Savannah: A Friendly Place

by Elizabeth Seward on

Savannah isn’t a young American town. Established in 1733, Savannah is what we refer to as “historical” in the U.S.A. The city’s pillared homes and ivy-covered walls make a nice backdrop for visitors on any of the various guided tours of the town, but the reputed friendliness of Savannah is part of the reason people visit and then return.

I first traveled to Savannah on tour. My band played at a place in town, The Jinx, and I was impressed with the owner of the venue. She was kind, energetic and uniquely accommodating. She believed in paying touring bands and she even had a space available for the bands that came through if they didn’t have a place to stay. She promoted touring bands to local music writers and publications. She requested a stack of posters in advance and made a point to actually hang them. And so my first experience in Savannah was a good one. People were at the show and enjoying themselves. One man even bought two of everything we had for sale at the merch table and then opened up a tab for me and my bandmates to use the rest of the night. The one-off kindnesses I experienced in Savannah might have seemed just like good luck when isolated, but the collective hospitality of the town began to seem more intentional than not, more a fact of Savannah life than a fluke.

%Gallery-162312%

When I was back home in New York, I talked about moving to the South. Before visiting Savannah, I never knew charm and cool could be so inseparably paired in a place. When a roommate of mine eventually departed NYC with aim for Savannah, I bid her farewell with envy. I couldn’t undo my first impression of this Georgia destination; the luster didn’t fade with time.

My husband and I were haplessly traveling down the east coast in June. The trip had been a series of badly timed and poorly planned excursions that had led to more frustration than fun. We decided to stop in Savannah because he had never been there, but we only had one afternoon to explore. Yelp pointed us in the direction of a good cafe, so we parked and tied our dogs to the patio table when we arrived. We sat next to a Russian couple that had been living in Savannah for a while. Conversation sparked in that serendipitous way it does sometimes, wherein each involved party is actually in the mood to talk. When the couple said goodbye, two older gentlemen discussed our afternoon plans with us, giving us both advice and direction. We walked toward the river with the canopying Spanish moss overhead. Many more people than usual, it seemed, stopped to pet our dogs. Each person had anecdotal Savannah stories to share and we had listening ears. In between our conversations, we began discussing the town.

“Everyone is so friendly here. It’s unbelievable,” my husband remarked.

“I told you so,” I quipped.

When the heat of the afternoon had toasted our shoulders, we walked back to our car. My husband pulled out of our space and drove down the road and made a left turn. Unfortunately, he turned directly into another car, mistakenly thinking that we were on a two-way street when we were instead on a one-way street. I uttered a succession of curse words and we pulled over into a nearby parking lot to assess the damage. The two cars were damaged, alright. I was trembling as the woman who owned the car we’d hit approached us, feeling uneasy in anticipation of her wrath.

“Just tell me, what were you thinking?” she asked my husband in a voice sweet with maternal instinct.

“I thought we were on a two-way street. We don’t live here. I’m so sorry,” he responded.

“Well, that’s OK. Is everyone alright?” she asked, spotting our dogs through the open door.

“We’re fine, are you?” I asked.

“I sure am, and that’s all that matters,” she said before warming us with a smile I’ll never forget.

Look Up: The Perseid From Texas

by Elizabeth Seward on

I’m moving out of Austin and back to New York just before what would have marked two years in Texas. I only have four weeks left until I pack the POD and I have an expanding bucket list to make good with before I go. One of my incentives for leaving NYC in the first place was the sky. I wanted to see it. I wanted to observe its expansive breadth and color during sunrise and sunset. I wanted to see that glimpse of the world beyond Earth provided with each shining star and planet in the night sky. In the event of a meteor shower, like The Perseid, I wanted to see those soaring trails of light, too. And so we drove; we drove west. At the suggestion of a friend who was in a back seat of our van, we followed the highway west and into the ink black of the early morning. Steep hills and sudden, sharp turns paved the path into the Westlake area, where we followed our friend’s directions through a twisting, gravel road that brought us to the windy top of a ridge, wherein his family owns ten acres of land.Pine in the air outside, cedar in the ranch’s interior, and a blank canvas of a sky, ready for the brush strokes of passing meteors. We took lawn chairs out to the center of the wooded yard and looked up.

“Six years ago, we heard an awful noise coming from out here. It was a mountain lion eating a baby deer,” my friend told us.

I curled my legs into my chest and wondered where my dogs had wandered off to. Every twinkling star I saw through the trees beside me looked like a glowing, peering eye of a calculating cat. My shuddering was paused at the sight of what I’d come to see, a shooting star, a member of the Perseids participating in its annual, orbital dance. Vega was straight above and persistent as an LED flashlight shining from across the room, but Vega isn’t across the room. Vega is 25 light-years away. It’s 2.1 times as massive as the Sun and a planet about the size of Jupiter may be in orbit around Vega.

We know nothing, I thought as I stared at Vega. We see nothing, I thought as I concentrated on the sky, hoping that the layers between me and the rest of space would shed like onion peels. This is all we have, this small ball of a planet, barely plotted on the map of it all. Zoom out on the universe and we fade away alongside the meteors we see, which are similarly relatively tiny. But then again, maybe that’s everything. Perhaps the best we can do is take those harrowing right turns into our countryside and look around and then look up. The scents of the wild, the instinctive fear of a predatory animal looming, the mysteries within the keyhole view of the universe we see from here – we’re hardwired to explore and take note. Bucket lists exist because of this facet of our being, the pursuit of knowledge and even better, knowledge by way of experience. I wanted to see a meteor shower in the Texas sky and I did. And while my bucket list for Earth is a bottomless well, one day our travel planning will be based off of a list that isn’t anchored to this one little planet. We’ll one day vacation on the Moon or Mars, but then what? The universe is expanding and travel will follow suit. And no matter where we are, no matter which far-off planet we get to, we’ll always be compelled to look around and then look up.

Video Of Dolphins Looks So Good It Doesn’t Seem Real

by Kraig Becker on

Mark Peters recently went fishing for tuna off the coast of Santa Cruz in California. He took with him his trusty GoPro video camera and a newly built “torpedo” housing that would allow him to film underwater. Peters hoped to capture some great footage of their catch of the day but instead wound up with some of the most amazing video of dolphins that you could ever hope to see. The images are so good in fact, you’ll swear they were created by Pixar.

The video, which you’ll find below, just serves to underscore how excellent and versatile the GoPro cameras really are. They were designed for use in action sports, such as mountain biking or kayaking, but have evolved into a fantastic device for capturing video in a variety of situations. The footage captured here simply has to be seen to be believed.


“The Blue” from Mark Peters on Vimeo

Video Of The Day: ‘Samsara’ Captures Imagery From Across The Globe

by Libby Zay on

Today’s Video of the Day is an exclusive clip from “Samsara,” a new movie featuring mesmerizing scenes from more than 20 countries. Filmed over a period of five years, the footage covers sacred grounds, disaster zones, industrial sites and natural wonders, demonstrating that human’s life cycle mirrors that of the rest of the planet. The film’s title is a Sanskrit word meaning “the ever turning wheel of life.”

Although it is a documentary, Samsara has no dialogue or descriptive text. Instead, the viewer is encouraged to find inspiration from the images on screen and musical score in order to make their own interpretations. Director Ron Fricke and producer Mark Magidson sought out to make the film in order to capture the “elusive current of interconnection that runs through our lives.” In other words, the filmmakers hoped to encapsulate the essence of a subject, not just its physical presence. They traveled across the globe in order to make the film, including the Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii, a village in Ethiopia, Chateau de Versailles in France, and a doll factory in Japan.

Samsara will be shown on the big screen in select cities starting Friday, August 24. For a full schedule of screenings in the United States, click here. You can also watch the theatrical trailer after the jump.

Cedar Point Officially Announces New Roller Coaster For 2013

by Libby Zay on

Always seeking to break records, it looks as though Ohio’s Cedar Point will be building a new winged coaster projected to have the longest drop, fastest run and longest ride of its kind. The coaster, which is set up so riders are suspended in cars that hang out over both sides of the track, is the first coaster to be built at the park since Maverick debuted in 2007. Although rumors about a new coaster have been circulating for months, the news officially broke today when the amusement park put out a press release.

Expected to be completed for the summer of 2013, the ride is named “Gatekeeper” because a section of the ride will arch through two towers directly over the park’s admission gate. Riders will go on a two-minute and 40-second spin that hits speeds up to 67 mph on a 4,164-foot track that reaches heights of 170 feet.

Here’s how a press release describes the coaster: “Once riders crest the top of the 170-foot-tall lift hill, the coaster train will rotate 180 degrees to the right, turning riders upside down before plummeting a record 164 feet toward the ground at speeds reaching 67 mph. Then the train will enter a half loop, go through a half twist and curve out in the opposite direction from which it came. A towering 105-foot-tall camelback hill awaits just before riders glide through a 360-degree giant flat spin.”

Of course, all those numbers come with a cost: the new coaster and a redesigned front gate will cost the park approximately $30 million. According to the Sandusky Register, Cedar Point will also remove two rides – Space Spiral and Disaster Transport – to make room for the new coaster. When completed, the park will once again have 16 roller coasters, which was temporarily set back to 15 when Cedar Point began taking down Disaster Transport.