49.5 mi / 13.0 mph / 417 ft. climbing
Home: Ling’s AirBNB Room

Our motel combined two of Choice Hotels’ brands literally under one roof. We had paid $52 (plus tax) for our “Econo Lodge” room, while fancier people paid $73 (plus tax) for a “Quality Inn” room. The guy hadn’t said anything about the big breakfast room behind me when checking in, and comparing the “amenities” lists on Choice Hotels website made it quite clear that breakfast was something that came with the Quality price but not the Econo Lodge price. On the other hand, the gallery on the Econo Lodge page included detailed photos of the breakfast room, and reviews mentioned the breakfast, so…?

We’d carried microwave breakfast bowls with us from the Dollar General yesterday morning, so certainly didn’t need the motel breakfast, but when I went down to pick up coffees (the only thing included in the Econo Lodge rate according to the website), I asked the guy if breakfast was open to us and he said “yes, yes!” as if it was strange that I even asked. Rett judiciously had enough with her room breakfast, but I’m never one to pass up free calories, so I was obliged to add on some biscuits and gravy and a load more. It’s just funny how we’ve now been in hundreds of motels/AirBNBs around the world, and there are still “firsts” to discover!

Our highway-interchange motel was the final thing along a frontage road, so it was not surprising that Rett was surprised that we were going to continue forward down that frontage road rather than backtracking. But for some reason, the I-95 frontage road runs continuously for 27 miles here, despite there being very few properties that need access along its length. That lack-of-properties (and StreetView) suggested it could be a very nice cycling option (despite a lack of heatmap activity), and it turned out even better than I expected. Barely any traffic, and a much-better surface than I’d feared (frequently frontage roads can be the old main highway, and barely maintained).

The town of Ridgeland lived up to its name, requiring us to climb a 3%, 40-foot hill as the price of entry, the biggest natural hill we’ve gone up since the dunes of the Outer Banks. A few miles past the south end of town our frontage-road luck came to an end: traffic had increased, the small shoulder completely disappeared, and the next 9 miles featured the rough decaying pavement that I often associate with frontage roads (even though at this point it’s actually signed as US-17!) The worst bit was that there was essentially a 9-mile long potholed crack running about a foot to the left of the white line (only on our side!), exactly where we naturally want to ride to give cars room to pass. So we either found ourselves stressed because we were too far out in the center of the lane and cars were passing too close, or too far out to the edge of the pavement where we might lose control, or banging along over the holes and cracks.

Past Hardeeville I-95 veers west, so our US-17 returned to being a major highway of its own, but now with a good-sized shoulder, smooth surface, and finally-behaving tailwinds, the miles flew by. When we exited onto “Alligator Alley” to take the back door into Savannah, we again returned to a shoulderless two-laner, but this time with 70% of the vehicles being heavy trucks. Most of them behaved, but it was a less-than-peaceful entry into Georgia, US state #26!

The East Coast Greenway is what directed us into Savannah via Port Wentworth, and it shows a two-mile detour around the huge container-ship terminal (one source of all the truck traffic) rather than taking the direct route through the center of the terminal. But we figured that we’d already battled those trucks for five miles, so why add two more to to avoid just another three miles of battle? It turned out to totally be the right decision, as the truck (and car!) traffic actually evaporated to nearly nothing. Yes, the intermodal hub was a young boy’s Richard-Scarry dream of clockwork activity (ships! cranes! boxes! trucks! trains!), but it seems like the system had been designed to keep nearly all of that freight movement off of the cross-town road.

With time to kill before our Savannah AirBNB check-in, we repeated our Charleston arrival-day with a stop at Service Brewing for a couple of their flights. Our backdoor entry meant that we hadn’t yet seen any of the Savannah that draws people to this city.

But then a couple blocks from the brewery, we found ourselves suddenly bumping along a narrow stone-lined street, lined with historic brick waterfront buildings. This was the Savannah I remembered (though my memory had misplaced the location of all these steep stairs and narrow sloped passageways with Charleston)!

Rett was instantly in love, but then she met an even better distraction! Megan, one of her oldest friends and maid-of-honor at our wedding, was also in Savannah, having flown in from Chicago last night! It wasn’t a complete coincidence; Megan was in town to run the Every Woman’s Marathon, and two-and-a-half weeks ago I had roughly calculated that our current pace would put us in Savannah at roughly the same time, so we set a goal to arrive the night before the marathon, even though we were more than 500 miles away at the time. We did it! And tomorrow we would watch Megan meet her even-more-impressive 26.2-mile goal!

After a too-brief hangout under the live oaks cantilevered over the dark alleyways, we let Megan get off her feet and back to resting up for her tomorrow. We had just a couple miles left to ride to our AirBNB, and before we even got there, Rett had decided she wants to spend a year living in Savannah (shh, no one tell her that it’s not 70 degrees all year round).

By pure coincidence, our AirBNB house was directly on the marathon route, with our room’s window facing right toward mile 24.6. An even better coincidence regarding our location was that the one WarmShowers host in Savannah lives just two short-blocks away. We weren’t staying with him, but I had used him as a mailing location for parts to repair Rett’s pannier that was broken in our crash. I picked up the box from his front porch while Rett continued ahead and met our AirBNB host. We needed to lift the bikes up a couple stairs to get them into the fenced back yard, so I temporarily dropped the box next to the sidewalk. I then forgot about it for 5 minutes, and when I went back to grab it, shit, it’s gone!! WTF?! The WarmShowers guy had actually initially recommended that I have it mailed to a friend of his, since he had a couple of packages stolen off his porch years ago, but I wasn’t that concerned. Now I get the concern! I saw Ling, our AirBNB host, coming back up the sidewalk, and she was confused at my confusion, and I shortly figured out what had happened: she had seen the box laying there, saw the WarmShowers guy’s nearby address (and his name) and since she’s a kind and helpful person, walked over to put it on his porch. Ha! I’m not sure she fully understood why the box was actually mine, but she at least believed me, and walked back to make the 2nd retrieval of the box by someone who it wasn’t addressed to.