(Most of the roads I took today aren’t even on this map. The railway is, leading to Yemassee)

Despite being long overdue a rest day (it should have been on Saturday and it’s now Monday!), I decided to put it off for just one more day. I was still feeling physically up for another ride, especially after the pleasure of cruising more slowly through Charleston yesterday. The forecast, I saw on TV last night, was for a very hot day today and the hottest on what would now be my rest day, which meant I could hunker down with the Three Rs – read, write and relax – in the motel’s aircon at my destination, Yemassee. So I set my alarm for very early (don’t ask) and left in the dark again, headed into deepest South Carolina.

• Today’s Distance (miles): 63
• Time in saddle: 5h 18
• Max/min temp – in full sun (°c): 29°/21° (a big benefit of starting early was the very comfortable temperatures!)
• Climbing (feet) : 223
• Calories used: 3,296
• Today’s 2nd Breakfast: Skin-on fries, breakfast egg croissant and coffee, Wendy’s Yemassee
• Cafe time: 0h 15 (the most unusual stat of the trip so far?!)

One of the hardest things to convey in this blog is the atmosphere of places I pass through. Sometimes a film clip can help, like the one from two nights ago beside the river at Buck Hall Campground. The whole ride today was exceptionally atmospheric, from the first section in pitch dark following the greenway bike route I was on yesterday for another few miles (the creature noises were so loud that I had to keep checking there wasn’t something coming at me) to the beautiful backcountry dead end road I followed as the sky lightened, only to have to retrace my route and try again…

…to the long spell of cycling along old plantation roads, passing many grand gates, with huge White Houses at the end of long grassy driveways, mostly hidden from view by bearded oak trees festooned with Spanish moss.

I call this blog Incidents of Travel – after John L Stevens’ wonderful travel book, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan from the 1840s – but what was unusual about today was the lack of incidents, in a day full of a strong sense of being somewhere so different from home. Paul Theroux, another of my favourite travel writers, said in The Old Patagonian Express that travel is ‘a vanishing act’, but writing about travel is ‘the opposite…It is motion given order by its repetition in words’. I find this thought incredibly inspiring every single day, and riding in the dark felt as close to disappearing as is possible to get on a bike, and it’s only now that I’ve stopped for the day that I’m trying to give order to my movements through such unfamiliar territory, by writing this.

The most magical moment came in a long wooded stretch, the closest thing to an ‘incident’ up until then, which was the sudden realisation when I stopped to adjust a shoe that I was surrounded by an amazing flooded forest on both sides. I stared at it for a while, listening to the bird calls and the gentle creaking of the branches above me, then thought I should try to capture it to share. Honestly the film of it comes close, but it’s not quite enough. I think it’s because you can’t convey the contrast to the miles cycled beside ‘normal’ woodlands beforehand.

I finally got to the end of the string of deserted rural roads and arrived at Yemassee. My motel was a few miles further on, nearer the highway. I almost laughed at seeing a proper train station. I think it’s the first one of the whole adventure so far, apart from Boston & New York City.

As I carefully rolled over the shiny tracks, I saw a man standing beside a car with it’s bonnet/hood up, leaning in for a better look. I called out ‘Good morning!’, as I went slowly past him, and he shouted back ‘Good morning! Say, how do you tell the difference between an Australian accent and a British accent? Which are you?’ We got into a conversation about what I was doing in Yemasse. ‘If you’re a cyclist, where the hell are the rest of your cyclist friends, are they coming down the road?’ I explained as best I could what I was doing there, and asked his name. ‘I’m Yisrael, that’s Israel but you gotta stick a ‘Y’ in front, and that makes ‘Yisrael’.’ Well, I’m Benjamin’ I said. ‘Are you?’, said Yisrael, wiping his hands as if he was pausing the repairs for now. ‘That means ‘Son on the right hand’, doesn’t it.’. I asked what he was doing with his car. ‘I can’t believe my bad luck. The head gasket has gone on my truck and my car at the same time. I’m trying to fix this one and it’s going from bad to worse.’ I asked if he had a winch, meaning to lift the engine out. ‘Uh-huh, and I’m wishing I’d done that to begin with to save me all of this trouble.’ Yisrael had an unusual accent, not really as southern-sounding as I’ve become accustomed to. ‘I’m from Jacksonville, Florida, but I lived in New York City for many years. Man, in my twenties I lived in Harlem,’ (where I stayed with Jacob Brown last month) ‘and I coulda bought one of those brownstones for $15,000!’

He’d ended up here for a reason that he seemed about to explain to me, but I could see him change his mind, and he started talking about music instead. I’d said I was a musician and he began to tell me about his own compositions. ‘I wrote a lot of tunes years ago, and I used to just set up a cassette tape recorder and put them down on that. I even wrote my music out so I wouldn’t forget the tune – but I just wrote it all in quarter notes*, up and down, because that was easiest.’

*What Americans call crotchets

Yisrael was an incredibly alert and interesting kind of guy, with his heavy-rimmed glasses and a great sense of humour. He got on to the subject of his house, which was a white cabin behind him with the house number hanging on a sign, and a lean-to he said he used for laundry and car repairs. ‘I bought all of this land’, he said, gesturing all around him, ‘about thirty years ago for $5000 and now I know it’s worth millions. The town, Yemasse, they want to get rid of me, and they’ve sued me twice to get me off the land. But they can’t do it, it’s illegal! You see those trees behind the bank?’ I looked around for a bank then realised that the white building covered in creepers was an old bank. ‘That’s a whole parcel of land back there that they want to build on. I knew it when I bought the whole place. I tried to buy the bank too when they closed it down. I offered $5,000 but they wanted 12. Then when nobody else wanted it they gave it to the town for 1 dollar! Oh, they knew what they were doing. Stopping me! Now it’s falling down, it’s no good, there’s a big crack, you see? The top’s gonna come right off any day.’

‘I also write Proverbs!’ Yisrael announced, taking me by surprise yet again. ‘Here we go’, he said. ‘A man’s home is his hassle!’ I laughed and he said, ‘Don’t you let your wife here you saying that, or even laughing at that! Actually, I ripped that off someone else, but I changed it a bit so now it’s in with my Proverbs.’ I told him I was going to move on, and he wished me well on my journey. ‘You know you’re near the Auldbrass Plantation*? It’s open to the public, you should pay a visit. A friend of mine worked there for a while. Back in the day there used to be an old slave who’d lived on that land for years. His name was Old Brass, and after he was gone everyone just called the place ‘Old Brass’. That’s what it was, ‘Old Brass’. But when they built the house on the land they didn’t like the slave name, so they changed it, to ‘Auldbrass’. Now it’s owned by a big shot Hollywood producer.’ I told him I’d hoped to see it tomorrow until I found it only opened for one weekend in alternate years, in November, entrance fee $250. ‘Like I said, big shot. Safe travels, Ben-ya-meen!’, said Yisrael, and he stuck his head under the hood and got back to trying to fixing his busted car.

*Frank Lloyd Wright’s Plantation home (built for another Stevens between 1939-1941). It was originally called Old Brass, after an old ex-slave who had lived on the land for many years, but FLW persuaded the owner to change it to Auldbrass.

For the first time on this trip my 2nd breakfast was actually taken at my destination. There were hardly any places en route anyway, which was fine. All I had was a ten minute break for a gas station coffee. I loved cycling through such deserted but beautiful countryside, and felt sad to arrive at another ‘highway’ town for my motel stop. But that’s where they are, so that’s where I stay. It’s a shame Joel Silver doesn’t like camping enough to open up his hundreds of acres to my tent for two nights. Just saying.

Everything felt so different today, and I’m still not quite sure why. Arriving in Yemassee after 62 miles of cycling at a time when I might sometimes be just leaving for the day’s ride; I think that must be a big part of it!

NATURE PAGES: I saw a dead armadillo today. I took a picture, I even wrote a little bit for the blog, but in the end I just couldn’t bring myself to post it. It was so beautiful looking, despite its injuries, just lying in the hard shoulder in the middle of nowhere, and such an unusual sight for me, but still, I couldn’t do it.

FUNDRAISING NEWS: I found when I settled in to the Wendy’s near my motel and logged on to the internet that I’d been promoted. Last month I was in the top 10% of Just Giving fundraisers – but today…

SIGNS OF AGE:

SIGNS THAT SURPRISE ME:

SIGN THAT IS FUNNY: