Birmingham had a way of permeating my your skin faster than I’d expect. Six days went by in a blur of good food, good people, and a city I came to understand in a whole new light. But somewhere in those last couple of days I could feel the trip starting to pivot. The new adventures were behind me. It was time to get to Atlanta, get the bike sorted, and start pointing towards Savannah.
Getting out of Birmingham took longer than planned — in the best possible way.
I’d met a wildfire photojournalist at a pool party earlier in the week, and before I left he wanted to get some shots of me on the GS. He had a Canon 5D Mark IV and a 300mm f/2.8 that was smooth as glass — we nerded out about that platform for a few minutes before we got started, because of course we did (I loved my Mark III). He took me to a tree-lined street nearby and just started shooting. No fuss, no elaborate setup — just the bike rolling toward him through the dappled morning light, over and over until he had what he wanted.
The shoot wrapped up around 11 AM. I had a virtual medical appointment at 11:40, needed to be at the hotel in Atlanta by 4 so I could shower before meeting my dinner guest at 5, and I had no interest in showing up looking like I’d just ridden 150 miles through whatever Alabama had planned for the afternoon. The Talladega National Forest was right there, and on any other day I’d have found my way through it on something smaller than an interstate. Not today. I-20 east it was.
It started simply enough — a light drizzle, nothing to get worked up about. Then it started to rain in earnest. Then it really came down, to the point where I was slowing with the rest of traffic, hazards on, just trying to stay visible and keep pace. Then construction showed up. Then grooved pavement, with sharp transitions between lanes that you could feel through the bars every time you moved around a truck. Then the wind picked up, and suddenly there were 18-wheelers on both sides throwing spray and pushing air in every direction.
On its own, any one of those things is manageable. Rain — fine. Construction — fine. Trucks — fine. It was the compounding that made it hard. Each new element arrived before you’d finished processing the last one, and by the time they were all stacked up together there wasn’t a lot of mental bandwidth left over for anything else. You just rode.
I’ve told myself for years: I’ll do rain, I’ll do cold, but I won’t do both. California winter rain is cold rain — the kind that soaks through before you’re warmed up, that drops the temperature further, that turns a manageable situation into a hypothermia question if you’re not careful. That’s the combination I’ve been avoiding. Not rain itself.
The temperature on I-20 was in the low 80s. Southern summer rain doesn’t carry the cold — it’s warm, almost gentle from a temperature standpoint, whatever else it throws at you. I was damp, not cold. The thing my nervous system had been quietly bracing for all these years never arrived. Back in New Zealand last February, I’d spent a full day dreading this exact scenario and came out the other side fine without ever understanding why. I-20 gave me the answer.
By the time the Georgia state line appeared, it was a genuine sight for sore eyes. The weather eased, the pace of traffic came back up, and I had fifty miles to Atlanta with the worst of it behind me. I nicked through the city at just the right moment — rush hour was nipping at my rear tire but hadn’t quite caught up yet. Getting onto I-285 was its own kind of brutal, and Georgia 400 had some incremental slowness, but for 3 o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon in Atlanta, I’ll take it.
I made it to the hotel at 4 — just enough time to shower, unload the bike, and get it dropped at BMW of Roswell for service. After everything this trip had thrown at the GS, I wanted to do it once and do it right: front suspension strut, the 36,000-mile service, and a warranty bulletin on the drive shaft. I was so consumed with getting the handoff sorted that when my dinner guest walked up in full motorcycle gear, I said hello to him like I was meeting a stranger. It took him looking at me quizzically before it clicked.
That was M — a cousin on my sister’s branch of the family tree, though it takes about four hops through her in-laws to get there on paper. We went to college together and always ran in slightly different circles, so we’ve ended up closer than four hops would normally suggest. When I finally recognized him, we both laughed from somewhere deep — it was one of those genuinely awkward human moments that’s funny precisely because there’s no recovering from it. He looked me up and down and asked where exactly we were planning to have dinner, given that I’d left my gear at the dealer and no longer had a motorcycle. I said, hey — there’s a Mexican place right across the street from the dealer. I ate there last time I was in for service. Good enough.
It turned into one of those organic conversations where you talk about everything and nothing in the same breath. We were both excited about his new role, and I was equal parts amused and envious at the simplicity of his bike. We laughed about the fact that I’d started calling the GS Pharaoh — after all the plagues inflicted by motorcycle Moses on this trip. Then somewhere between chips and whatever came next, it went deeper.
We got into the spiritual realities of the current political climate — how the church has been dressing itself up in political theater, and what AI might mean for the Christian faith. He’s a pastor at a church in North Atlanta. I’m a garden variety gay guy from the San Francisco Bay Area. What surprised me is that we met more in the middle than we did looking at each other from a distance — and that was genuinely healing, after some of the more pointed conversations a few days earlier back at the farm.
I’m not sure where I stand in my faith these days. As I told him, I’ve come to believe that agnosticism actually has real staying power — it’s not just an easy way of avoiding the word atheist. I just don’t know.
I’m not really sure who Jesus is. But I’m pretty confident that if he were here today, he’d be on a motorcycle — probably a Royal Enfield. Simple yet complex all in the same moment.
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