Eight weeks went by faster than I expected. When I landed in Savannah in September, the GS had been sitting in storage for sixteen weeks and the whole fall was still out in front of me. Since then I’ve put 4,711 miles on it for Postcards to Dad, spent more time with family than I have in years, and found a riding community in a city I’d only ever known as the place my sister lives. Now it’s time to head back to California, and Savannah deserved a proper goodbye.

Any celebration (even goodbyes) in the South starts with food, and some of the most interesting local flavor I found came from Kroger—or the K-Rodger, as it’s often called around here. The meat counter there carries Country Pleasin’, a hickory-smoked sausage made by a family outfit in Mississippi, in flavors you’ll never see in a California grocery store. I had them weigh out Pork & Pineapple [or Jalapeño & Pineapple?], Pork & Alligator, and Crawfish & Pork (local flavor, lol). The crawdad won by a mile. It had more of a kick than I expected, and it was good enough that I’d go back to the counter for more.

The next day I pointed the GS toward Hilton Head Island to see the Harbour Town Lighthouse, the red-and-white striped tower that shows up on every postcard of the place. Getting there meant crossing the Talmadge Memorial Bridge, which I somehow hadn’t done in all the years I’ve been coming to Savannah. The bridge has always been part of the background for me. I’ve seen it from River Street and from the water, but I’d never actually ridden it.

It turned out to be better than I expected. The deck climbs 185 feet over the Savannah River so container ships can get under it to the port, and from the top the whole city lays out to the right: the riverfront warehouses, the gold dome of City Hall, and church steeples poking up out of the tree canopy. On the far side you drop down onto Hutchinson Island, cross the Back River on an older two-lane bridge, and just like that you’re in South Carolina. It’s a little embarrassing that it took me this long.

From there it was marsh country the rest of the way. The cordgrass had gone gold for the fall, and the tidal creeks wound through it in every direction. Every so often a row of big white houses lined up along the edge of the water, each one with its own long dock reaching out to the channel.

The lighthouse sits inside Sea Pines, the gated community on the south end of the island. I pulled up to the gate ready to pay the day fee like everyone else, and I was turned away. Motorcycles aren’t allowed in Sea Pines at all. It says so right on the lighthouse’s own website, which I would have known if I’d bothered to look (Doh!).

I’ve seen this movie before on the other coast. Pebble Beach does the same thing with 17-Mile Drive: cars pay at the gate and roll on through, bicycles are welcome, and motorcycles stay outside. Rich people like their quiet. My first reaction was to bristle a little. I’d guess my dollars helped pave the public road that got me to that gate, and now I was being told I couldn’t ride the last few miles past it.

Then I sat there on the bike a little longer and thought about why the rule exists. Rules like that don’t come out of nowhere. Loud pipes don’t save lives—they just piss people off, and that includes plenty of us who ride. Every rider who decides the whole neighborhood needs to hear him coming makes the decision for the rest of us at gates like this one. I turned the GS around, and the lighthouse will have to wait for another trip and another set of wheels.

The ride back made up for it. I pulled off on the east side of the Talmadge as the sun dropped behind the bridge, with the port cranes lined up on the far bank and a sundog glowing in the clouds just off to the right. (A sundog is a bright patch of rainbow that shows up beside a low sun when ice crystals high in the clouds bend the light. I had to look that up.) I’ve driven past that skyline dozens of times. I’d never stopped to look at it.

Sunday was my last Kickstart. Every Sunday at 2 p.m., Mark gathers the Kickstart Vintage Motorcycle Club in front of the Foxy Loxy, and the bikes line up along the curb under the live oaks. Coming from the Bay Area, an afternoon coffee meet still feels a little backwards to me, since every meetup I’ve known out west starts early.

The bikes are all over the map. There are old airhead BMWs, Trevor’s 2002 Sportster, Gage’s Harley built to look like a dirt bike, and a black Triumph Thruxton I’ve been quietly coveting for weeks. I’m the only GS in the bunch, and probably the only guy who shows up in an Aerostich. Nobody has ever cared about either one.

What I didn’t see coming was the moment it snuck up on me. Somewhere on that last Sunday, I looked around and realized I knew these people. I knew their names, their bikes, and which ones would still be there at the bitter end. I wasn’t the new guy anymore.

That’s the part I’ll miss. The guard at Sea Pines didn’t know me from any other guy on a loud bike, and from his side of the gate that’s fair. The folks under the oaks at the Foxy Loxy knew exactly who I was, and they were glad I’d come. Being seen is one thing. Being known is something else entirely.

This meeting was different. The conversation ran well past the end of the meetup. By the time the group started breaking up, the light had gone long and amber, and the shadows under the oaks were a lot deeper than they had been in September. Somewhere in the last three months, summer had quietly turned into fall, and I’d been too busy riding to notice the change here. Leaving felt bittersweet in a way I hadn’t expected from a coffee meetup.

There’s one more task before I fly home. The GS will stay here in Savannah until I’m back, so I need to run the old gas out of the tank and fill it back up with fresh fuel and a dose of Stabil. It isn’t the most poetic way to say goodbye to a place, but it’s an honest one. You don’t stabilize the gas in a tank on a bike you’re never coming back for.

See you soon, Savannah.