If I Could Pick One Holiday

to go full tilt on, said the man across the aisle and one row ahead of me on the bus, it would be Valentine's Day.

I call bs on that. What man really loves Valentine's Day, c'mon.

I took a Greyhound bus last week for the first time in, oh, five decades or so, to get to Atlanta from Savannah. I had helped a friend drive from West Virginia to Port Royal, SC where she rented a house for a break from the winter at home. Anyone I tell that I took the bus says with a worried look, Oh, how was it? as if it were a new, mysterious way to get around.

Well, it was just like flying, except nowhere near as crowded, and on the ground instead of in the air. And the real bonus:  I didn't have to deal with airports on either end of the trip. But I do wonder how Greyhound stays in business if all of their routes are as poorly travelled as this one was. 

The one thing that has stayed the same from five decades ago is the people on the bus, specifically the odd ones. The man who spoke about his favorite holiday spent the entire three-hour trip between Savannah and Macon, GA trying to persuade some woman that she and he should be in a "relationship," a word that I heard him say over and over.

Well, good luck, sir.

When I last took a bus trip, it was over five hours long and a young woman who got on in one small town spent her time on the bus shrieking about problems she was having, and how she was going to get off at such-and-such town and kill herself. 

Well, alrighty, then.  

At another town, a man got on and decided that he could help her. I am suspicious of what help he was planning to offer, but they both got off the bus a few towns away from where he got on.  

I am sure that just as many slightly-off kilter people travel by air, but the planes are too loud to allow eavesdropping, thank goodness.

However! In the non-bus-related portion of the trip, I loved the Spanish Moss. It was much more lush than any I saw in Savannah, gorgeous. (I may have taken a lot of photos of the moss.)

 

We ate lots of seafood, including at this cute place, which collects dollar bills donated and signed by customers. They covered almost every surface in the place, including on the ceilings in some of the rooms.  When all of the surfaces fill up with dollars, the owner takes some down and donates them to a local charity, which accepts the dollars even though they are signed, drawn on and painted. The bank accepts them and they are probably destroyed and replaced by the treasury.  

 

We ate here one night, and watched as shrimp boats came in for the night.

We did very little shopping in Beaufort but I like the name of this business:

Guess what they sell.

And of course, we went to my favorite place, the beach.

It is at Hunting Island State Park, and it is a beautiful place, with a very narrow road leading through the pines and low shrubbery native to the area. There weren't many birds at all, but we did see a male bluebird. Who knew? They like the beach?

This is the lighthouse at the park:

Nope, it is not near the water, and that is because it HAS been near the water, and then IN the water since it was built in the 1800s. Storms constantly change the shoreline here, the lighthouse has been moved several times and since it is no longer used, it's just a tourist attraction with the addition of ---of course!---a gift shop.

Now, back to normal, which apparently means gray rainy weather. 

And knitting.