I’ve been riding long enough to know that assumptions fill in when actual information doesn’t. For example, which state has the most registered Republicans? California. Which state is home to one of the country’s leading medical research centers? Alabama. So let’s take Savannah. My assumption was Savannah was as flat as Kansas with trees. I got shown in all the ways. Savannah has a motorcycling community that shows up in the rain, parks a bad ass Russian Ural with a sidecar next to a vintage Triumphs on a Sunday afternoon. These people are cool!

Yes, Bay Area bubble boy — you too can learn a few things when you leave home.

Good news, the GS was running again. The battery tender solved the hesitant starting overnight. After a week getting my bearings around Tybee Island I figured it was time to start finding the riders here. In the Bay Area I already know where to plug in — BARF, Homoto, Northern and Central California BMW Club. Up in Vancouver? Bikes-n-Coffee and Rain City Bike Crew fill in that gap. Now it’s new city. I’m starting from zero. The thing I hadn’t realized yet was that I wasn’t really looking for riders. I was trying to figure out whether I was willing to belong here.

Kickstart Vintage Motorcycle Club meets at the Foxy Loxy, a coffee shop and Tex-Mex place in the Starland District set up inside an old Savannah home with a courtyard out back. Kickstart has been running long enough to hit event number 320. Things kick off on Sunday afternoons, 2 to 4 with enough time to hit church in the morning and ride in the afternoon. That timing alone told me I wasn’t in the Bay Area anymore — meetups back home happen at 8 AM or an after dark night ride when the commuters aren’t around.

I’d emailed the organizer ahead of time. Showing up on a GS with California plates to a vintage bike meetup didn’t seem like the kind of entrance I’d want to make cold (not a local, not a vintage bike, not even close to vintage on either count). But hey, I’m becoming vintage!

Mother’s Day weekend kept the turnout smaller. Maybe ten bikes. What showed up was all over the map — a few sport bikes, several Triumphs from different eras, a couple of Harleys. And then the one that made me stop: the Ural (pronounced ooh-rawl, not you’re-al I came to find out). Russian-made, sidecar attached, absolutely beautiful in that utilitarian Soviet-engineering kind of way. I didn’t expect to see one of those parked between a modern naked bike and an old British twin, but there it was.

The guy who rode it turned out to be one of those well-traveled humans you meet sometimes who makes you feel like you haven’t gone anywhere at all. He runs from San Francisco out to Asia on a regular basis (I didn’t catch the full route but it sounded like months, not weeks). When I mentioned I was from the Bay Area he wanted to talk parking strategy for long-haul trips out of the city — where you can leave a bike for weeks at a time without it getting towed or messed with, which neighborhoods are safer than others, the usual traveler calculus. We swapped some notes. I told him to reach out as he needs to. Happy to help.

The Triumph collector was worth the whole afternoon on his own. He’s been in Savannah a long time and knows the city better than most locals do. He had this theory he laid out like he’d been thinking about it for years: every region has a sizing question, the thing people ask each other that places you on the social map without anyone actually saying that’s what they’re doing. In Truckee back home? Do you ski. In the Bay – where do you work? In Savannah it’s where you went to high school — public, private, religious, what part of town. That answer follows you forward in ways that don’t necessarily announce themselves. It’s a stark contrast to the Bay Area, where nearly everyone is from somewhere else and the question wouldn’t even make sense (nobody went to high school in San Francisco because few are actually from San Francisco). I filed that one away to check against family.

A few days later I found out Savannah had a Cycle Gear. I didn’t know they had locations this far east — being based in the Bay Area I’d thought of them as a West Coast operation, maybe some Southwest presence, but I genuinely hadn’t mapped their reach. They run a national bike night and Savannah had one coming up that week. I marked it on the calendar.

Then I looked at the forecast.

Rain. Not the light kind.

I stood there genuinely unsure whether anyone would show. I almost didn’t go myself. It’s a once-a-month event and I was hoping for a decent first showing, but the weather wasn’t cooperating.

I went anyway.

The community showed up in full. Rain and all. The parking lot was packed. A number of riders were standing around in the weather like it wasn’t even a consideration. It’s a stark contrast to the Bay Area, where a twenty percent chance of precipitation is sufficient justification for staying home (I’ve done it myself, so I’m not throwing stones, but still). These riders ride.

The crowd was bigger and more varied than Kickstart, which meant it took me a little longer to figure out where to start. I’m not always great at that initial moment (the cold contact, the figuring out who to talk to first when you’re the new guy), but I got out of my own way and kept moving. One of the more interesting conversations I had was with a newer rider on a CFMoto — I’ve seen them starting to show up in the Bay Area over the last year or so, but I’d assumed they hadn’t made much of a dent on the East Coast yet. He told me one of the major dealers here has gotten fully behind the brand and that parts sourcing hasn’t been a real problem, though the aftermarket community is definitely thinner than it would be with an established Japanese manufacturer. That last part landed immediately. The fact that there’s no BMW dealer in Savannah has been sitting in the back of my mind since the bike arrived on that semi. This conversation brought it front and center.

I also ran into a GS rider. He had his cruiser that night. Mentioned he does local rides in the area. We traded numbers.

That’s how community starts. I meet someone, and then I meet someone through them, and then if I’m paying attention and actually following up on with people, I blink and maybe I’ve found the beginnings of something.

That’s the sneaky thing about this whole venture. It requires something real from me — an actual commitment to the geography and to the community here — to get anything meaningful back out of it. Showing up to two events and meeting a handful of interesting people is a start, but it’s not a network. It’s not a life. Building something here that actually works means deciding I’m here, not just passing through with an open-ended return ticket and one foot still planted somewhere else.

The rocking chair at the airport got me thinking about it that first night. The Ural guy and the Triumph collector and a rain-soaked Cycle Gear parking lot full of people who showed up anyway are starting to confirm it. Home is where you are. Right now, I’m here and I’ve found great peoples alongside me.