32.8 mi / 12.7 mph / 225 ft. climbing
Home: Blythe Island Regional Park

Yesterday we were running the A/C in our motel room, and this morning I needed to turn on the heat. A blast of cold autumn air has finally made it to the southeast. Even though we left our room well after sunrise, we rode for at least an hour with the thermometer stuck at 50℉. The gusty wind had Rett hopping up and down in the middle of the grocery store parking lot, where she found a patch of sun, to stay warm while eating our 2nd-breakfast.

On the extreme outskirts of Brunswick we hit a section of US-17 where an entire new roadway was being built alongside it, despite the existing road being entirely sufficient to handle the current amount of traffic. Presumably it’s preparation for big subdivisions being dropped into the forest, in this “Westernmost Point of the East Coast” (and thus, supposedly hurricane-protected, as I’d seen it advertised somewhere). I saw a new “School Zone Speed Limit” sign by one of the blocks of cleared land, and thought “huh, I guess that must be for the school they’re going to build here in 5 years.” But no, there was an elementary school sitting in the forest along this highway, miles from where the nearest kid could ride her bike (much less walk) to school. What I’m trying to say is that they do land-use really badly around here!

Before Darien, a huge brand new country recreation complex also had appeared in the middle of the forest, with four baseball fields and (unusually), two football fields with full goalposts. I thought maybe that was where the nearby, also-disconnected-from-anything high school played/practiced, but no, they had their own football field. Maybe pick-up football games on full-sized fields are just more of thing in Georgia than in most places? Then we hit a section where there was a miles-long sidewalk paralleling (but well off) the highway for no particular reason, but it was a more-relaxed place for us to ride our bikes, so no complaints about that particular land-use decision.

It’s been 19 days (or 11 riding days) since we’ve camped, and if that’s not a record for us, it feels like one. As we settled into our camp-routines, I realized the lack of camping is a big part of what has made the last couple of days feel relatively aimless to me. Early in my career of bike touring I discovered that it was actually the camping that drew me back to it more than the pedaling, and apparently pitching a tent remains an important part to me.

The palm-bushes ringing our campsite, and the Spanish Moss hanging above, made it even more special to pitch our tent. I’ve never camped in a place that looks like this, partly because our last time camping was in North Carolina! Blythe Island is a county park, so we won’t actually get to know what Georgia State Parks are like (nor did we visit a South Carolina State Park), but the county park was really nice. Individual shower rooms, firewood delivered to our site (especially useful for us!), and a nice quiet mostly-empty tent-camping section on this Friday night.

While Rett was in the tent readying for bed and I was sitting by the fire she heard (over the distant roar of nearby I-95) something large crashing around in the palm-bushes. I got up to investigate and heard two of them in two different areas, but couldn’t see anything even with my headlamp. But my headlamp did nothing to pause their crashing around. It didn’t feel like whatever they were had an interest in us or our food (or in being stealthy). Rett made a good guess that they might be armadillos, who we have seen frequently dead on the side of the road, but never alive. Tonight would not change that, but at least we heard them!