Biking from Savannah to New Orleans
Tomorrow, April 1, I will be flying to Savannah Georgia to begin an approximately 1000 mile cycling journey to New Orleans. The focus of the trip will be on photographing birds during the spring migration. The map above shows the route I have constructed. On an average day, I will be biking about 50 miles. This is sufficiently short to allow me to take time to photograph birds throughout the day, yet long enough to allow me to make reasonable progress along my journey. I have added 5 birding days when I will not be moving to a new location. These occur at Lake City FL, St. Marks FL (2 days), Pensacola Beach FL, and Gulf Shores AL. All told, the trip will take 26 days: 2 air travel days, an extra day in Savannah and in New Orleans, 5 birding days, and 17 cycling days. My planned route is 936 miles including a number of detours to birding locations along the way. However, it does not include my cycling on my birding rest days which is why I expect the final milage total to be about 1000 miles.
This is my fully loaded bicycle. Since this is a self-supported trip, I need to carry everything with me that I will need for the trip. I am staying in hotels, so there is no need for camping gear etc. On the other hand, the focus of this trip is bird photography, so I have all of my camera gear as well as my computer to process my bird photos and to blog about the trip. All told, my fully loaded bike weighs in at about 69 lbs. I took the loaded bike out for a test ride this past week. After biking up and down the hills around my home, I am quite glad that my route will be very flat.
Having tested that everything would fit on the bike, I then repacked everything for my flight. Besides being near the coast and a good place for birding, one of the reasons that I picked Savannah as my starting point is that I can fly nonstop from Boston. When changing planes, I always worry that my bike will not make the connection or that the extra handling will lead to damage, thus my preference for nonstops. I will carry my other two bags onboard with me. Once I unpack in Savannah, I will put the two carry on bags into the bike bag and ship them all to my hotel in New Orleans. That way, when I arrive in New Orleans, I can repack everything for my flight back home.
As I blogged earlier this year, I have a goal of bicycling in all 50 states. This map shows all of the states that I have bicycled in since 2019. This trip, highlighted in light green, will add 5 new states to my list and bring me up to 37. I have booked a bicycling and birding trip to Alaska for June. In the fall, I plan to cycle from Cape May NJ to Chincoteague VA and back during the fall bird migration. Those two trips will add another 4 states to my list. If all goes according to plan, I will end the year at 41 states.
Last Tuesday, I photographed this Piping Plover on Plum Island. It was my 194th species for the year. Last year I saw 202 species in the US which was significantly higher than my previous record of 144 set both in 2020 and 2021. I suspect I will exceed 202 species before I depart Savannah. I am hoping that by the time I complete this trip, I will be over 300 species for the year.
I plan to blog almost every night of the trip. It is possible that some days, I may not have sufficiently good internet to post, or I may simply want to take an evening off. My blog posts will tend to be more focused on the bicycling and scenery than photographs of birds. The reason for this is practical. It takes a lot of time to cull, identify and edit the thousands of bird photos I expect to take each day. This work can be done after I return home as my somewhat delayed Hawaii posts demonstrate. On the other hand, if I do not write about the cycling experience of my day when it happens, the details both fade and get mixed around remarkably quickly; hence, the emphasis on blogging about the experience as I live it.
I am extermely excited to heading off on this trip. I hope you all will enjoy reading about it in the coming weeks.