Savannah, GA to Richmond Hill, GA

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.

Randy’s Bar-B-Q, what I initially thought was a long-out-of-business place along the relatively-barren road, until I saw the big hot-dog of a smoker out back. Google’s 4.6-star rating now makes me wish we would have come by when it was open!

Honestly 60% of the day’s excursion was to visit Mirabelle, a coffee/waffle shop, and it was worth it, especially with the clerk who loved CBC’s ‘Anne of Green Gables’, despite not even being born when that version was released.

Mirabelle was directly across the street from The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, one of the tallest buildings in the city (214 feet to the top of the crosses).

The warm-climate whitewash, unusual for an American Catholic Church, is nicely matched with pastel shades in the interior.

Inside the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist.

Blue cheese columns and rose gold pipes (the organ pipes are actually a colorless silvered metal, but the warm reflections of sunlight filtered through the stained glass made it impossible to know that without being told by an expert.

This organ is quite new, installed in 1987, and the cathedral’s designation as a (minor) basilica is even newer (2020), indicating that the busload of tourists getting a lesson from their guide aren’t the only people who fill the pews these days.

A man who truly loves his job, this Cathedral security guard actually led us back inside after we had left, to make sure that we got a proper picture of the organ!

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.

A closeup of the Spanish Moss that beards all the live oaks in Savannah’s squares. Unusually for a thing-growing-on-another-thing, it’s native to the region, not an invasive species, and not a parasite (though the many small trees we’ve seen with thick beards draping otherwise-bare branches make me think some species tolerate it less than the live oaks do).

Savannah residential entry.

Our room in the six-unit Savannah AirBNB (by this point there was only one other guest).

The high ceilings were amazing, but the 19 steps they required made me glad we had taken a first-floor room!

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.

Tree-tunnel photo #55 of the last three weeks.

Not quite a tree-tunnel, but a somewhat more-suburban-feeling part of Savannah. We passed areas that felt completely like the Chicago suburbs of Wilmette (but with different trees) and Oak Park (but with different trees).

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.

The photos I saw online told me that this visit would be little more than a time-killer, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that the gravestone scenes were much more atmospheric than I’d expected (…which probably doesn’t come through in my photos either).

Bonaventure Cemetery.

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!)

Two Tides Brewing Co. Yes, those are technically all “beers”!

The trendy-feeling Metropolitan/Thomas Square neighborhood that the brewery was in (they’re hosting a Metalfest in a couple weeks!) was definitely a place for nomads like us!

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?)

Oh boo hoo, the bike lane ended, whatever will we do?

This medium-sized shoulder was actually the best of all setups, better than the bike lane (which had no rumble strip and encouraged the cars to pass too close to us) and better than the 10-foot shoulder (which collected tons of tire-popping debris). Here we have a buffer from the cars, and the grass is close enough to absorb all the debris that the cars blow off the road.

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.