Juliette Gordon Low's house, Savannah
Guest blogger Haley Mac Donell, 10, shares a recent trip experience:
If you are looking for a place to go on vacation and have young children that like ghosts and history, Savannah is definitely your destination. This past Memorial Day weekend my Girl Scout troop and I set off for Savannah to visit the Juliette Gordon Low House, who founded the Girl Scouts, and to see this great historic city.
To try something different, we took Amtrak from Winter Park, Florida to Savannah. My Mom was able to get a AAA discount on Amtrak. To me it is way better than driving, but don’t use the train if you live very far away. For first time train riders, make sure to bring spending money for snacks and meals and a lot of entertainment like books, an iPod or a Nintendo DS. It is also important to have a sense of adventure, because you can walk through the train cars
and explore the sleeper cars. We also ate dinner in the dining car. This was a great experience!
From the train station to the hotel you will need transportation, so make sure to have it arranged before you get there. We stayed at the Inn at Ellis Square , which is a AAA Two Diamond hotel. The location is just a few blocks from the River Walk. We had a great room with a view. For the Girl Scouts out there, the hotel has a hospitality patch you can earn while you are there.
A key destination in Savannah would be the Juliet Gordon Low house and they offer a great tour. Check out all the different and cool furniture! For Girl Scouts be sure to do some of the activities afterwards too. The Juliette Gordon Low house also has a great gift shop. It is filled with items for sale that Girl Scouts from around the world that have visited there have made and given to the house for sale. For Girl Scouts, you can spend most of the day at the house. It was an awesome experience!
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fter the visiting the house, for lunch check out “Smooth” right across the street. “Smooth” offers smoothies and bag lunches (you must pre-order ahead of time for bag lunches). Yum! Animal lovers should check out Oatland Wildlife Center. At OWC you can see all the unique animals, including bison.
The River Walk in downtown Savannah is a great place to tour, shop and eat. We enjoyed a great lunch a Spanky’s. Their chicken fingers were out of this world!
A sweet place to go is the Savannah Candy Kitchen; it has two destinations, and has very good treats including candies made by them and other companies. (They make taffy every day!) For girl scouts, you can even arrange a
special tour with yummy samples! My favorite dinner spot was the very delicious restaurant, The Lady and Sons owed by Food TV star Paula Dean. If you have a party of 10 or more you can make a reservation ahead of time. This is a spot not to be missed!
Aside from being a beautiful city with a lot of history, Savannah is also known as one of the most haunted cities in America. One of the best parts of the trip was to take ghost tour of the city by horse and carriage! We went while it was still light out so it wasn’t too scary.
Savannah has a lot for everyone. I can’t wait for my next visit.
