Friends Fall Frolic to Savannah

Fall Frolic to Savannah

$155-215 per person depending on Room Selection

Most visitors to Savannah enjoy the shops along River Street, take a scenic bus tour or carriage ride, or go on a riverboat cruise, but the Friends of the State Botanical Garden are going places many visitors do not see……we’re going “off-the-beaten-track!”

The first stop is the Coastal Georgia Botanical Garden at the Historic Bamboo Farm, located 10 miles southwest of downtown Savannah. We’ll have a guided tour of the garden and learn how the 46-acre facility evolved from a USDA Plant Introduction Center in the early 1900’s into a world-class botanical garden. Known locally as the “Bamboo Farm”, the garden still houses a historic display of over 70 types of bamboo, once a major focus of research at the facility. Today the garden also includes an extensive collection of native and cold-hardy palms and one of the largest collections of camellias in the Southeast.  There is also a water garden, cottage garden, water-wise garden, shade garden, iris garden, white garden and rose garden.  A unique feature of the new children’s garden is a bamboo maze planted with over 2,000 bamboo plants surrounding a 45-foot observation tower where children can help guide their friends through the challenging maze.

After exploring the garden, we’ll check into our hotel and relax before going back there for a casual barbeque dinner on the terrace of the new Andrews Visitor Center.

It’s rise-and-shine early on day 2. After a complimentary continental breakfast, we depart at 8:00 am sharp for a trip to the Savannah historic district and a brief photo-op at the historic Forsyth Park Fountain.  Built in 1859, the fountain is the focal point at the end of an alée of magnificent live oak trees draped in Spanish moss.  It is one of the most photographed sites in Savannah.

The next stop, certainly “off-the-beaten-track” for most visitors to Savannah, is the Historic Bonaventure Cemetery.  Docents with the Bonaventure Historical Society will guide us through this amazing resting place for some of Savannah’s founding fathers and best known citizens, including Conrad Aiken, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, several Civil War generals, plantation proprietors, and Georgia’s first Governor, Edward Telfair. The grave site most visited is that of Savannah-born composer Johnny Mercer, whose Oscar-winning songs include “Moon River” and “Days of Wine and Roses”.

The final stop on the tour is the Crab Shack restaurant on Tybee Island where you can fill up on seafood and take in the sites of this unusual and sprawling eatery, complete with a pond of baby alligators!

An early afternoon departure will get us back to Athens around sunset.