Savannah Day 4
We’d initially only booked three nights in Savannah, but 1) Rett’s love of the city, 2) one of those days (happily!) “burned” with marathon spectating, 3) the space in our calendar leading to Thanksgiving in St. Augustine, 4) the availability of our room, and 5) the cleaning-fee math that makes additional nights on an AirBNB stay cheaper than the initial nights, all combined to inspire us to stay for a fourth night. With the extra day we walked into the city center one more time, laying down a few stitches in the fabric that we’d skipped yesterday, but making it a bit less of a marathon so that we could actually take some afternoon downtime.
We walked the area’s lone angled street for “direct” entry to the center, and it crossed some empty lots, industrial rust, and some of the most-disheveled housing we’ve seen in Savannah. But we got friendly “good morning!”s from other pedestrians, and nothing felt unsafe here or in the other lower-income parts of the city that we’ve passed through. It’s actually good to see that the charm of the city hasn’t gentrified everyone out, and that plenty of modest housing stock exists close to the core. I was curious to see how and where the shade-poor 20th-century development would transition back into the historic Savannah of everyone’s photographs, and it turned out to happen quite abruptly at Broad St., where an apartment building branded as “The Line” made the invisible explicit.
Walking around on a Monday definitely showed that some of yesterday’s heavy tourist-load was weekend-related, though the sightseeing trolleys were still filled, and dozens of people were lined up outside Mrs. Wilkes restaurant as we walked up and down Jones Street, “The Prettiest Street in Savannah”. We thought of paying for a house-museum tour, but the 20-minute wait was enough to tip us off to the “no” side of the fence we’d been sitting on. Rett had chosen our AirBNB partly to scratch that “go inside a historic Savannah house” itch anyway, and the way we collapsed into our four-poster bed proved that returning “home” was the right call.
To Richmond Hill
25.5 mi / 11.3 mph / 246 ft. climbing
Home: Scottish Inns
Even with our “extra” day, we have 7 days to get to St. Augustine, and a bit of weather, lack of on-route campgrounds, and plenty of cheap motels has made for a weird breakdown. Today we’d ride barely 20 miles to a motel, so even with a lazy checkout, we still had time to do day 4.5 of Savannah-exploration, this time hitting some more-outlying areas since we were on our bikes.
The enormous Bonaventure Cemetery lies down at the eastern edge of the city, and we descended through a Hawaiian-feeling near-jungle road to get there. The bikes made it easy to explore the many cemetery “roads”, while everyone else (it was the most-tourist-filled cemetery we’ve ever been in) was tied to golf-cart mini-buses.
On the way back west across the city, we didn’t even need to go out of our way to hit a brewery I had just stumbled across via a New York Times list. Two Tides Brewing specializes in “sour, haze, and funk”, which is right up our alley, and the insane $50 for a flight of 8 beers might have actually been worth it. The rooms-in-a-house setup was cool too, a taproom layout we’ve never seen (which is saying something, since we’ve been to a lot of breweries!)
Our exit from Savannah was via our old frenemy US-17, which varied between no-shoulders, to (fairly-narrow) bike-lanes, to “Bike Lane Ends” (and is replaced by a shoulder 3 times wider than the bike lane?)
For the whole ride my bike had been clicking and clacking with each pedal stroke, something that had started a few days ago but now had become completely consistent (Rett said it sounded like I was playing the spoons behind her). It was one of those super-annoying-to-diagnose sounds that only happens when riding, and not when off the bike spinning the pedals with my hands. It could have been coming from my pedal, my seat, or any of the several parts in between, and I was further discouraged by the fact that my quick diagnostic efforts over the last couple days had failed. So when we arrived at the motel, I went back outside to do a full flip-over and take-apart. I quickly discovered that the bolts holding the left crankarm onto the spindle were a bit loose, but I went ahead and took it completely off so that I could see if the bottom bracket bearings were shot. It seemed like it was the loose bolts that were the problem, though only tomorrow will tell for sure.
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