We were in Savannah in November 2017 as part of a short Southeast loop. Read about our second visit in 2022 here.

J and I had not been to Savannah, so we wanted to spend as much time as possible wandering around and soaking up the history and architecture of the city. Our internet research did not get us particularly excited about any restaurants or breweries in Savannah (with the exception of Service Brewing Co, which was closed the days we were there) so eating and drinking were secondary to our main goal of exploring.

Campground

We stayed at Red Gate Campground, a large, grassy, friendly park with nature trails, ponds, and a horse farm next door. It’s a lovely campground and we recommend it. Our pond-side spot was private and shady; it had no sewer hookup (most sites in the main field have full hookups) but for two nights we didn’t care. A family of RVers from Florida relaxing in camp chairs chatted us up while we dumped our tanks upon arrival from Atlanta (not sure why they were hanging out by the dump station, but they were very nice) and we learned that their son/brother had recently moved into the house next door to our old house in Charlottesville! Gotta love those random small-world connections.

Red Gate is about a 10 minute drive from downtown Savannah. Parking in the city is strange: the meters are good for varying lengths of time on different blocks, so pay attention to the signs. Street parking seemed to be way cheaper than garage parking.

Exploring

The Savannah Visitors Center was our first stop in town; for $6 they sell a booklet with several downtown architecture walks. It’s a good buy, full of architectural and historical information and much easier than trying to piece together tours from the internet and following a phone-sized map. We chose three of the walks and felt like we got a good overview of the downtown area and its lovely squares and avenues lined with giant oaks draped with Spanish moss. Savannah is a beautiful town!

Drinking

We started night #1 with a fancy cocktail at Public Kitchen, a small, buzzing place, with not the fastest bar service. We moved on after one tasty drink.

Halfway through day two I was struck down by the plague, but J soldiered on alone and went to Circa 1875 for a nightcap. He liked the place itself, but they were out of Angostura bitters for his Old Fashioned–how does a responsible bar buyer run out of bitters?

Eating

Dinner our first night was at Crystal Beer Parlor, which was giant and unexpectedly full of kids. We sat at the bar and had some local beers and greasy comfort food.

On his solo night out, J ate at The Grey, a really cool diner that he said I would have really liked. Bummer. He liked the atmosphere, but they forgot to put in his food order so he had to wait forever to eat. Hopefully that was a service anomaly.

So you can see that while we saw a lot of Savannah on foot, we didn’t experience very much of the culinary and brewing scene. If you have any recommendations for next time, please put them in the comments!