Key West or Bust, Day 3

Bikers and the City

Tuesday May 13, 2008

Since we have a very light riding day, we sleep in as long as possible. But eventually, the lure of a perfect southern day entices even the most sleepyheaded into action and to embrace the day.

And it is a perfect day, unusually crisp and cool for this time of year, 51F and perfectly formed. By 8:30 AM we have fueled the bike and are ready to head southward on I-77. But Jill, my GPS friend, keeps clicking in my ear. I've never heard her do this before and it's actually quite annoying. It appears I've created a spurious waypoint and it is corrupted, because the GPS keeps going back to the "touch-screen-waypoint" screen regardless of what I do. "Won't that annoy you?" Kitty asks.

Well, yeah, but what am I to do? Can't sit here waiting for Jill to fix herself. After trying various things without success, I finally think of trying to delete the wayward waypoint, and that seems to fix the problem. I've never had this issue before with any of my GPS units, so it's a mystery to me.

With that problem resolved, we set off southward. I think of motorycling, of life and its rewards. This is such a perfect day, and to think that only two days ago we were slogging through vicious downpours! It occurs to me that this perfect day is emblematic of life in general: The best rewards come after the times when it's hard to perservere, when hope most difficult to maintain. The brightest days often come after the darkest.

After an hour and 40 minutes of perfectly delightful riding, we stop for a break, and I'm standing in the lobby of the rest area idly looking at a map. Kitty walks up and I describe our intended route. I-77, as Interstates go, has been a lovely ride this morning, but at heart, when traveling with Kitty, I'm not an Interstate kind of guy. "Can we avoid I-95?" Kitty asks.

Well, yes, we can. And so I choose a route where we work our way off the Interstate and westward about 10 miles using a "shortest-distance" route that only Jill could love. We have to deviate several times because Jill, in her zeal to create the shortest route, doesn't always consider whether all the routes are paved! At the town of North, we turn left on US 321 South, which immediately pays riding dividends.

This is the rural South, with long smooth stretches of pavement interspersed with small towns featuring the occasional white southern mansion with its tall columnades and live oak trees exotically festooned with hanging strands of moss, giant magnolia trees holding their own space in the expansive green lawns. Some of these live oak trees must be large enough to overspread my entire property! The primary field crop seems to be corn, which appears to be about 12-18 inches tall this time of year. In one field we see a giant machine with a spraying apparatus that must be at least 80 feet wide. A white fog emanates from the spraying. Logging trucks and the implements of logging are everywhere. We ride due south through miles of tall green forests that are mostly pine but also, until corrected by someone who really knows, what I'm going to call pin oak forests. To our right is a railroad track; we never leave it for 80 miles or more, but Kitty is disappointed that we never see a train.

I am so happy Kitty gently urged me to find a route that escapes I-95! This has been a low-key and relaxing but captivating ride! On a motorcycle, two lanes are better than four just about any day! We get to Savannah at a little after 1:00 PM, check with the hotel to make sure everything is in order (we can't check in until about 3:30), and then ride 15 miles east along a scenic Rt 80 through the swampland to Tybee Island, Savannah's beach and the locale of several historic old forts. On either side are brown grassy swamplands and shrimp boat docks.

On our motorcycle, Kitty & I really are the antithesis of city folks. We usually avoid cities entirely, so Savannah is a bit of an experiment to see if we might actually like dabbling in city life. But we are strangely out of place here, out of synch, and I can't help thinking we do better together on the open road. This is never more evident than when we walk on the North Beach of Tybee Island in our long jeans and motorcycle boots, surrounded by beautiful people in tans and beach attire. On vacation and off the bike, I could be one of those people, and frequently am (well, except for the beautiful part); on the bike, well, I just want to be on the bike. Much as I crave my beach time, somehow this leaves me a little empty and I'm ready to be back in the saddle again.

On the way back to Savannah we stop at Old Fort Jackson, which has quite a colorful history with regard to defending Savannah against the British and later against the Union forces. Ironically, its last stand was ended by a command to evacuate when the Union General Sherman arrived in Savannah on his famous march, and in that confrontation not a shot was fired from the venerable old fort. The Savannah River is wide and deep here, and several oceangoing vessels pass into or out of the harbor while we are there.

As we unpack, I can only marvel at the bewildering assortment of stuff we pull out of our trailer and into the elevator to our fouth-floor hotel room. "What ever happened to those people who threw an extra pair of jeans into the saddlebag and were off for a week?" I ask Kitty. She has no answer. But as I recall telling my son, "We are the people I warned us about!"

My WOTI friend Roger Riley recommended Uncle Bubba's for dinner, or Paula Deen's (Lady and Sons), also recommended by some others. Well, by the time we get back to our hotel in the historic district, we are hungy. We talk about riding to Uncle Bubba's or walking to Paula Deen's but in the end, Mazlo always wins: we walk to the waterfront and enter pretty much the first restaurant we see, which happens to a Cajun place named Huey's. Cajun with a South Carolina flair: they serve Kitty's grilled salmon with garlic and parmesan cheese grits! I have a crawfish etouffee and thus Mazlo is happy and so are we.

Tomorrow is our longest riding day for this trip, about 400 Interstate miles to Sarasota. We've been watching the news about those terrible fires in Florida, and this evening I actually called our friend in Sarasota. We think our southbound route probably won't be affected, as we're tracking mostly along the Gulf coast, but the return trip was scheduled to run by Lake Okochobee, one of the hardest hit areas.

It's a lot to think about. And we'll think about it as we need to, and we are quite ready to abandon or modify any plans we've made.