Savannah Trip with Pack UP + Go
Apr. 21st, 2018 10:48 amA few years ago, I read an article about a travel agency named Pack Up + Go. Their special feature is that they plan a three-day weekend for you, without telling you where you’re going until you’re ready to leave. We were intrigued by the idea, but wasn’t sure whether it was for us. Is this sort of travel pleasant for us? Do they do a good job of delivering on this travel experience?
We didn’t find many reviews, and eventually we decided that we wouldn’t really know unless we tried them ourselves, and we were willing to try the experiment. This ended up with a trip to Savannah January 26-28, 2017. So this report is discussing this trip from several different angles: what did we do in Savannah? Is this model of travel a good one for us? Is Pack Up + Go good at arranging this sort of trip? What should we and they do differently next time?
We had first tried to use Pack Up + Go for a road trip weekend for the weekend before Thanksgiving 2017, because planning for road trips in the Tesla has been just fussy enough to hit the zone in which I was attracted to the idea of offloading the planning work to someone else, but I was confident that we wouldn’t get stranded without power if they weren’t able to arrange Tesla charging as well as they said they were.
But it turned out that on that weekend, we needed to make a planned road trip. So we changed our mandate for Pack Up + Go to say “we would like to take a airplane trip in the winter to someplace warm with a great food culture”. (Pack Up + Go gave us no trouble at all about rescheduling with a couple weeks forewarning.)
A week before we left, we got email with the weather forecast for our destination - high around 60° with a chance of rain – and our flight time - 7am. The flight time gave us some hesitation - we are somewhat late risers, and we worried whether early rush hour traffic might hinder us on the way to the airport. But leaving early in the morning would give us more time to get to our destination. To get to the airport by 5:30, we decided to wake up at 4:20 and try to leave by 4:45.
This led to the first mistake of the trip, and the mistake was ours: even though we knew we would be waking up at 4am, and we planned to go to bed early, the chores of getting packed and getting the house ready for us to leave bogged us down, and we didn’t manage to get to bed until midnight. We would have had a happier trip with more sleep.
We got to the airport with a comfortable amount of time - not enough to eat breakfast, but without any worry about missing our flight. We opened the packet they sent us to discover that we were going to Savannah! (I’m not sure how things were arranged in the envelope, but we fumbled getting the destination card out of the envelope, dropping papers on the floor. We took a video of the reveal in imitation of the happy selfies we saw on Pack Up + Go’s testimonial page, but it’s not something we want to share.)
Savannah was an exciting destination for us. We had been to Savannah very briefly once before - only long enough for an extraordinary lunch at Mrs. Wilkes Dining Room.
The flight (with a connection in Atlanta) was just long enough to read through the suggested itinerary and the Savannah visitor’s guide in the packet. Their suggested itinerary recommended Mrs. Wilkes as our first stop, and spotting that they were open only for lunch Monday - Friday did much to reconcile me to the early-morning flight.
But we didn’t get to go to Mrs. Wilkes. We got a taxi from the airport to take us to our hotel and then to Mrs. Wilkes, and the taxi driver said that Mrs. Wilkes is closed during January. I called from the taxi to double-check, but I got no answer. Alas!
I’ve put a lot of thought about the question of what the Pack Up + Go itinerary should have said about Mrs. Wilkes. On the one hand, guiding us to a restaurant that was closed during our visit was not the best possible itinerary. On the other hand, Mrs. Wilkes is exactly our sort of restaurant, the sort of place we want to be recommended - and since we knew about it ahead of time, I would have lost trust in Pack Up + Go if they hadn’t mentioned it. But I don’t know if it would enhance clients’ travel in general to say “You’re missing out on this awesome restaurant.” After a lot of pondering, I’ve decided that for me specifically, with my strong interest in Roadfood and my broad knowledge of the most-lauded Roadfood restaurants around the country, the best thing to do would be to say “We know that Mrs. Wilkes is right up your alley, but unfortunately they are closed this weekend.” That would have confirmed that they understood our interests and spared us the effort of trying to arrange our plans to include Mrs. Wilkes. But that only applies to the real standouts like Mrs. Wilkes.
So there we were at the hotel with our brunch plans thwarted. And here I made a mistake or maybe two. The possible mistake: instead of calling Pack Up + Go (they had said “please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions at all while you're away”), I fell back on my usual tools of Roadfood and Yelp. From a long-term perspective, it was certainly a mistake - doing the experiment of calling them would have given me more information about whether it’s worth calling them.
The definite mistake: I over-constrained the problem. I was looking for (a) Southern food that was (b) highly recommended and (c) very close to the hotel for the sake of Lori’s legs. (Lori’s been having some knee and back issues that make it hard for her to do a lot of walking.) This made the question too hard to solve when we were both hungry and running on low sleep. I eventually broke the barrier by deciding that we could be more free-spending than usual this weekend and use Lyft to get around and pay for pricier tours.
For lunch, we went to Debi’s, a meat-and-three restaurant made famous for a minor role in Forrest Gump.

I had a good feeling when I saw eleven sides listed on the specials page.

Lori had the honey pecan chicken, with sides of field peas (because I talked her into trying them), mashed potatoes, and bread pudding. (The bread pudding made me double-check whether the section of the menu was labeled “sides” or “vegetables”.) The honey pecan chicken was a combination of flavors I just didn’t really appreciate; the sauce was mostly just sweet, and the whole pecans in the sauce didn’t spread much flavor. Neither of us cared for the field peas. But the bread pudding was delicious.

My lunch was the fried fish special, with red rice, Parmesan brussels, and turnip greens. Everything I had was delicious. I was particularly taken with the Parmesan brussels; the Brussels sprouts I tend to enjoy are usually roasted to bring out the nutty flavors, but these were stewed so long that they had lost all firmness and crushed just with my tongue.

Lunch finished with “bonbons”, bite-sized nuggets of mint chocolate ice cream dipped in chocolate.

When we left Debi’s, we met our first of Savannah’s squares. Savannah was laid out on an orderly plan with 24 wards of buildings each ringing a public square. 22 of them are still around, and they give historic Savannah a very distinctive look.

We ambled back towards the hotel through the City Market. We stopped for a picture with an affable statue of Johnny Mercer.

Lori took a nap while I tried to sort out plans. We then took a trolley tour of the city to spare Lori’s legs and get a feel for the place. (No pictures, because the sides of the trolley were shielded by clear-ish plastic and I didn’t think pictures would come out.) The tour was pretty good, with a few short performances with costumed performers among the sights. We particularly remember the performance of Rosie the Riveter working in the Georgia shipyards.
Our first choice for dinner was The Olde Pink House for fancified southern food. But when the concierge called to make a reservation for us, the earliest reservation available was 10pm for both Friday and Saturday. So we decided to skip The Olde Pink House.
Instead, we took one of Pack Up + Go’s recommendations and went to Circa 1875, a French restaurant. (The woman who waited on us had a French accent and a personality that said ‘owner’.)
We shared the pâté as an appetizer.

I had the Cassoulet Maison. I don’t have a lot of experience with cassoulet, but I think it’s possible to do a better job than this. The beans were kind of crunchy in that way that makes me think “undercooked”, and the sausage and sauce didn’t add greater joy.

Lori had the duck breast, and while I think we both felt that she was the clear winner on dinner choice, her meal was not particularly memorable.

Dessert was better, though. I encouraged Lori to get the La Provence cocktail, which involved lavender-infused sparkling wine. This was a delightful drink.

I spotted crêpes Suzette on the dessert list, and I am a sucker for flambéed desserts, so I persuaded Lori to share them with me. Alas, it was not flambéed tableside, but it was still very tasty.

I should note that Lori loved the ambiance and liked the food at Circa 1875 more than I did.
The Pac-man shape of the crêpes Suzette provides a nice segue to our next stop:
from there, we went to a place that had caught my eye in the Savannah tourist guide: The Chromatic Dragon. The Chromatic Dragon is what I’d affectionately call a nerd bar, dedicated to combining food and drink with Dungeons and Dragons and other RPGs, board games, and console video games. I know of a few other nerd bars, such as the Malted Meeple (board games) in Akron, and 16-bit (arcade games) in Cleveland, and I’ve backed a Kickstarter for one in Pittsburgh. It may be that soon I’ll find nerd bars so commonplace that I won’t seek them out when traveling, but right now I feel excited to visit them in an “I’m somebody’s target demographic” way.


The menu was a smorgasbord of nerd jokes, and if you like that sort of thing I invite you to click through to see the large version of these pictures. My favorite dish name on the menu was “Shrimp and Crits” (runner up: “Bean Me Up Scotty”), and I regretted that I was too full from dinner to order any food.





We probably could have joined a game with someone else, but we were feeling tired and not completely social. I ordered a tasty fruity drink called a Skooma (a Skyrim referenced), we played one game of Red Dragon Inn (because it’s a game about fantasy characters in a bar that we could play in a bar about fantasy characters… oh, never mind), we wandered through to make sure we’d seen all the sights, and we went back to our hotel.

Saturday, January 27
We slept late to make up for the early flight.
The hotel’s breakfast was probably just fine, but I had hopes of something more than fine. But we had a time limit before our lunch plans. While Lori got ready, I went out to bring breakfast back for us. My first try was Goosefeather’s, which had been among Pack Up + Go’s recommendations. But the line was long enough that I didn’t want to wait. (Pack Up + Go had said “You may have to wait, but it’s worth it.” But I didn’t think I had time.)
So instead, I stopped at a French bakery near our hotel named Cafe M. They spoke proudly of how all their baked goods were made fresh each morning. I got a couple of croissants, some cannelis, and a breakfast crepe, and everything was delicious.

The reason I was so attentive to the schedule: we had signed up for a food tour with Savannah Taste Experience. (We knew that it would use up most of Lori’s capacity for walking for the day, but thought it would be worth it.) We might have looked for a food tour on our own, but Pack Up + Go’s recommendation certainly contributed.
The tour began at Smith Brothers Butchers, a Savannah specialty food store.

We sampled brightly colored beet dip, three flavors of very tasty sausage (andouille, Tuscan, and blueberry), and housemade pickles.

Next stop: Wall’s BBQ, which has been serving up barbecue in the former woodshed of a house since 1963.

The sample they offered was half a pulled pork sandwich, and it was outstanding - some of the best barbecue I’ve had. This had been on Pack Up + Go’s list of recommendations, and it was an excellent suggestion. This might be my second favorite restaurant experience in Savannah.

The tour guide explained that the rule at Wall’s is “When you can read it, you can eat it.” Side items on the menu are scrambled at the beginning of the day, and unscrambled when they become ready to eat. I have not yet ben able to unscramble everything on this list.
Our next stop was a mini picnic in Crawford Square, where our tour guide brought back sandwiches from Zunzi’s, a South African-inspired sandwich shop that Pack Up + Go had called “the best sandwich you may ever have.” The sandwich was the Conquistador, chicken baked en papillote on French bread with a zesty sauce. It was tasty, but I wouldn’t call it the best sandwich we ever had.

From there we went to Our Daily Bread Cafe, a bakery with a connection to the nearby church that I no longer recall precisely. The official sample was a little pimiento cheese croissant which was a pleasant dainty bite. I also ordered a pecan pie square that turned out to be a cloying disappointment.


We stopped around the corner at Nuts About Savannah, a roasted nut and popcorn shop with a vivid Christian faith.
Penultimate stop: Savannah Seafood Shack, which shares space with a rolled ice cream place named Below Zero. I ogled a Low Country boil, but it was on someone else’s table so I didn’t take pictures. The tour sample was a bite-size piece of crab pie, which tasted clearly of crab and a whole lot of cheese.

The final stop on the food tour was Cha Bella, an upscale farm-to-table restaurant. The pear bread pudding was good, but I’d much rather go to Wall’s.


I was happy with the food tour. As usual with food tours, it was much more expensive than it would have been for us to visit these places on our own, but the small samples and the explanations from the tour guide provided a lot of value. We also bought a copy of Savannah Food: a Delicious History, written by the folks who run the food tour, and I’ve really enjoyed that in-depth treatment of Savannah’s restaurant scene.
After the food tour, we had another tour planned: the Freedom Trails tour of black history. (In a van, because Lori’s legs were screaming.) This was important to us, because we know that Savannah is rich in black history, and we know that we’re prone to overlooking that history. But the tour was a bit iconoclastic. Instead of the fancy trolley of Friday’s tour, this tour was driving around in an unlabeled grey van that was showing its age. Lori and I were the only two passengers on the tour. And we sometimes found the guide’s accent difficult to understand and his tales rambling and unclear. (TripAdvisor reviews seem very mixed about our guide - many found him excellent, but a fair number have had bad experience or had him not show up at all.)
There was a usual succession of historic buildings to drive by - I didn’t take pictures through the van windows. But there were three stops where we spent a lot of time. The first was the Beach Institute, one of the first African-American schools in Savannah, now home of a gallery of African-American art. The largest section of the museum was dedicated to the woodcarvings of Ulysses Davis, a self-taught barber and whittler from Georgia in the 1950s.

Our second stop was at the Savannah African Art Museum. The art was fascinating, but I felt it was only scratching the surface of presenting many different African cultures.


The third long stretch of the tour was a drive through a Savannah cemetery that had once been a plantation. I remember some markers of slave burials, a whipping tree, and the grave of NAACP activist W. W. Law, but much of it has blurred out of clear memory.
I’d give such a tour another chance, but it was far from a complete success for us. Part of that is just that I didn’t have enough of a framework of African-American history to easily incorporate the details that Johnnie Brown gave us, but it’s also true that Savannah doesn’t express African-American history in its geography as much as white history.
For dinner, I yielded to the impulse to be an out-and-out tourist: we went to The Pirates’ House. We’d heard about The Pirates’ House several times on our tours because it’s the oldest building in Georgia, and it was usually described as good food, but touristy enough that locals didn’t return often. But why not be a tourist when that involves pirates?
Thoughts of piracy led to thoughts of rum drinks. And I wasn’t driving; drinks were an option.
So I sampled the Chatham Artillery Punch, because we’d heard it mentioned on Friday’s historical tour. According to the legend, George Washington visited the Chatham Artillery in 1791 and was honored with a banquet, and there was confusion over which officer was supposed to spike the punch, so they all did. According to the Pirate’s House menu, it involves tea, white rum, gin, whiskey, brandy, and red wine, as well as other flavorings.
It turned out to b a delicious drink. It was fruity, but the tea kept it from being overly sweet.

For an appetizer, we had fried green tomatoes, made fancy with smoked gouda pimiento cheese and chipotle aioli. I’ve had fried green tomatoes several times now, and I have yet to find any that I’ve found particularly tasty. I think I’m at the point that I don’t need to try them any more. Even without the chipotle aioli, they were too spicy for Lori.

I fared better with my shrimp and grits. I had only had shrimp and grits twice before, and neither time had been particularly good. So this try had gotten to the point that this was risking a strikeout of the entire concept. Fortunately, this was very good, with a nice Cajun cream sauce.

Lori was much less happy with her crab au gratin, which tasted mostly of cheese.

Overall, the Pirates’ House was not as gimmicky as I thought it might be, and I enjoyed exploring the place and reading about the subterranean passages. But although the drinks were very tasty, the food was good but not awesome.
Afterward, we took one more trolley tour, this time a ghost tour. We usually enjoy ghost tours, but this one really failed to gather my attention. I don’t know whether it was tour fatigue or the fact that this was a trolley tour instead of a walking tour, but the stories didn’t engage me. The one nifty thing I remember is a couple of performances from costumed performers, including a creepy one from a doctor in the midst of a yellow fever epidemic.
Sunday, January 28
I chose breakfast from the Roadfood website: Sisters of the New South. I liked the Roadfood description, and it had a good local reputation - the Lyft driver who took us away from there afterward said “That’s the place where, when your mother can’t cook for you, you go there.” But our experience was not that good.
I had the smothered chicken, rice, and a biscuit. The rice was amazing, full of dark, flavorful secrets. But the smothered chicken and the biscuit were both kind of dry in a lonely-on-the-steam-table kind of way.

Lori chose a pancake breakfast because she feels a need to start her day with breakfast food. It was pedestrian.

St. John’s Cathedral had been on Pack Up + Go’s list of recommended sights to see in Savannah, and Lori prefers to go to Mass when she can, so we went there for services. It really was a beautiful cathedral, with mosaics everywhere.



Nearby Lafayette Square.

With a little time left before we had to leave for the airport, I felt we ought to see a little of Savannah’s river and port. So we went down to the riverfront, which has been developed as a tourist zone.
Soft mist really dresses up the industrial site across the river.

This African American Monument was very moving.

Our last lunch was at Vic’s on the River, which we chose mostly because it had a river view, a short walk, and available seating. It turned out very nicely.
It started with biscuits with orange marmalade. There were perhaps not my quintessential biscuits, a touch denser and cagier than my ideal - but I think that’s a local style.

The menu didn’t have a lot that stood out to me as truly local. My fancy was caught by a dressed-up shrimp and grits with smoked cheddar grits, bacon, and rosemary barbecue sauce. I don’t have a lot of shrimp and grits experience, as I’ve said, but this was sumptuous and outstanding.

Lori chose the fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy, which was also delicious.

For dessert, Lori talked me into the praline basket with ice cream.

And with that, we were off to the airport to return to Pittsburgh. The taxi driver who had taken us from the airport had offered to bring us back and had sent us a text to confirm - this worked out very nicely because it allowed us to ask her to pick us up at the restaurant instead of the hotel.
Final Thoughts
So, how do we sum this up? What do we think of Pack Up + Go?
- We had a good time.
- Savannah was a great choice of city for us. It was very scenic and had lots of good food.
- The recommendations for things to do in Savannah were generally on point.
- The price was reasonable, I think; although I carefully didn’t check the prices for flights to Savannah, I think the price we paid (at the lowest tier for a flyaway weekend with Pack Up + Go) was reasonable for two round-trip tickets and a nice hotel. They may have gotten the tickets more cheaply, but that’s fine - they deserve to have some profit margin. (I’m still not certain that I’d find the value in a driving vacation, but I’d give it a try.)
- Their minimum price is not particularly cheap. We felt we got what we paid for, but that price point is not for everyone and not for us all the time. (And their price options quickly climb into “I can’t imagine spending that much for a weekend” territory.)
- An unforeseen benefit: Pack Up + Go makes a great conversation topic. When people asked us “what brought you to Savannah?” and we answered “We went to the airport and discovered we were coming here”, it sparked a lot of pleasant conversations.
Pack Up + Go is certainly not for everyone. In particular, some people use a different budget for their travel, and some people enjoy the planning part of the travel. (Sometimes we are those people, and we won’t always use Pack Up + Go.) But we had a good time, and we would certainly give Pack Up + Go another try.