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Zombie Route 1 and Feet Wet
August 16, 2010
I suppose you are asking what boats and zombies have to do with each other. I know that I feel like a zombie when I drive back and forth the 4-5 hours it takes to get from the apartment in Atlanta to Makara in Brunswick or vice versa, but that is not the whole story. Zombies have been big in the movies over the past year or so but that's not it either. In fact it is Interstate 16 specifically that I often refer to as Zombie Route 1. The reason goes back a long way and is not only that feel like a zombie after that stretch of road, which is a very boring 150+ mile stretch more or less in a straight line from Macon to Savannah. I have been an avid gamer virtually my whole life. Started out when all you could do was use a board to play (mostly strategy and tactical gaming). I relished mainframe based games when computer games first came into being. Stuff like Adventure and the original Lunar Lander on a Tektronix vector display. Anybody remember those? Sort of a souped up cathod ray storage ocsilliscope. Yes, I am that old! As the PC revolution took off I could not get enough of the early games and followed the evolution as PC's got better and faster. I was a great fan of the MechWarrior series and loved Myst and other puzzle games. Lately Valve's Half-Life series is one of my favorites as well as the newer Left 4 Dead series. And it at this point, without further digressing, that I come to zombies. In Left 4 Dead, a first person shooter or FPS as we gamers say, it is zombies that are your foe. In the follow-up sequel Left 4 Dead 2 the game starts in, drum roll…, Savannah Georgia and follows a journey to New Orleans. Now to get from Savannah to New Orleans the logical route is to take, you guessed it, Interstate 16 West to Macon.
Hence we arrive at the end of the shaggy dog story and the reason I so lovingly call that stretch of road Zombie Route 1.
As you can see from a game screen shot on the left it is indeed Interstate 16 that you travel and the traffic is not all that inaccurate on a bad day. Luckily I have not yet encountered any real zombies in my travels, just the traffic, but I will let you know if that changes.
As a tag line, one of the chapters in the game is a romp in Savannah along the River Walk. Earlier this year, we visited Savannah to check out the town, which is quite nice. Savannah maintains a historic beauty that is very charming. It is indeed a river town but very large ships regularly navigate it. Nothing like peering out your hotel room window at about bridge level of a large container ship that take up most of the river width. We availed ourselves of good food and drink at the very nice restaurant Elizabeth on 37th, which we can highly recommend. The layout of the town is wonderful as you move off the river. There are periodic public squares, quite literally squares, that are now small parks. You must go around each square to continue on the street that you are on. The architecture is lovely and the River Walk is unique. To make the Rive access better than a slog through a long muddy shore (quite a bit of tide in this part of the savannah River) they cam up with a neat idea. The river from is essentially two levels. There are two levels. The lower one is basically at river level and is now the River Walk area of Savannah composed of shops restaurants, parks and working docks. The upper level, is where the rest of Savannah is located. A huge stone retaining wall keeps it up there! An alley runs behind all the lower level buildings which are several stories high and go above the upper level grade. Access from the lower to upper levels is through ramps, stairs and bridges from the lower level building upper floors to the upper level of the river front. As we walked up the lower level of the River Walk at one point I literally just froze up. It was as if I was inside the game staring at the landscape and buildings. Really freaked Nancy because I kept saying I've been here before, albeit virtually. I was at the spot that the game designers used as a basis for the artwork in that part of Savannah, creepy. The first picture is me standing at one of the locations I recognized. 
The second show the rendition of that location in the game art. The similarities are spooky. You see the same doorway and alley. You can see the large stone retaining wall that runs the entire length behind the River Walk buildings and you can glimpse the elevated walkways from the upper stories to the street level behind River Walk.
OK so much for zombies. When I say feet wet I mean Makara is finally back in the water! In the picture she is side tided just to the left of the haul out area for some final touch up work away from yard dust.
A few days later I went back to Brunswick to move her back to her slip. As expected there is a bit of clean up to do to get the yard dust off her but that will be a labor of love. 
One thing is different from when she left for the yard. The slip is different! We snagged a better one while we were up on the hard. The old one was very close to the shore end of the docks. This made exiting difficult as there was precious little room to back out before the rudder would hit bottom. The new slip is right inside the T-Dock end of the dock which means there is ample room to back out and turn without playing footsies with the rudder and the bottom near the shoreline. Getting in is much simpler to with the caveat that you need to go further into the marina and then turn around to get into the slip. But that is a small price to pay to be a bit further out the dock. Another small advantage is the shore side facilities are right at the foot of the dock finger we are now on. Sweet!
We can now get back onto our to do list and move ahead on our project work. Guess I won't be focusing too much on zombies now that I can work on the boat again.