A Visit to the Hostess City of the South :: Personal Narrative Writing

A Visit to the Hostess City of the South In 1994 John Berendt whispered a tale of murder and scandal in a quaint Southern town that took the nation by storm. Berendt’s novel, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil spent more time on the New York Times Bestseller List than any other piece of fiction or nonfiction. This tale of a murder and other oddities which Savannah tucks away in it’s proverbial â€Å"closet† takes place during the 1980‘s and 1990‘s. Upon reading this novel I became obsessed with the idea of visiting Savannah, and in 2002 I was able to make this obsession a reality. With a much needed Spring Break in sight, my boyfriend and I decided to take a weekend jaunt to the â€Å"Hostess City of the South†. After our classes were over and our bags were packed, we finally headed out of Tallahassee on the afternoon of March 8th. We traveled east on I-10 and drove the mind-numbing 166 mile stretch to Jacksonville. The sad thing about interstates is that they are generally bland with only an occasional view of different scenery. We breezed past the generic fields and even more generic patches of forest that characterize I-10 along the Florida Panhandle. Shortly after merging with I-95 north of Jacksonville the area surrounding the interstate morphed into swampland as we crossed the Nassau, and later St. Mary‘s Rivers. We whizzed by an abundance of saw grass and swamp cypress, which was a nice change from the pine forests of Florida. Another change that we noticed around Brunswick, Georgia was the gas prices†¦only $0.99/gallon! Of course, we stopped to fill up and then proceeded to drive the ninety-five miles to our hotel in Hardeeville, South Carolina. Hardeeville was only fifteen miles from Savannah and we had a free hotel room there courtesy of a Ramada rewards program. The lax South Carolina laws on fireworks sales have made it a very lucrative business judging from all of the highway signs.