I’m fascinated by travel.

New places. Old places. It doesn’t matter.

More specifically, I’m enthralled with the means of how we get to our destination.

Hundreds of years ago, it would take days or weeks to travel between major cities. Now, you can just drive your car, get on a plane, hop on a train and you’re there.

Last week my family, my girlfriend and I traveled to Savannah, Georgia for a short — but much, much needed vacation. My family (mom, dad and sister) flew down from Delaware (via Philadelphia) while my girlfriend and I drove from The Classic City. It took my family six hours to traverse 720 miles (drove from Atlanta to Savannah); our trip from Athens — a one-way trip of 219 miles — took just about four hours.

Beautiful Savannah

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Once we got to Savannah after an eventful drive down (flat tire, drugged out driver at the gas station at which we filled the tire, being chased by a storm system from right outside of Athens to Savannah, etc.), the beauty struck me. The Spanish-moss draped trees lining the roads, parks and everything about the history stopped me in my tracks. No wonder why General Sherman decided not to torch it during his march through Georgia.

Here are a few more highlights of the truly amazing trip, in bullet form.

  • For as much talk as there is about Savannah’s food scene, it’s warranted. Over the three days in “The Hostess City of the South,” we ate at three different restaurants (not counting the bed and breakfast where we ate breakfast two mornings and the riverboat for dinner) and I left satiated. Coco’s Sunset Grill had a great salmon BLT sandwich; The Olde Pink House, while pricey, was as advertised and the Green Truck Pub has a decent mushroom cheeseburger. By the way, if you’re eating at the Green Truck Pub, bring your own ketchup. You’ll thank me later. Trust me on this.
  • Speaking of that riverboat, I never opened up in public as much as I did while dancing the night away to whatever random songs the hokey DJ and keyboardist decided to play. Surprisingly, I was the only person to join him on the dance floor for “The Wobble.” Living in San Marcos taught me that.

  • My girlfriend and I went on a jet ski tour of Dolphin Bay as well as a little bit of the Atlantic Ocean (who could have thought Hilton Head, South Carolina was that close). Once we got to Dolphin Bay and into the Atlantic Ocean, dolphins were less than 10 feet from us the whole time. Nature is an amazing thing — and scary at the same time with the storms we had.
  • Houses in downtown Savannah are built up, not back. We stayed in a house through Air BnB and it was four stories. Our room was on the fourth floor. Yeah, it got pretty hot up there and those steps were quite steep.

Want to know how great the trip was?

I’m not an emotional person. Ask anybody that knows me.

But when my family left for the airport Thursday afternoon, I couldn’t help but to tear up a bit. This was truthfully a nearly perfect vacation in every single way.

P.S. — I turned 29+1 last Tuesday.