's Island best breakfast. Neither Molly Ringwald nor Emilio Estevez were present, but they had good hash browns and waffles. They proudly serve Maxwell House coffee. After breakfast we drove to Island Mini Golf for our second high stakes game of miniature-golf. Sports historians will recall that the last time these two fierce competitors met on the greens Rebecca handily defeated Gil by seven strokes in Dickinson, ND. Pulling into the parking lot, Gil, amped up on two cups of Maxwell House, said: "Are you ready to be dominated?" Rebecca said: "Don't get ahead of yourself." But Gil quickly got ahead and stayed ahead throughout the game, ultimately beating (one might even say dominating) Rebecca by 14 strokes. Notice the calm in his, er, my eyes as he, er, I putt with a tree on my back.

From mini-golf we drove a little bit further towards Savannah, stopping at Desposito's, a seafood restaurant ringed by chain link fences, near the boat ramp in glorious Thunderbolt, GA (best name for a town ever, in this writer's opinion). You can see for yourself that the place looks almost abandoned from the outside. What it lacks in charms it makes up for in singularity of purpose. This is a seafood restaurant. And by seafood they really mean: snow crab, blue crab, oysters and shrimp. One of your beloved adventurers isn't interested in eating most of those things, so she had a fairly pedestrian grilled cheese sandwich, and got a funny look from our epically slow waitress. The other, more food-venturous traveller, had a 1/2 pound of snow crab legs and 6 steamed oysters (turned out to be seven; I got a two-fer).

I hadn't eaten steamed oysters until yesterday. I have eaten raw oysters on the half shell a few times, and found them to be an odd sort of pleasure. I was smart enough to know that I needed an oyster knife to liberate the succulent little muscles from their calcareous vaults. I should have asked for a chain mail glove as well. Cracking apart my first oyster, I stabbed myself in the palm with the knife, which, luckily, is pointy enough to slip between the two halves of the oyster shell, but not sharp enough to penetrate my hand. If it had been I would have needed a trip to the hospital. I wish I could have recorded the look on Rebecca's face as I ate this rich and delicious (and, to be fair, calorie- and nutrient-light) meal.

We drove into Savannah and walked the streets for a few hours. We stopped and got a smoothie because one of us was so hungry he thought he was going to fall down, then sat in one of the many tree-lined squares and enjoyed it. We decided that Savannah is much more pleasant than Charleston. That may just be because it was cooler and there was more shade; but Savannah seems like a place where people actually live. Charleston had dozens of enormous houses that no one lived in, that were there only for home and garden tours. Savannah seemed packed with life, with people living and breathing and moving through the city streets.

After doing some light window shopping (R mostly shopped; I mostly complained about shopping, though I must admit that I was only one to actually purchase anything: sourwood honey and some honeycomb at Savanah Bee Company), we went to Vinnie Van Go Go's, a pizza joint by the city market. At this point I was so hungry I was getting delirious. We put our name in for a table (30-40 minute wait, said the hostess!), and then sat across the street waiting in a park where people sat on park benches drinking beer from paper bags or plastic cups and a group of kids ran back and forth playing a game with inscrutable rules. We went back to the hostess table a few minutes later, and a woman waiting with her three kids told us that we didn't need to wait to go sit at the pizza bar, so we skipped the line and sat at the cozy, crowded bar and ate a delicious pizza with artichoke, spinach and feta cheese. It was nice to eat something that wasn't deep fried.

Right now in the parking lot pool bar there is a man announcing through a public address system that the Tybee Tropics Pool Bar has been voted the best pool bar on Tybee Island four years in a row. "It's wake up time! We can't serve alcohol until noon, but we hope that you come get your first drink on the island here. Remember that we'll have a guest DJ inside the house." The current DJ really likes the sounds of Michael Jackson and his own voice.

Happy fourth of July, everyone. We're looking forward to seeing some outrageous displays of patriotism down here in Georgia.

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