Andy & Kerry's Greenway Trip

OK, I know, I've been totally remiss in updating the blog and owe all of our worthy fans (read: our moms) a whole ton of news. So, here goes:

My last post was when we were in Chapel Hill, NC. We stayed with an old Peace Corps friend who has quite a wonderful life there. Perhaps I glossed over that segment of the trip with a bit of a broad brush, but so be it. We had a great time and loved the riding the state of North Carolina offered us. South of Chapel Hill was even better, with these great little backwoods roads and some of the finest people we've met. There was this one day, somewhere outside of Henderson, when we'd been riding all morning and hadn't seen any signs of civilization. We were running low on granola bars (always a scary possibility when Kerry's along) and hadn't packed lunch, thinking we'd eat along the way. Finally, I met a woman who was trying to quiet her incessantly barking dogs and asked her if there was anywhere to eat close by. "Well, just up ahead there's a little grocery store. I think they serve something up there. We don't have no Mac Donalds or anything like that. We're just a little COUNTRY town." I swear, I almost fell off my bike. She was so sweet and kind and yet sounded like such a caricature. I love the south. For the curious, we found the store, ate some delicious hamburgers and ice cream and, when we left, the extremely kind ladies working at the store gave us a container of chicken gizzards for the dog.

We did make one major mistake: We hit the South Carolina coast on July 4th weekend. Not good, Daniel-san. We'd just come off a nice rest day at Carolina Beach state park at the southern extreme of North Carolina, and rolled into South Carolina only to find every campsite and cheap motel room within 30 miles of our route booked up. After the indignity of riding through Myrtle Beach on a peak tourist day, we then had to scramble to find a place to stay. We finally found a room that was a bit more expensive than we'd hoped, but did the trick. With nothing but a completely occupied national forest campground between us and Charleston, we began to lose hope. That's when a Greenway advocate came to our rescue. The interesting part was, he wasn't going to actually be in Charleston when we were, nor was his family. Without even knowing us, Peter set it up so we could stay in his house, by ourselves, while we were in the city. We'd planned to take a day off there anyway, since it's so beautiful, but with the bleak outlook of the Fourth of July lodging still staring at us, there was no choice. Peter and his family proved to be the nicest hosts we never met! Here's to the kindness of strangers.

After Charleston, we veered from the official path in order to visit Beaufort, SC (pronounced byu-fort, I've been reminded at least a hundred times). It was so nice there, we took another day off and went on a dolphin/egret/crab watching cruise. Awesome. Then a short day to a town called Hardeeville and another shorty into Savannah, where we spent the day checking out the beautiful waterfront as well as a really cool railroad museum. This city is super nice and I'd recommend visiting here.

All theses days off seem pretty close together, right? Well, they are, but we actually powered through pretty hard in a lot of the more rural areas, so don't have any problem taking our time in the places we wanted to see. So what if we're slacking some, we did a 75-mile day from Charleston to Beaufort and didn't have any problems, so it's not like we're losing our shape.

By the way, for those of you who are curious why Kerry hasn't posted in a while, something went wrong with her blogger account and tech support (yours truly) hasn't figured out the problem. We'll see if we can't get her back up pretty soon.

Patch is well, though he did attempt suicide today by throwing himself under the wheels of a UPS truck. The driver's quick reactions and the dog's bad aim resulted in him only banging himself up on the side of the wheel. Otherwise, he continues to get all the attention and do none of the work. Oh well, I guess that's just what we expected.

So, that's it. We've got about 130 miles in Georgia and then it's a 500-mile, high-speed burn down the Florida coast until we can cool our heels on the beaches of scenic Key West. I've got tons more thoughts about the trip, but I think I'll keep them to myself for now, as I'm considering a book about this experience and wouldn't want to give everything away now. Why would anyone buy the book, right?

Until next time ...