Without the alarm going off this morning I think I’d still be asleep. I tried to be organised after the opera last night, leaving most of my panniers etc ready by the side door to load up and ship out, which meant that this morning I just packed a few things, made coffee, ate some breakfast, and left. I felt so sorry to be leaving Savannnah, one of my favourite places on this whole trip. I really hope to come back here with Susie one day. I think I know where we’ll stay.

• Today’s Distance (miles): 56
• Time in saddle: 4h 40
• Max/min temp (°c): 34°/25°
• Climbing (feet) : 209
• Calories used: 2,949
• Today’s 2nd Breakfast: Fried fish and jambalaya with coffee, at Altman’s, Eulonia GA
• Cafe time: 0h 12 (a new record)

Once again, I decided to go straight through the ride this morning, without a proper stop of any sort, except to take a couple of photos. There were lots of opportunities for food and coffee, at least during the first 25 miles out from the big city, but I really didn’t want anything.

I’d grabbed some food from a deli on the way back from Dido & Aeneas last night, including this, an absolutely delicious Savannah Banana Pudding. I inadvertently made them laugh in the store when I pronounced it, English-style, as a Savannah ‘Banarner’ pudding, instead of rhyming it with Savannah. Doh.

Today was a simple day – get out of the city, following the highway, if bike-friendly (it was, mostly), get to my motel in Eulonia before the heat really kicked in, and crash out. Objective firmly achieved! I was ably supported in covering the many miles this morning by listening to four episodes of Dad’s Army on BBC Sounds. They hit the spot today, making me laugh out loud several times:

Pike: ‘Mr Mainwaring, if Jonsey gets ‘Jerry’ to sit on his bacon slicer, won’t he get a little behind with his meat orders?

I did try following Google’s suggestion for a bike route at one point, but it led me to a strange and ramshackle community of cabins beside a railway track, in the gloom just before sun-up. I looked carefully at the map and it was definitively telling me to turn right alongside the tracks, which was waist-high with grass and ran straight towards some spooky-looking woods. No photo, sorry. I got quite spooked myself by this place, I’m not sure why. It does happen sometimes, just a sort of ripple of something that makes you feel uneasy. Maybe it’s something from the deep past, as I’ve mentioned feeling before on both this trip and in Kowloon. I swung round to get out of there as soon as I realised my mistake.

So I returned to the highway and got back to ‘blamming out the raw miles’ as an old Hemel Hempstead Cycling Club* member I used to ride with puts it. FotB @Steve Morris is fond of another of his expressions: when you’re ready to drop after a long ride but suddenly hit one of the gruelling Chilterns hills, he would shout out to the whole group like an army drill sergeant, ‘Right! Here come those new leg muscles!’.

One brief photo stop came when I saw I was right beside a beautiful cemetery, just a the sun made it over the tree tops to my left.

2nd breakfast came right at the end of the ride, and again at a time when I might conceivably have left on a day’s ride if the climate were different. I’d seen that there was a diner and store right by the motel, so stopped there first and got some really good southern cooking on the table along with the usual coffee and cold drinks. Their main dish was fried chicken, but I saw the fish come out of the frier and it looked irresistible to a hungry cyclist. And it was excellent, far better and fresher (and bigger!) than the expensive fish I had in that specialist seafood place back in somewhere, USA, and a generous side serving of jambalaya* to go with it! Total cost, with drinks, $6.99. That;s my very first jambalaya of this trip too, so lets have some Hank Williams…yeeeehaaaah!

*basically fried rice, onions, peppers, with added chicken and spicy sausage.

The last short hop was to the Eulonia Motel, owned by a man named Inder Brar who tells me he’s entering the Olympics for seniors, competing in shot put, javelin and discus. He said he set some records for India in 1961-1963, but I can’t find him online. He gave me a nice discount today because I arrived on a bike. ‘I don’t do this to make money now,’ he told me. ‘I do it to stay busy. I’m 87.’ I tried to pay him a few times, but so far he’s just said ‘Come back later, the computer isn’t on.’

WHETHER THE WEATHER BE GOOD: I’ve been having a lot of weather-related thoughts, as you’ve noticed on IoT. Inevitably this always happens on any bike trip. This has been a little different though. I had a chat with a waitress in Clary’s about the way the weather is reported in America, and she felt that the urge to over-dramatise and get you watching their channel led to a sort of paranoia about weather in general. But it’s been clear that this summer things are different. You could say my trip is a snapshot, with a six-year gap since the last ‘snap’. If I’d tried to make the same journey across Canada this year, it’s very unlikely that I’d have made it. The intense heat, wildfires and smoke pollution, and severe flooding all over the place would have turned it into a nightmare of a trip. Equally, I worked out that if I’d done this trip in reverse this summer, from Florida up to Maine, as I did consider doing, again I’m not at all sure I’d have got through it. As I left the northern states a few weeks ago, what was already unstable weather turned much worse, and far stormier. Let’s see how August continues…

NATURE PAGES: I saw my first live wild tortoise today, somewhere on the last 5 mile stretch. Somehow it had safely crossed the whole Highway unharmed. I managed to get a video but it was just as it pulled its head into its shell. All the nature action in this clip happens in the first 0.01 seconds! Be ready! After that it’s just me trying to be like David Attenborough and waiting for the tortoise’s next move, which never came. I just picked it up and put it in the grass.

UNEXPECTED TRAFFIC IN THE BAGGING AREA: A strange thing happened a few days ago. On Friday I got an alert message as I cycled along to say that I had very heavy traffic on my website. I checked later and found that the blog had had 570 hits during one hour. The previous whole day had been just 115. Although that was a particularly quiet day and numbers do go up and down a lot dependant on many things, this was weird. I kept wondering what on earth had happened, until my son Jacob told me that he’d given my trip a big shout-out during a meeting (online, I think?) at work – he works for the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) in the City of London – and they had all leapt at the chance to have a distracting, mid-meeting look! Thanks Jake!! Any new subscribers also welcome, if any of you nice CDP employees are still in the bagging area and looking for some more mid-morning distractions

OLD-TIME SIGNS:

SIGN THAT IS FUNNY: