To Whom It May Concern

Day 4 - 02Apr05

FINALLY, a long wonderful night of blissful sleep. I don't know what my deal was, but for probably a week leading up to the trip and the first couple of nights I spent in South Carolina I had the most difficult time trying to sleep. I'm guessing I just really missed the one I love, and that longing to be nearer to her again was messing up my sleep cycle.

It was really odd though, more so for her I'm sure. For me it was waking up in the middle of the night and being mildly disoriented, and then remembering where I am at, and that the most amazing young woman is asleep beside me. For her though, it was waking up completely perplexed, thinking she is still in the squad bay, and wondering "Why the hell is one of the girls in my bed with me????" Haha, I had to laugh when she told me that in the morning. I remember what that was like though, you wake up and think you are still there, and then finally about 4 days after you leave you are able to wake up and know right away you are no longer at boot camp. She woke up about a dozen times, usually startled, enough so that it would wake me up, and I would whisper to her and then hear her sigh deeply and sink back into bed, as though being there with me was some sort of comfort zone for her. That made me smile.

We were both awake around 0800 and we laid in bed and talked for probably an hour. I think Belly felt weird just lying in bed, considering she was used to getting up 4 hours or more earlier on a regular basis, but oddly enough I was the one who was awake more from about 0600 on, I just kept looking at her and smiling, I was so happy.

After some freshening up, we headed down at 0915 to have ourselves the good ole' continental breakfast. When we got to the lobby, there was this guy putting all the muffins and waffle batter and milk, etc, into the fridge. I was like "uh, excuse me, isn't this supposed to be open till 10??" and he laughed and reminded us that the night before was the end of Daylight Savings Time. DUH!!! I had completely forgotten. The man was nice enough to let us have whatever we wanted, and also some others who came down and found out the same way that we did that we had lost an hour the night before.

With that in mind we got ready with a sense of urgency because we had plans to spend the whole day in Savannah being tourists. I called the front desk and reserved the room for one more might so we could really check the city out, then we both threw on comfortable shoes, jeans, and tshirts, then jumped into the truck and headed back towards Savannah.

Now, two things about driving in Savannah: 1) the streets are in no way made for a vehicle the size of Belly's truck. In fact, although some of them were two lane streets, there was no way I would have been able to squeeze past parked cars without creeping into the left lane, so I had to be really careful while navigating my way around. 2) the other drivers in Savannah, tourists or not, were the rudest drivers I think I have ever seen!! I don't know what would possess someone to be so fantastically stupid that they would actually SPEED UP and cut us off with their Volkswagon that weighs less than 1/3 of what our 3 and a half ton truck weighs, and this would happen AFTER I was already making my lane change.

They would pretty much swerve around me in the same lane, and if I didn't stop the lane change I would have hit them. At one stop light it was everything within my power not to drag the skinny little punk ass out of his car and introduce him intimately to the pavement. EVERYONE seemed to be a stupid driver, I was wondering for a moment if I was actually in Lincoln, Nebraska again!!

Because it was still quite early, we were able to find a quaint little parking spot in one of the beautiful city squares, RIGHT in front of the building where Belly once lived. We didn't ever get to go inside of the building, and I probably should have asked one of the current students to give us a little tour so I could share more of Belly's art school experience, but with so much other stuff to do I never got around to it.

It was rather brisk and cool, compare to the other days I had spent in South Carolina, but we figured it would warm up later in the day, as we headed off hand in hand walking along the old city, checking out the sights. Belly showed me a cute little house that she used to hang out at, two gay guys rented it and they would throw really fun parties. Then we came upon a bar, Six Pence, where she used to eat nachos and drink beer. They were not open yet, so we continued our tour. We visited her favorite art store, a quaint little corner shop with everything from colored pencils to model airplanes. Then we visited with the sales lady in a fancy jewely store for about 15 minutes, about the history of Savannah, it was quite entertaining.

There was an international foods festival going on, and we walked all around thru the booths, but we didn't buy anything because neither one of us had cash, only our check cards haha. After festivaling for a bit, we headed down to the river front area. I always tend to look at things and wonder about what went on throughout history at this location, it's like you can almost feel the energy from so many years of constant activity in the area. The stairs down to the river were steep and very narrow, typical of the design in that era. You had to be polite and stand to the side and slither by if you met someone coming up as you were going down. Thankfully we didn't meet anyone too large, or it might have been disastrous heh.

By this time it was probably about 11:30, and the wind was really coming in cold off of the river. We went to a little restaurant called "Bernie's" and ordered up some corn fritters, nachos, and a couple of beers. We sat and sipped our beers and ate our appetizers slowly, it was really nice. The nachos were really good, not quite as good as Old Chicago's but then, are there any nachos that good? I think not, but these did the job.

We headed back out on the river front and checked out a really big candy shop, inside they were making their own caramel, taffy, Italian ice cream, there were all sorts of interesting candies. The whole place smelled like one big ole' bag of brown sugar. After leaving the candy store we realized that our choice of clothing for the day was sadly inadequate and we went in search of sweat shirts. After about 3 stores (cool stores, other than not having what we were looking for) we finally found a couple of sweatshirts, and the extra clothing made us a little more comfortable.

Under one of the hotels there was a Ben & Jerrys, and wow we had to have that, so I got money from the ATM and we enjoyed some chocolate ice cream bliss. Unfortunately, I had a big ole' waffle cone and the wind was blowing so damn hard that it was actually blowing my dribbling ice cream all over my hands and pants. That was pretty frustrating, so much so that I finally gave up and threw the cone away.

The wind was really getting cold coming off the river at this point, so we headed back up into the old city squares again and started walking around. We checked out a few art galleries, a silver smith shop, a cat shop, and then sat down for awhile because I was tired, yes, ME, not her haha. She made fun of me for that, oh well heh. We decided to head back towards the truck, it was mid afternoon by this time, and Belly wanted to grab the blanket because later on in the evening we were going to ride the Haunted House horse drawn buggy tour.

We went back to the Six Pence bar and had a couple of drinks and some dessert, and visited with one another for a couple of hours, then we headed out to find out where our horse tour would be starting from. Upon finding the starting point, we headed into a rustic little underground bar called the Bar Bar, and played pool and drank beer for about an hour. It was a really nice place, and we were basically the only ones there. Belly won EVERY stinking game though, because I kept fouling up, I would get like down to the eight ball and scratch and lose, it was really quite annoying, but it was still a lot of fun!!

Then as the day was winding down, it was off to ride our Haunted House tour. Interestingly enough, the driver of the carriage was originally from Nebraska, and we freaked her out because in 4 years on the job she had never had anyone from Nebraska take her tour, it seemed like that made her day. The tour was pretty cool, I liked the actual historical explanations about the old buildings even more than the tales of ghosts that live within. The tour was about 45 minutes long, and thank God we brought a blanket because it was unseasonably cold, and so cuddling under the blanket for ghost stories was really necessary haha.

After the tour we went back to the Bar Bar and had a couple more drinks, watched a little NCAA basketball, then we headed for the truck and started back to the hotel. Along the way we stopped first at the ghetto McDonalds and decided it looked really dirty so we headed up the road to the pothead college student McDonalds, where they didn't even acknowledge us at the drive thru for like 5 minutes and then they couldn't figure out how to work their credit card machine so we had to go to an ATM for more cash!!

Finally, with the precious fries Belly so desired in hand, we got back to the hotel, another late night of talking to one another, and drifting off to sleep... blissful.