A Cemetery and Looks That Kill

Yesterday morning I left Jekyll Island and started heading north.  I was passing through Savannah and had an extra couple hours in my schedule so I decided to stop and check it out.  My only prior exposure to Savannah was through the movie “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” starring Kevin Spacey and John Cusack, and so I figured an appropriate place to visit was Bonaventure Graveyard.  When the book “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” was published in 1994, the cover featured a picture of a statue from a grave in Bonaventure Cemetery, and the opening and closing scenes of the movie are filmed in the cemetery as well. 

A bit spooky, even in the day time

Bonaventure Cemetery looks and feels just like a cemetery should.  It is set on the banks of the Wilmington River in a quiet section of the busy city.  It’s quiet and peaceful and it’s full of tall, expansive oaks that provide lots of shade.  The oaks, like many of the other trees in the humid environment in the south, are draped with Spanish moss that gives them an appropriately creepy graveyard-ey personality.  The sunlight filtered down through them and created an almost spiritual effect of columns of pale yellow light that touched various patches of the ground in the quiet shade.  Dates on the headstones range from as far back as the mid 1800s up to recent years.  Some of the older ones are well dressed with black mold against their worn ivory surfaces, again giving them the just-as-you-would-expect look to old headstones.   Most of the gravesites appeared to be family sites: they were large squares segmented off by gray granite bricks around the exterior and had multiple people buried within each site.  The headstones varied from simple plates on the ground to exquisite statues of sorrowful looking angels to foreboding mausoleums. 

This desolate tree made
a great headstone itself

I only spent perhaps an hour in Bonaventure, but John Muir, the namesake of Muir Woods and the Muir Train in the Sierra Nevada mountains, actually spent six days camping and sleeping in the cemetery, at times even sleeping on top of gravestones.

Sleeping on top of gravestones was not for me, so I left Bonaventure and drove further north towards Charleston, SC.  I stopped just outside of Charleston in Wadmalaw Island to visit the Charleston Tea Plantation, which is the only tea plantation in the United States.  They are a small operation with only about 130 acres of land and they sell tea under the brand American Classic Tea.  I took a tour of the farm and the manufacturing plant and got to learn all about how tea plants are grown, farmed, and harvested.  The tour started with a trip through the tea fields on an old trolley.  Since it was the middle of the day on a Monday, the tour was quite small and there were only 6 of us on the trolley:  two older ladies from Florida, a mother, daughter, and granddaughter trio from Georgia, and myself.  Our guide explained how all of the tea plants on the plantation were started from a single cutting of a tea plant.  They do not use seeds to grow new plants, but they use cuttings from their existing plants to propagate new plants, so all of the plants on the farm are essentially clones of each other.   One other interesting thing that I learned was that black tea, oolong tea, and green tea are all from the exact same plant, but the difference comes in how the leaves are processed.  

So that's what tea fields look like...

As the tour progressed, the guide kept asking random trivia questions about tea to keep the six of us engaged.   “Tea is the second most consumed beverage on the planet, who knows what the first is?”

“Soda pop!” I shouted out.  One of the humorless elderly Florida ladies turned around and gave me a deathly stare of disapproval. She obviously was a very serious trivia player.  (The answer was “water.”

“The United Kingdom is fifth per-capita in tea consumption in the world.  Where is the most tea consumed?”

“Teepees!” I guessed loudly.  Again, the lady from Florida did not approve and shot me a look even worse than the soda pop stare.  Everyone else thought it was amusing, though.  (The answer was Turkey, btw)

At the end of the trolley tour, we got to see how the leaves were processed and converted into loose tea, and after that we got to drink as much tea as we wanted.  I sampled several glasses of mint tea, raspberry tea, and peach tea (after which I did create quite a tea-pee before getting back on the road!). 

Today I plan to continue my journey north a bit more.  I’ll be wandering around in Charleston for a couple hours and then heading up to North Carolina to take a tour of a dairy farm.  In the description of the tour it said they let you get hands-on with milking cows, but the part I’m hoping for is getting hands-on with some ice cream samples.  

The lady on the right kept scowling at
my trivia answers.  I was trying to be sly
and get a picture of her while she did it,
but I was never quick enough on the
shutter button.