January 9, 2024
It was this trail that brought us to the specific Airbnb where we checked into yesterday. Jill stumbled upon Riverside Park and the Greenway on one of her Saturday sojourns during our first winter in Augusta. It is on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River. The trail goes for quite a way. About seven miles of it is paved with asphalt and runs down what once appears to have been a railroad bed. The sides of the path are banked with old bedrock and soil; in other places the path is open on both sides declining into a gentle forest. The floor of the wooded area is covered in the detritus of fallen leaves, but not a thick mat like northern woodlands. In places one sees into the sloping back yards of big homes that rest in quiet neighborhoods.
On our one and only walk here in early 2021, we happened upon the mayor of North Augusta as he was taking a stroll down the path. He was very genial, like most politicians and like many people we meet, he was attracted to Teddi. People often ask after her breed and tell us how beautiful she is. Some love to tell us that their dad or their grandfather had an Airedale back in the day, when it seemed they were everywhere. The mayor told us we should consider wintering in North Augusta the following year, exactly what one would expect the mayor to suggest. We did not give it a second thought. Yet here we are two years later.
Last year we stayed in Waynesville, Georgia, about twenty-five miles south of Augusta, Georgia. The restaurants were horrible and there are not many of them, either. One weekend, starved of a good brunch, we traveled north to the Hammond's Ferry neighborhood on the Savannah River waterfront in South Carolina. It’s just over the bridge from Augusta, Georgia. On the website it describes itself as a mixed-use development with a "vibrant town center." It is nice, but one could take the cookie cutter pattern used to design it and drop it on Mars and no one would know where they were, on Mars or in Denver, Colorado.
While we at brunch we looked at Google Maps and we discovered that the North Augusta Greenway skirts the edge of Hammond’s Ferry. We bemoaned the fact that we could not afford to winter in one of the luxury townhouses that are scattered throughout its well-planned streets. Jill pulled up the Airbnb app to see if anything in our price range was close by and available. Total serendipity.
Close by, about half mile away, is a nice, neat working-class neighborhood. The app showed a bungalow was available with a fenced in yard that allowed pets. After a bit of sleuthing and cruising the streets close by, we found the house. We pulled the trigger that morning for January through March 2024. And here we are. The trail is a quarter mile walk and from the Airbnb and another couple blocks further to the nice restaurants in Hammond's Ferry.
