I’ve now found myself back in the Bay Area. After a 2 a.m. arrival into San Francisco following a weather-induced chain reaction through Denver, my alarm went off six hours later for physical therapy. Five weeks in small town Georgia and Alabama gave way to jamming through Bay Area freeway traffic before I’d even had time to unpack. Yet, even now, I’m still trying to figure out how to get all of it onto the page.

The south isn’t the place I left twenty-five years ago, and I’m not the same person who left twenty-five years ago. If anything became clear over those five weeks, it’s that those two truths ran through nearly every mile of this trip. I spent my final days doing less sightseeing and more investing in the people who mattered: my family and the new friends I’d made over at Kickstart Vintage Motorcycle Club.

Every once in a while, you’re that guy. You are the one who shows up to a motorcycle meetup without a motorcycle. Sometimes it’s an accident. This time it was on purpose. The GS was already tucked away for the summer, so I showed up with a camera instead of a kickstand. I’d only been to Kickstart twice before, which technically gives me a two-for-three record of arriving on a motorcycle—a passing grade, maybe, if the grader’s feeling generous. Still, it was good to trade hellos, handshakes, and hugs with people I’d come to know over the previous five weeks, even if I could sense a little head scratching from some of the newer faces. The guy from California. The one without the motorcycle.

The GS is taking the summer off in the garage now, and motorcycles don’t particularly enjoy sitting still. I prepped it for storage the same way I’d want someone to prep mine. The battery tender went on first. Given the starting trouble that kicked off this entire trip, I wasn’t about to take chances with the new battery. Then came a full tank of gas, the recommended amount of marine grade Stabil, and another five or ten miles on the road to make sure everything worked its way through the fuel system. I don’t want to come back to gummed-up injectors and a bike that won’t start. I’d rather not repeat the messy middle of this journey.

The last week wasn’t really about destinations anymore. It was about the moments that usually disappear during a holiday visit. My nephew and I grabbed shrimp tacos by the lagoon and spent the afternoon talking about motorcycles, California, and what comes next for both of us. I found myself listening more than talking as he walked me through applying to college today. It’s hard to overstate how different the process is from when I sat in front of a black-and-yellow terminal in my high school library more than thirty years ago, dialing into a university over a modem. He isn’t just competing with students across Georgia anymore. He’s competing with applicants from around the world. I’m proud of him. He’s got a bright future ahead of him, and hearing him talk made me realize just how much the world has changed since I was his age.

I also made time with my virtual mother-in-law, who’d generously opened her home to me for most of this trip. We had lunch overlooking the water with a low country boil in front of us, a meal that’s become one of my Southern favorites over the years, second only to shrimp and grits, which completely confused me the first time I ordered it and somehow became a primary comfort food. The food was great, and I enjoyed hearing her story even more—how she’d left south Florida decades ago, slowly built a life here, and eventually fell in love with Savannah. It reminded me that places become home one ordinary day at a time.

My sister and I both laughed about how quickly five weeks disappeared. She’d spent them focused on graduation parties and getting my nephew ready for college. I’d spent them wandering Georgia and Alabama, splitting time between motorcycles, my parents, and trying to figure out what this next chapter of life might look like. She was headed to the Florida panhandle for a holiday while I was headed back west, and somewhere in that conversation we realized how different this trip had been from the holidays, where everything gets compressed into a handful of dinners and events. Five weeks left room to simply exist together. We promised we’d do more of that next time. It’s one of those lessons you seem to relearn every few years: don’t let the details crowd out the priorities.

The last few days with my parents were intentionally ordinary. We picked up dinner, watched a movie, and didn’t try to make every afternoon into an event. Mom and I went to get our toes done together at the nail salon, just the two of us. Looking back, I’m grateful for how unremarkable it all was. That last dinner, though, was harder than I expected. I remember the hug not being long enough, and I remember walking down the hallway afterward with an ache I couldn’t quite put words to. Holiday visits always carry a little sadness because they’re over so quickly, but this felt different. I’d been there long enough to stop feeling like I was visiting and start feeling connected again. Somewhere during those five weeks, Georgia quietly stopped being the place I grew up and started becoming part of my present again. That was a shift I didn’t expect.

While waiting for my flight, I ducked into Leopold’s for a last scoop at the airport — cookies and cream, eaten at one of the little marble tables out front under a departures board that still carries a little Southern charm. I’d already hit Leopold’s once, at my nephew’s graduation, and this stuff is seriously good. It’s well worth every bolus on the insulin pump.

It’s strange how five weeks can feel both impossibly long and impossibly short. Sitting back in California now, part of me feels like I was gone for months, while another part feels like I blinked and the weeks between that first evening in the rocking chair on Tybee Island and my flight home simply disappeared. Even now, I’m not sure I know how to measure what this trip meant beyond calling it intense. There were emotional highs and lows, unexpected friendships, difficult conversations, and countless reminders that people are usually kinder than we give them credit for. As much as this trip asked of me, it gave back to me every bit as much.

I now know why the GS needs a battery tender hooked to its heart between rides.

Turns out I need one too.

Life at the Pace of Sweet Tea has been a five-week series about leaving California, landing in Savannah with one-way plans, and figuring out what comes next. Read the whole series here.