You don’t need to go far to enjoy a fun vacation. Take cue from this 1949 John Falter cover illustration and relax with an evening picnic.

Paris, Kentucky, will never be Paris, France, no matter how great the Kentucky Horse Park and Bluegrass Bourbon may be. But you do score some undeniable bonuses with close-to-home travel: No airports, no TSA, no exchange rate, and no translation.

Part of the joy of blooming where you’re planted is the spontaneity of flipping open an atlas or speed-dialing a GPS and heading off whichever way the wind blows. If something piques your interest, you can go down a country lane or make a fresh turn into an undiscovered part of the city. You’re an explorer in your own land, digging deeper into the history and culture of an area you thought you knew. For starters, here’s a dozen ideas to mix and match after checking local city guides for details. (And remember, you’ll always have Paris—be it Kentucky or France.)

Sunup

1. If you’re a sports fan, grab your favorite treats from the concession stand and root for a minor or major league team at a stadium you’ve never visited before.
2. When flowers are in glorious bloom, stroll through outdoor sculpture parks, gardens, and zoos that are proud of their gardens, too.
3. Pull on a life jacket and hop on board a riverboat or lake cruiser to explore a new body of water. Some cities have amphibious duck rides that plunge you right into the waves.
4. Weather permitting, pack a picnic with foods from a deli or market you’ve not yet tried. Check out city or state parks within an easy drive, and again, try one that’s new to you.
5. Book a matinee at a regional theater, then the evening will be free for a special dinner together.
6. Look into local historical societies, and explore a noteworthy house museum or a quirky local landmark. Some areas were famous for making glass, fine furniture, or farm equipment, and dedicated curators have saved the best for later generations to enjoy.

Sundown

1. Make a reservation to dine by a lake or river. Twilight’s magical on the waves.
2. Be brave and hop into a pub or tavern for karaoke night. Brush up your “Jeopardy!” skills with trivia night at the pub or sports bar.
3. Travel for your stomach. Search for regional favorites wherever you go: Maybe it’s Cincinnati chili, Milwaukee beer and brats, or a Maine lobster bake.
4. Find the oldest tavern in town and taste a bit of history. Order up the signature drink that’s been pleasing locals for generations.
5. Scan university music and theater programs for some of the best productions (and prices!) in town.
6. Break out of your pizza rut and try a new regional style—every town has its favorite twists on the best pie.

Staycations: Less Stress, More Fun! The Saturday Evening Post

It’s hard to express what this feeling is, a feeling of pampering and privilege, perhaps. A feeling of having arrived. Even in the land of equality, these are feelings everyone should get a taste of from time to time, but we usually don’t in the hustle-bustle of modern life.

From California to New York, Michigan to Florida, America’s grand hotels are distinctive in their architecture, histories, and traditions. They were created as retreats for Americans made newly prosperous in the Industrial Age. These were newly minted gentility, folks with money to carve out leisure time and lake steamers and railroads to whisk them away.

Today what all the grand hotels share is a sense of occasion. You don’t just pull up to the hotel parking lot expecting a convenient stopover on a long, arduous journey to somewhere else. Here, the hotel is the journey’s end. You book ahead and anticipate walking through those majestic doors to be spoiled by a level of service that’s rare unto extinction anywhere else in American life.

And then there’s just the simple grandness of the history. Each time I go, I wonder: How many people before me have stared up 100 feet to the top of West Baden Springs’ massive rotunda in the Hoosier heartland? How many visitors have marveled at the Moorish exuberance of tile and tapestry at Casa Monica in old St. Augustine? How many travelers have clipped-clopped up to the flag-festooned entrance of Michigan’s Grand Hotel aboard the hotel’s horse-drawn carriage, liveried in burgundy and silver?

The Greenbrier in West Virginia is the oldest of these venerable hotels with a tradition dating to 1778. Back then visitors would brave rutted roads to soak in the sulfur springs that bubbled up in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains.

The Greenbrier is perhaps more like an English country house hotel than any property on American soil. Pillars and ceiling soar, sheltering American and English antiques, glorious mantles rescued from European wrecking balls, and 19th-century oil portraits capturing the flower of English and Southern gentility. That spirit is preserved today in the famous afternoon tea in the lobby at linen-topped tables while a pianist plays soft melodies in the background.

Part of the fun of exploring heritage hotels is taking time to slow down and step back into the traditions of travelers past. You can’t leave the Grand Hotel atop its Mackinac Island bluff without whacking a few croquet balls, rocking on the world’s longest front porch, and parading past a gauntlet of white-jacketed waiters into the vast dining room.

The Grand Hotel commands this jot of limestone, the linchpin between Michigan’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas and the Great Lakes of Huron and Michigan. It’s the place to slip back a century or more to an authentic horse-based society. However high summer’s temperatures spike, Mackinac always sounds like Christmas Eve with the clatter of horses’ hooves and the heel chains on their hitches jangling like jingle bells.

Celebrating 125 years, the white pine Grand Hotel floats somewhere in time, still hallmarked by friendly Midwestern service. There’s a genteel pace at this National Historic Landmark that’s otherworldly.

On this car-free island, the Grand Hotel welcomes its guests to the stables to meet the giant Percherons and hackney horses that pull its distinctive burgundy vehicles. I love to whisper to these leviathans in their stalls and admire the turn-of-the-century sleighs, cutters, and carriages in the Grand’s collection.

While Mackinac Island turned its back on America’s motoring progress, the Indiana hamlet of French Lick couldn’t get enough of flashy cars, shiny locomotives, and private planes all belching fumes into the country air. For 30 rollicking years that peaked in the Roaring ’20s, each arrival meant more high rollers in its dueling illegal casinos of French Lick and West Baden Springs.

While French Lick Resort barred its threshold to the likes of Al Capone, its rival casino just a mile down this Southern Indiana valley, West Baden, was wide open to the King of Crime and his courtiers. Legend has it that you could spot Capone checking in then buying a Chicago paper to see what kind of trouble he’d left behind back home.

Capone cavorted under West Baden’s soaring dome, which hotelier Lee Sinclair crowed was “The Eighth Wonder of the World.” It was the largest free-standing dome in the world when it was unveiled in 1902, a record that stood until the Astrodome in 1965.

Bitter rivals for so long, these two behemoths in the Hoosier countryside now thrive as sister resorts, yoked together in a mammoth historic preservation project. It took $500 million to restore French Lick to grandeur and bring West Baden back from ruin.

Today it’s as easy as hopping on a resort shuttle to zoom between the two, trying out each one’s pools, spas, shops, restaurants, and golf courses.

French Lick now has 23½-karat gold plaster rosettes and brackets in its lobby, recreated from a historic photo. Gold leaf glitters once again on the pavilion roof. The casino is back—and these days it’s even legal.

West Baden has its Pompeian Court back in the vast atrium with Muses and Greek gods looking down. This is my favorite spot for afternoon tea or drinks at the bar, dwarfed by the masters of Olympus and the dome crown that glitters and seems to change color all night long.

Across the country from Indiana, the marbling and gilt are anything but faux at the US Grant Hotel in San Diego—just rediscovered after years in disguise.

When the Sycuan tribe of the Kumeyaay Indians bought the Grant in 2003, they discovered the original white Italian marble of the Grand Staircase lurking beneath the carpet. The staircase posts and balustrades, thought to be wood, were really carved alabaster. The new owners reopened the original carriage entrance and crowned it with a 1930s crystal chandelier.

The hotel seems to have come full circle, glittering again on Kumeyaay ancestral land in San Diego’s historic Gaslamp Quarter.

The Grant is an urban grande dame hotel, an elegant base for shopping at Westfield Horton Plaza and enjoying performances at the Civic Auditorium, Balboa Theatre, and Symphony Hall.

After seeing a show there’s no better place for a nightcap—maybe a signature Ulysses Vodkatini—than the GG Lounge. Relax and let your mind drift back 80 years or so to when one of the Grant’s owners foresaw prohibition on the horizon. He converted the Bivouac Grill into a not-so-secret speakeasy called the Plata Real Nightclub. Bartenders moved the booze through holding pipes meant for steam and salt water from the bay.

The Grant became one of San Diego’s most prosperous hotels during the era of bootleg gin; now, eight decades later, it’s come full circle to thrive as a legitimate grand hotel.

IF YOU GO

Casa Monica

Casa Monica in St. Augustine, Florida

Casa Monica
Where: St. Augustine, Florida
A bit of history: The town of St. Augustine was founded by the Spanish in 1565 and remained under Spanish control for more than two centuries.
Fun fact: The hotel is named for St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine, the city’s namesake.
The tab: Room rates in low season (January and June-November) range from $159 to $259. High season rates (February-May nd December) range from $179-$399.
Contact: 888-213-8903; www.casamonica.com.

The Grand Hotel

The Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, Michigan.

The Grand Hotel
Where: Mackinac Island, Michigan
A bit of history: Five presidents have visited the Grand Hotel— Truman, Kennedy, Ford, Bush, and Clinton.
Fun fact: The Grand was the location for the 1979 movie Somewhere in Time starring the late Christopher Reeve, Christopher Plummer, and Jane Seymour.
The tab: The resort is open May 4-Oct. 28. The weekday price ranges from $254 per person per night to $374 per person per night. On the weekends prices range from $274 per person per night to $399 per person per night in a Named Room. The fees include the Full American Plan (three meals included).
Contact: 800-334-7263; www.grandhotel.com.

West Baden Springs

West Baden Springs in French Lick, Indiana.

West Baden Springs
Where: French Lick, Indiana
A bit of history: Hotelier Lee Sinclair hired 500 men to work 10-hour shifts six days a week to build the domed building that every architect said couldn’t be built.
Fun fact: The last time the Chicago Cubs won the World Series was 1908—the last year they trained at West Baden Springs. In 2011, to break the century-plus drought, the Cubs requested West Baden’s famous Sprudel spring water shipped to spring training where it was sprinkled on the training field and on Wrigley Field in Chicago—to no avail.
The tab: In off-season (January-April and November-December) a French Lick room for two starts at $189 and a West Baden room for two at $299. In peak season (May-October) a French Lick room for two starts at $189 and a West Baden room for two at $299.
Contact: 888-936-9360; http://frenchlick.com.

US Grant

The US Grant in San Diego, California

US Grant
Where: San Diego, California
A bit of history: In 1939 Grant’s owners installed the West Coast’s largest radio towers on the roof. KFVW radio soon moved into the space, and the hotel scored a coup when President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered one of his first radio addresses to the nation from the Grant.
Fun fact: For the 2006 grand re-opening owners of the US Grant commissioned a $250,000 hand-milled carpet from Thailand and had it delivered by ship. You can admire the rug’s lustrous blues and golds in the lobby.
The tab: Room rates in the low season of December are $189-$309; the rest of the year, $289-$589.
Contact: 888-625-5144; www.usgrant.net.

The Greenbrier

The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia

The Greenbrier
Where: White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia
A bit of history: Because of the Greenbrier’s proximity to Washington, D.C., the government built a secret fallout shelter there in 1962. The shelter was big enough to protect each and every member of the U.S. Congress plus the executive and judicial branches of the government in the event of nuclear war. A secret for 30 years, the bunker is now open for tours.
Fun fact: The healing—and odiferous—sulfur waters that first drew people here in 1778 still bubble out of the spring under the green-domed Springhouse.
The tab: Off-season (January-April, November-December) room rate for double is $245 midweek, $570 weekend. In peak season (May-October) rates are $379 to $770.
Contact: 800-453-4858; www.greenbrier.com

Mohonk Mountain House

Mohonk Mountain House was built in 1869 by two brothers on 2,200 lush acres surrounding Lake Mohonk in the Shawangunk Ridge in New Paltz, New York.

Mohonk Mountain House
Where: New Paltz, New York
A bit of history: This National Historic Landmark was built in 1869 by two brothers on 2,200 lush acres surrounding Lake Mohonk in the Shawangunk Ridge. The hotel has stayed in the same family to this day.
Fun Fact: This picturesque resort is the subject of a Currier & Ives print. It was also featured in the Stephen King novel The Regulators.
The tab: Room rates for two adults are $560-$990 per night, including three meals, afternoon tea and cookies, plus activities such as yoga and use of the indoor pool and fitness center. In low season (January-March) a Midweek Winter Getaway is $170 per person per night based on double occupancy.
Contact: 800-772-6646; www.mohonk.com.

America’s Grand Hotels The Saturday Evening Post

North Americans have a rich bounty of shipwrecks along the reefs and shoals of the continent. Here is a sampler of easily accessible dives.

Florida Keys Shipwreck Heritage Trail

Florida Keys Shipwreck Heritage Trail. Divers and snorkelers can explore nine wrecks from Key Largo to Key West, lying in 20 to 140 feet of water. Many dote on the oldest wreck, the San Pedro, a member of the 1733 Spanish treasure fleet. It’s off Islamorada’s Indian Key in just 18 feet of water. Dives are usually less than $100 including gear. 800-352-5397; fla-keys.com.

James Bond, Thuderball, Plane Wreck

The famous James Bond wreck is in Nassau, Bahamas. Divers can see two wrecks used in Thunderball and Never Say Never Again, an old World War II landing craft, decorated with fire coral, sponges, and sea fans, and the steel skeleton of a Vulcan bomber aircraft. Dives are usually less than $150 including gear. 242-302-2000; bahamas.com .

The Royal Mail Steamer Rhone Shipwreck

The Royal Mail Steamer Rhone is the grand dive of the British Virgin Islands, off Salt Island. The ship, which went down in an 1867 hurricane, lies on a reef in 20 to 80 feet of water. It’s now encrusted with corals and sponges, and world-famous from its starring role in the film The Deep, with Jacqueline Bisset. Dives are generally less than $150 including gear. 800-835-8530; b-v-i.com.

Barbados’ Carlisle Bay Shipwrecks

Barbados’ Carlisle Bay is clogged with at least four wrecks, all close to shore. The Berwind is an easy dive, a French tug sunk in 1919, now in about 25 feet of water. Blowfish, trumpet fish, and lizard fish make the wreck home. 800-221-9831; barbados.org.

Besides the Herman H. Hettler, Smith Moore, and The Manhattan, many other wrecks lie off Au Sable Reef in Pictured Rock National Lakeshore, Lake Superior. Shipwreck Tours of Munising leads dive charters out to two wrecks, at $75 per person for a two-tank dive. Landlubbers can glide above three turn-of-the-century wooden ships, the Bermuda, the Hettler, and a mystery wreck as yet unidentified, in the company’s glass-bottom boat for $30, $12 for children 12 and younger. 906-387-5456; shipwrecktours.com.

Stay Dry in the Museums

For those who don’t like to get their feet wet, here are some great rescued wrecks and artifacts around the world.

Florida Keys History of Diving Museum in Islamorada covers every inch of dive history, from the heavy lead boots to the shiny metal helmets of early diving. Take a snapshot of the earliest underwater cameras. The museum is open daily 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Ticket price is $12 per adult, $11 per seniors, $6 per child 5-12 and free for children younger than 5. 305-664-9737; divingmuseum.org.

Mel Fisher Maritime Museum, Key West, holds one of the world’s great Spanish sunken treasures raised to the surface. For more than 15 years, Fisher, his family and his team searched for the Spanish galleons Atocha and Santa Margarita, royal treasure ships that went down in a hurricane in 1622 en route from Cuba to Spain. They found millions in emeralds, coins and gold bars, on display in Key West. The museum is open daily 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 9:30 a.m.-5 p.m. weekends and holidays. Ticket price is $12 per adult; $10.50 per student, and $6 per child. 305-294-2633; melfisher.org.

Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute covers the waterfront from the island’s pink sand to the bottom of the ocean floor. This is the place to try on scuba gear and take a simulated dive in a Nautilus X2 submersible—and survive an attack by a giant squid. Science is fun in this museum, which also has a Shipwreck Gallery, with centuries of recovered artifacts, and a Treasure Room with Spanish gold and pirate booty. The museum is open daily except Christmas, 9 a.m.- 5 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. weekends. Ticket price is $12.50 per adult, $10 per senior, $6 per child 6-17, and free for children younger than 5. 441-292-7219; buei.org.

Mary Rose, King Henry VIII’s favorite warship, is awaiting her new $59 million museum in 2012 in Portsmouth, England. In the meantime, scores of artifacts brought up from the wreck are on display at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. See what Tudor tankards looked like, and the tools that the ship’s barber/physician used on the crew. The Mary Rose, built between 1509 and 1511, served proudly in King Henry’s wars, and was on her way out of Portsmouth harbor in 1545 to fight the French once again when she sank. Not until 1966 did scuba diver Alexander McKee locate the wreck in near-zero visibility. The hull was raised in 1982, and has been undergoing hydration preservation ever since. Portsmouth Historic Dockyard is open 10 a.m. daily except Dec. 24, 25 and 26; from April-October, last tickets to the attractions are sold at 4.30 p.m. and the Dockyard gates are closed at 6 p.m. From November-March, last tickets to the attractions are sold at 4 p.m. and the Dockyard gates are closed at 5.30 p.m. Ticket price for all six Dockyard attractions is $31 per adult, $26 per senior, and $22 per student and child 5-15. 44-023- 9272-8060; maryrose.org

The Vasa Museum in Stockholm is Scandinavia’s most-visited, a vast space that spotlights the world’s only surviving 17th-century ship. King Gustav II Adolf commissioned the mighty warship, which was launched in 1627. On her maiden voyage in Stockholm harbor, the Vasa heeled over and sank. In 1956, divers raised the foremast; they brought the bulk of the ship to the surface in 1961. “Face to Face” is one of the museum’s most moving exhibits, with personae created from the wreck’s 15 unidentified skeletons telling their stories from Aug. 10, 1628, the day the Vasa sank. The museum is open daily 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., until 8 p.m. on select Wednesdays. Ticket price is $16 per adult, free for children 18 and younger. 46-8-519 548 00; vasamuseet.se/en.

Diver Betsa Marsh has explored shipwrecks from the Great Lakes and Caribbean to Polynesia and Micronesia.

Dive In! The Saturday Evening Post

Ageless St. Augustine Bonus
(Bonus material from “Ageless St. Augustine,” in the Jan/Feb 2010 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Click here to subscribe or buy the issue online at ShopThePost.com.)

The Kessler calamari at 95 Cordova in the Casa Monica Hotel is so popular that the restaurant plans to sell it in go-cups for travelers wandering the streets. Even nonsquid lovers fall for this semolina-crusted version, served with a Moroccan pesto of sweet olives, tomatoes, and asiago cheese. “We haven’t convinced them to let us walk and drink here like you can in New Orleans and Key West,” said Casa Monica’s Joni Dooley Barkley, “but we can walk and eat.”

For dessert, there’s Key Lime Pie in every possible permutation, but for my calories, I’ll take Claude’s Chocolate. Former New Yorkers Claude Franques and his wife, Nicole, have gotten into the Southern groove, making little white chocolate mimosas, flavored with orange and champagne, and pandering to University of Florida fans with dark chocolate gators.

However, there are scarier things than gators in St. Augustine. All you need to feel a chill up your spine is to eavesdrop on the locals. The Casa Monica Hotel and adjoining condos were built on an old Indian burial ground, they say, and were so haunted that the new owners called in ghostbusters from England.

Henry Flagler, the Standard Oil magnate who transformed Florida with grandiose hotels and railroads, died in 1913 and was lying in state in the rotunda of the building that is now his namesake college. Local legend holds that during the service, the casket lid slammed down, a puff of smoke flew up to the top of the dome, flashed down like lightning and seared a portrait of the man himself in one of the inch-square floor tiles. Just ask a local where to look in this sea of mosaics.

The St. Augustine Lighthouse, recently restored, has its own tales to tell. It’s a huff-and-puff climb up 219 stairs. (Just imagine being a keeper carrying 30-pound buckets of hot pig lard up to fuel the flame.)

Tragically, three little girls were killed during the lighthouse construction when they hopped into a railroad car for a ride and couldn’t stop it before it dumped them into the waves.

In the 136 years since, ghosts seem to have stacked up upon themselves at the lighthouse. When the SciFi Channel’s Ghost Hunters came to tape, they saw faces leaning over the stair landings and tracked plenty of psychic activity.

But you can hardly blame spirits for haunting St. Augustine. I didn’t want to leave either.

To make the most out of your St. Augustine getaway, check out the links below.

Art Galleries
Attractions
Bed and Breakfast Inns
Campgrounds
Events
Hotels

St. Augustine Travel Tips The Saturday Evening Post

Of course, she’s had work done—expert work. Because no one would trust Gone with the Wind to anyone but the best cinematic plastic surgeons.

The film, which catapulted Britain’s Vivien Leigh to icon status as Scarlett O’Hara and immortalized Clark Gable as the only possible Rhett Butler, will celebrate its 70th birthday this December. Thousands are planning pilgrimages to Georgia, the setting for the book and scene of the premiere. Marietta, Georgia, is even restaging the three-day GWTW gala of 1939, with spotlights criss-crossing the night sky and the remaining cast members walking the red carpet.

But what, really, is left after all this time—73 years after Margaret Mitchell unleashed the world’s best-selling novel?

Never underestimate the South’s love of tradition and, especially, its tenacious stewardship of all things GWTW.

From an original Scarlett gown to Mitchell’s Remington typewriter, there’s plenty to experience. Here are some of the milestones to help you map your own epic adventure.

Questing for Tara

Docent Ted Key greets visitors at Stately Oaks plantation in Jonesboro. Photo courtesy Betsa Marsh.

GWTW fans—called “Windies”—long for the towering white pillars of Tara, but the mansion we love was basically a confection whipped up by producer David O. Selznick.

The native Pittsburgher, who called GWTW “the American bible,” envisioned a plantation house like the antebellum mansions lining the Mississippi. Mitchell’s Tara, however, was modeled after her great-grandparents’ farmstead in Clayton County, a two-story frame house with a comfy porch. The family called it “Rural Home.”
In a tribute to her Irish ancestry, Mitchell named her fictional estate Tara for the hill of Tara, 30 miles outside Dublin, where Ireland’s first High King was declared.

“When Margaret Mitchell saw the film, she said, ‘That’s not the house I wrote about,’ ” said Ted Key, a costumed docent at Stately Oaks in Jonesboro, Clayton County.

Built in about 1831 by Mitchell’s Irish ancestor Philip Fitzgerald, Rural Home is now in ruins. Instead, head down Carriage Lane to Stately Oaks, an 1839 home in the Plantation Plain style of Rural Home.

“Windies always ask, ‘Is this Tara?’ ” Key said. “It’s as close to Tara as you’re going to get.”

During the Civil War, the Robert McCord family lived in the house, which was moved four miles in 1972. Mrs. McCord, her six children, and the cook were hiding alone
in the home when Union soldiers broke into the basement and found them.

An officer stationed a guard at the front and back doors to protect them, then asked a favor of the lady of the house. Would her cook make his officers home-cooked meals?

“That’s the way the house was saved,” Key said.

It was on the porch of her family farmhouse, similar to Stately Oaks, that young Mitchell heard tales of the war.

“I heard about fighting and wounds… how ladies nursed in the hospitals…the way gangrene smelled. …I heard about the burning and looting of Atlanta. I heard everything in the world except that the Confederates lost the war. When I was 10 years old,” Mitchell recalled, “it was a violent shock to learn that General Lee had been licked.”

Hollywood may not have gotten Rural Home right, but it did create an indelible illusion beloved around the world.

In 1979 Georgia’s First Lady, Betty Talmadge, bought the studio façade of Tara’s doorway, now located at Atlanta’s Margaret Mitchell House and Gone with the Wind Museum.

A photo of Mitchell surrounded by her papers is on display at the Margaret Mitchell House. Photo courtesy Betsa Marsh

Tracking the GWTW Manuscript

Travelers would love to see the original pages of the world’s best-selling novel, but Margaret Mitchell wouldn’t have it.

Her second husband, John Marsh, who encouraged Mitchell to write, said her will placed upon him “the duty of destroying her papers. … She believed that an author should stand or fall before the public on the basis of the author’s published work.”

Only 20 or so pages survive, and if you really want to see them, there’s only one thing to do.

Sue.

“There are a few pages in the SunTrust Bank, where they will remain unless someone challenges her authorship,” said Richard Cruce, the librarian who handles the Mitchell collection at the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System.

But you won’t leave the library disappointed. Fans from 38 states and 13 countries came last year to see the Remington typewriter that Mitchell wrote GWTW on—last chapter first. She wrote out of chronology from 1926 on, eventually weaving the chapters together about 1935.

The manuscript may be out of reach, but the Margaret Mitchell House has the clipboard she corrected it on. And the suitcase that Harold Latham of Macmillan Publishing bought to carry away the manuscript.

He’d come from New York to scout for new writers. When he met Mitchell at a writers’ conference and asked if she had work to show, Mitchell said, “No, I have nothing.”

A friend urged her on, and Mitchell finally went to the Georgia Terrace Hotel just as Latham was leaving. She handed over 70 bulging envelopes and said, “Take the damn thing before I change my mind.”

Searching for the Loew’s Grand

Seats 101, 103, and 105 at the Road to Tara Museum were saved from the Loew's Grand, which burned in 1978. Photo courtesy Betsa Marsh

Gone with the Wind was a publishing sensation, even at an astronomical $3 each. It sold more than 28 million copies worldwide.

Barely was the ink dry before movie buzz started. Clark Gable, “King of Hollywood,” would play Rhett, everyone decided. The actor, however, resisted all the way. Finally, his studio, MGM, loaned him out for the role, and Selznick added $50,000 to the deal, enough for Gable to divorce Ria Langham and marry Carole Lombard. Lombard urged him to take the part, and now no one can imagine anyone else as Rhett Butler.

Scarlett was trickier. The search would take two years, cost more than $92,000, and involve 1,400 actresses, from Lana Turner to Lucille Ball.

Ninety candidates took screen tests, with four in full color: front-runner Joan Bennett, Jean Arthur, Paulette Goddard, and Vivien Leigh.

Selznick, of course, swooned for 25-year-old Leigh, who traveled from London to land the role.

“Better an English girl,” sniffed a Daughter of the Confederacy, “than a Yankee.”

Atlanta, of course, was determined to host the world premiere, and the lavish Loew’s Grand was the place.

“The premiere was like a snowflake in Atlanta,” said Beth Bailey of the Clayton County Convention and Visitors Bureau. “We shut down everything for one snowflake. People didn’t go to work, didn’t do anything but try to see actors from Gone with the Wind.”

The city dolled up the Grand, built in 1893, with faux Tara pillars and raked the night sky with searchlights on December 15, 1939. All the stars arrived, somehow dwarfed by the 4-foot-11-inch figure of Margaret Mitchell.

Sadly, the Grand burned in 1978, and only fragments remain. The Road to Tara Museum has three of its red plush seats, a playbill, a railing, and a scrap of art deco carpet.

Atlanta’s Fox Theatre, built in 1929 as a Masonic temple, has taken over the heritage role with classic movies, including GWTW. It even has a few of the Grand’s seats. Ironically, they’re up in the standing room only area of the top balcony, a section reserved for blacks during segregation.

Staying at the Stars’ Hotel

You can still book the Clark Gable suite at the Georgian Terrace Hotel. The ballroom, a white vision of Corinthian columns and chandeliers, was the setting for the film’s post-premiere party.

“Every day,” said Carl Dees, general manager of the hotel, “someone comes into this ballroom to take pictures.”

Unveiling the Costumes
Walter Plunkett created some of film’s most iconic costumes. Who can forget Scarlett’s green velvet drapery gown?

He took the costumes after filming and willed most of them to the University of Texas, where they remain in storage.

Only one of Scarlett’s original gowns is on display, and it draws Windies from around the world to Marietta’s Scarlett on the Square. It’s her ivory bengaline silk gown that Rhett bought her on their honeymoon in New Orleans.

At the Road to Tara Museum in Jonesboro, seamstresses have devoted thousands of hours replicating GWTW gowns. They had the green-sprig fabric for Scarlett’s barbecue dress specially milled and sent plumes to Las Vegas to be dyed just the right burgundy for the gown Scarlett wore to Ashley Wilkes’ birthday party.
And when they replicated the green drapery gown and hat, they added a real chicken’s foot to the cording on the hat, just as Scarlett wore it. For true Windies, no detail is too small.

In Search of Rhett and Scarlett The Saturday Evening Post

Am I back in Greece? Spain? The Caribbean? It’s actually a bit of them all in the surprisingly sensual city of St. Augustine, Florida.

Once the tourist trap where kitschy hordes went only to sip from Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth, this town of 12,000—fiercely proud to be the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the continental U.S.—has plotted a whole new trajectory.

Sure, there are Cadillacs and condos, all the clichés of Florida, but there’s also full-sensory touring, from morning’s first sunray to evening’s last lullaby breeze.
Sniff out the gunpowder as you cross the drawbridge to the Castillo de San Marcos, designated a national monument in 1924. Ponce de Leon is credited with “discovering” St. Augustine in 1513, but the Spaniards came to colonize in 1565. They immediately fortified this beachhead, first with wooden palisades, then shifted to the local coquina stone for the Castillo’s construction from 1672-1695. It’s stood impregnable ever since.

Inside, reenactors fire off their muzzle-loaders, the smoke trailing that telltale fireworks aroma. The smell wafts over to the Colonial Spanish Quarter, a living history settlement along St. George Street. Behind stone walls, it’s the 1740s again, as tradesmen pound wrought iron and work leather; while in the apothecary shop, they grind mint and other herbs that families used against various maladies.

St. George Street is the pedestrian spine of St. Augustine, running from the lone remaining city gate to the town’s original Spanish plaza—almost a mini-version of Barcelona’s Las Ramblas.

Like Las Ramblas, St. George Street is a jumble of authentic buildings, reproductions, and, yes, some of the tackier cogs of the tourism engine. Yet there are sublime moments, too, as when you follow your nose to the piquant incense of St. Photios Greek Orthodox National Shrine. No matter how hot the day, the cool courtyard and the white plastered walls will drop your internal thermometer at least 10 degrees.

The shrine is an expression of gratitude from Greeks, who established their first religious community on the American mainland in Florida. After the Treaty of Paris (1763) ended the French and Indian War and forced Spain to cede Florida to the English, one Scotsman sniffed a fortune by building a cotton and indigo plantation in the newly Anglicized land. He swept up volunteers from Greece, Italy, and the Minorcan Islands of Spain, essentially enslaving them once they arrived in Florida.

The Greeks named their town New Smyrna and toiled for 10 years before marching north to St. Augustine after conflicts with a cruel overseer. Greek Orthodox worshippers have been lighting tapers and burning incense here ever since.

Minorcan and Greek families are the bedrock of St. Augustine society, and one of the tastiest places to dip into Greek culture is the Athena Restaurant. George Chryssaidis and his family fold a mean spinach-feta omelet and slice a juicy gyro. Every dish is made with Frixa olive oil, their family brand going back many generations.

Food, particularly seafood, is one of the central pleasures in St. Augustine. Into the 1970s, this was shrimp central, with dynasties of Greek, Italian, and Spanish families hauling in the nets. Local industry has faded, but nearly every self-respecting menu still features famous St. Augustine fried shrimp. Forced to pick a favorite, most people opt for O’Steen’s, the quintessential mom-and-pop place serving, some say, America’s best fried shrimp.

And to drink? In an old Spanish town, broiling in the sun, definitely sangria.

Just as it’s an unwritten law that you can’t leave town without a sip from Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth, it’s practically mandatory to head out to St. Augustine’s No. 1 attraction, the Alligator Farm Zoological Park. There’s plenty of sensory overload here, too: smells, parrot calls, and the snapping of alligator jaws when you toss chow in their moats.

The farm has moved away from cheesy animal shows to a more educational format, where visitors can witness a petite alligator handler grabbing a bamboo stick and hopping over the wooden barrier for her morning “class.” She’s surrounded by basking alligators that seem to understand her quiet command: “Be good.” St. Augustine is good, in every way that matters.

For more travel tips, visit saturdayeveningpost.com/staugustine.

Ageless St. Augustine The Saturday Evening Post