Savannah mom-tween bonding on bikes during downtown tree tour? Read how that turned out

It was supposed to be just a bike ride, a way to revisit Savannah’s famous downtown — which we residents all too often take for granted — and check out our city’s beloved canopy of trees.

After all, “moss-draped live oak trees” is a phrase you can find in nearly every travel article about Savannah. Yet, how often do those of us who live here actually take time to celebrate our trees?

But somehow I managed to turn the ride into our own little mother-daughter showdown — a middle-schooler and middle-aged mom epiphany — with the lovely backdrop of live oaks and magnolias.

My 12-year-old daughter and I were looking for a bike route to do that’s similar to Hilton Head’s self-guided Legacy Oak tour, which spotlights more than a dozen centuries-old live oaks throughout Sea Pines Resort. 

The Downtown Savannah Tree Tour on Bike Walk Savannah’s web site would be perfect, I thought. The ride features 10 stops throughout Savannah’s Historic District and takes less than an hour.

But characteristically, I couldn’t just leave it as a simple ride.

This will be great, I projected. We’ll bond. We’ll laugh. We’ll make plans for a big mom-daughter bike trip to some enchanted spot someday to the “Mama Mia” soundtrack. It will be like we’re pedaling inside a glowing Instagram post, a post in which my daughter would use hashtags like “#idol” and “#admire” and #perfectday when referring to me throughout it all.

Right.

I obviously suffer from that all-too-common problem of coveting the seeming perfection of other people’s social media in my very imperfect life. 

At the start of our ride, while checking out the towering Candler oak across from Forsyth Park, I may have enthused one to many “Isn’t this funs?” with all that annoying cheeriness of a wanna-be #coolmom.

Then, somewhere around Calhoun or Monterey Square, my stainless parent-child good times vision board hopes began to smear. 

I pointed out what I guessed was the tree we were supposed to find, maybe it was the Chinese fringetree or the Japanese maple. 

My kid was less than enthused. 

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Shocking, I realize, that a seventh-grader fluent in teenager-speak was not swooning over her mom’s faux arbor knowledge when she could have been listening to Beyonce at the neighborhood pool with friends. 

She may have even used that ubiquitous middle-schooler word “duh.”

So by Madison Square, with its oh-so judgy magnolia and crape myrtle, we were hungry, annoyed and wondering, “Why did we want to see all these trees again?”

Fancy Parker’s lunch by Colonial Park Cemetery helped. Nothing like munching overpriced sandwiches near Button Gwinnett’s ghost to help soothe the soul. 

I confessed my real motive for the ride: to have an ideal time with her before losing her to the world of middle school, teen angst and mono-syllabic responses. 

In the Hallmark movie version or no-filter-needed Instagram version, this is where the coming-of-age heroine is supposed to say, with tears in her eyes, something like “Mom, you’re never going to lose me, #alwaysyourbaby.”

Instead, what this wise-beyond-her-years tween said was more real, something to the effect of: “not everything we do together has to be perfect.”

Or fun?

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Turns out, we did have fun, especially when we arrived at the route’s last spot, Mother Mathilda Beasley Park, which has a wetland retention area teeming with trees — river birch, bald cypress, sweet bay magnolia.

We had not been to the park in years. 

All those childhood hours she spent at the park’s playground came back to her. Remember those climbing bars and that spinning thing? 

Remember when you had your Fancy-Nancy-themed birthday party in that park clubhouse? Remember how sick you were at the birthday, the birthday girl who couldn’t celebrate? 

Remember how that day, too, wasn’t perfect at all, but was still fun?

#Notperfect but #together — our new mom-daughter hashtags. 

Anne Hart is a contributing lifestyles columnist for the Savannah Morning News. Contact her at anne@southernmamas.com. Follow on Instagram at southernmamas. See more columns by Anne Hart at SavannahNow.com/lifestyle/.

If you bike

What: Downtown Savannah Bike Tour guide and map

Where: bikewalksavannah.org/routes/downtown-savannah-tree-tour/ 

Contact: Bikewalksavannah.org