Author Archives: Barbara

Savannah 

Oops-pushed the wrong button. Here is the picture of dessert.

After that delicious lunch we toured the Owens-Thomas house. A beautifully restored home.  Then we went to the Telfair Academy which is really a museum.  The museum had an astonishing collection of tea pots, coffee

pots and chocolate cups.  This was a beautiful collection along with the art displayed.  We stayed until closing and the headed back to the hotel since it was threatening to rain.  No sooner did we return to our room and the skies opened up.  We are now having happy hour in our room since the weather is so bad.

Savannah

After breakfast we started our tour.  The first stop was St John the Baptist Catholic Church.  This church is stunning. It is one of the most beautiful churches I’ve seen.

      

After the church it was on to City Market where we strolled through the shops until we stopped at Wet Willies for our frozen libations.

The tour gave us an overview of Savannah and then we could choose what we wanted to see and ride the bus from place to place.  That said after City Msrket we walked through some of the city to the Pink House where we would eat lunch.  Clara ordered a Pink Lady and I ordered a jalapeño marguerita.

  

For lunch Clara ordered she crab soup. Marsha ordered jalapeño Mac and cheese poppers and gazpacho,  Beverly ordered shrimp and grits and I had the BLT salad.  Presentation was beautiful and everything tasted even better than it looked.   However, the piece de resistance was dessert.  The four of us shared the praline basket filled with creamy ice cream, fresh fruit on a swirl of dark chocolate.

East Coast Trip

We left Brooksville on April 13th to head for Brunswick, GA where we would meet friends who have moved there and take them to dinner.  We made good time so we made a side trip to St. Mary’s GA.  It is a very picturesque town and we have put it on our list to return to at a later date.  The hotel we stayed at had a free happy hour.  We went out to dinner with our friends and had a nice time.

The next day we are traveling to Savannsh.  Since it would not take long to get to Savannah we decided to tour St Simons Island.  First we went to Fort Frederica.  Then we went to the St Simons lighthouse.

  

 

After the lighthouse we drove to the beach.  We found some shade and had some snacks and happy hour.

 

After happy hour we continued on to Savannah.  We checked into the hotel and then hit River Street. We walked all of River Street and ended up at the Warehouse Bar.

Tomorrow we have booked a tour and the Hop on Hop off bus.   We retired to the hotel for a good nights sleep.

Last Day in Japan

i am sitting in the Haneda Airport in Tokyo waiting to board our flight.  The flight leaves on the 3oth from Tokyo and we land in LA on the 29th.  I’m tired and confused.  Let me start at the beginning of the day.  Woke up to cold and rain.  We had planned on going to a park to see some cherry blossoms but scratched that idea due to weather.  We took our time getting ready since the plan was to go to the train station, but the bullet train didn’t leave until 3:30pm so we had plenty of time to kill.  The train station is huge with plenty of shops do there was enough to look at.  The first order of business was breakfast.  We found the Jim Beam cafe and they had breakfast.  I had a ham and cheese on toasted bread with potato salad and coffee. Marsha had the egg and cheese on toast with potato salad and tea.  Believe it or not breakfast was really good.  We then walked around the station for a while and then settled in for the long wait.  In the afternoon we went back to the Jim Beam Cafe for a Jim Beam orange cocktail and a Jim Beam grapefruit cocktail.  We ordered appetizers of white asparagus and oranges and pickled daikon radish and cream cheese.  Needless to say all was good.  Finally time to get on the bullet train.  It took us 2 1/2 hous to go from Osaka to Tokyo.  We stopped at the train station and had to find the subway to the airport.  Obviously we managed well since we are here.  A lady on the subway saw our suitcases and told us which stop was ours.  I thought that was really nice.  The Haneda airport is traveler friendly.  There are shops and the also had a karaoke band playing.  See pic.  I really enjoyed Japan even though the cherry blossoms were not in bloom.  I’ll really miss the toilets (mine doesn’t play music or wash my heine) and bathrooms.  However it is hard to describe the sea of people we had to wade through every day.  I’ll finish this in LA and send it.  We are now in LA and we took a shuttle to the Westin Hotel for a welcome back party for us.

Drinks at the Westin after we landed in LA.

Osaka

After breakfast Marsha and I took the hotel shuttle to the Osaka airport to catch a train into central Osaka.  We wanted to be at Shin-Osaka terminal because tbat is close to our hotel.  We got an express train and it was about an hour ride.  This railroad station is huge- think of a really big airport.  Again most everything is in Japanese so we asked someone how to get to our hotel.  The directions were easy and it was an easy walk to the hotel.  We dropped off our bags and walked around to see the area.  The area around the station and hotel appears to be almost all residential and it was quiet.  We checked into our hotel at 3pm and the front desk had taken our luggage up to our room. We then decided to take the subway to the Umeda section of Osaka.  There was supposed to be shops and entertainment there.  We went to buy subway tickets from the machine but didn’t know how much they cost.  A person from the subway (in uniform) assisted us and off we were to Umeda.  Everything here is very crowded but Umeda is indescribable.  The subways were jammed full and when we reached the surface street there was wall to wall people.  I have never seen so many people.  I can’t even tell you how many malls there are in this area there are so many and they are all full of people. We picked one and went in.  Beautiful mall with 9 floors of really nice shops and restaurants.  We stopped at a French Bistro for a glass of wine.  All of the restaurants had long lines with people waiting to eat.  I think there was 93 restaurants and they were all busy.  As I told you indescribable.   Marsha and I decided to eat at one of the little places in the station near our hotel.  While we were at the Shin-Osaka station we bought our bullet train tickets to Tokyo.We got back to the hotel and put on the pajamas provided by the hotel since there was no room for our suitcases the room was so small.  Every hotel in Japan had pajamas for us to wear along with sandals in the room.  I took a picture of the bathroom so you could see how small this place is and it was not cheap. There is also a pic of Marsha in bed so you can see how small the room is.

I forgot about the vending machines.  There are banks of them everywhere.  There is never less than 2 together.