41.0 mi / 12.5 mph / 396 ft. climbing
Home: Danny’s AirBNB

“Make hay while the sun shines” is an inherent part of my personality. It’s the part that led me to spend far below my means for a couple of sun-shining decades, with the accumulated hay allowing us to retire early and live this life. And it’s also why, in our 500 mile quest for Savannah, I had argued to continue the long days while we had tailwinds, to put us “ahead of schedule”. But now that we’d gotten ahead, and the tailwinds had come to an end, I was totally willing to take a rest day before continuing on to Myrtle Beach. So it was a surprise that Rett argued for continuing our already-long push, though it made sense when she explained that she’d feel more-restored with a single stop of three nights rather than two two-night stops separated by a ride. So we push on for one more day!

Our cheap Days Inn made itself into an even better value by providing our first good motel breakfast in a while (waffles! eggs! sausages!) With that energy, we backtracked out of the weird US-17 frontage road that the motel was on, returning through Shallotte, but then onto Old Georgetown Road, a road paralleling the US-17, halfway between that highway and the coast. And suddenly we were on our first quiet road in days, with the forest surroundings making it feel like a National Park road.

Unfortunately the next intersection a couple miles later merged new sources of traffic with our route, and our quiet path grew progressively louder. We passed some under-construction housing developments being raised inside holes of just-flattened forest, and that sort of development explains why so many cars fill these roads: to do literally anything you’re required to drive your car 10 or 20 miles from your house, so everyone who lives here is constantly on the roads! While it is good to see North Carolina allowing houses to be built for people to live in (likely better than many northern states), it sure would be better to see development happening in existing cities rather than in completely-disconnected pockets. The “Stop Overdevelopment” signs we’ve seen the last couple days are probably going a bit far, but as people who need to share the limited road space with all these additional users, it’s clear that it would be a lot easier to scale the transportation infrastructure with the population if the additional population wasn’t so diffuse!

Fifteen miles into our ride on this Election Day, we left the battleground of North Carolina for the very not-battleground of South Carolina. I hoped that the sight of a couple of adventurers inspired people who are open to experience to go cast a ballot, and those angry that we slowed them down for two seconds figured that they no longer had time to go vote. But nothing felt starkly different when we crossed into state number 25 of our nomadacy.

At mile 20 we turned left (initially down some side streets) to return to the coast at North Myrtle Beach. The East Coast Greenway route helped us to cross the Intracoastal Waterway over a water-level drawbridge, rather than doing a huge climb on the huge highway. And when we hit Ocean Boulevard, traffic again dropped to nearly nothing, despite the extremely-high housing density created by the high-rise resorts. I’m sure it would be a different story in the summer, but from the echoing emptiness it was clear that even this far south, “off season” still exists (which was later confirmed by a couple of local cyclists who stopped to chat).

At 28th Avenue South, Ocean Boulevard is mysteriously cut off, only to resume at 33rd Ave. Rather than adding an extra mile trekking inland and then back out, we used the cycling heatmap to find unsanctioned pathways at both 28th and 33rd to cut through. It definitely required a bit of walking and pushing the bikes, and might not have actually saved us any time, but at least it was a different type of work, and it was totally possible, even with our fat and heavy bikes.

Eventually an infiltrating bay forced us inland anyway, and while I was trying to figure out the exact form of sidewalk-riding (apparently legal in South Carolina) to keep us on the East Coast Greenway Route (and off US-17), Rett found a resort-connected restaurant for a fish-taco lunch. With the warm temperatures, palmetto trees, and undefined separation between “indoor” and “outdoor” spaces, the Nacho Hippo Cantina’s American take on “Mexican” actually felt almost entirely Mexican!

The mostly-vacant resorts meant that there were plenty of deals to be had in Myrtle Beach, but Rett found an entire two-bedroom house for us for not much more money, so we decided to eschew the resort experience and just do our normal hole-up for a few days. It did make it interesting to see the “real” Myrtle Beach, where the high-rises dwindled and the residential streets perpendicular to the coast road hid surprisingly-modest houses behind their moss-laden trees. Our place was more than a block from the beach, but similarly modest and quiet.

Days 2 and 3

The eight consecutive days of riding would have been a record if we hadn’t just done the same a month ago in New England. The 328 miles we covered over this period was significantly longer though, and very nearly the most distance we’ve ever put behind us in eight days. Thus a rest was quite deserved!

On the second day we got the most rain we’ve seen in months, so I was glad we hadn’t gone with my initial idea to spend a couple nights camping at Myrtle Beach State Park (and ok, it still wasn’t very much rain, but it was nice to not need to think about it at all). On the chance that our luck doesn’t continue forever, I spent the days applying Seam Grip waterproofing to the corner seams on our Big Agnes tent, where after some 160 nights of use the factory-installed seam tape has begun to fail. I also did the same for one of my pannier rain covers. Hopefully we don’t get rain for another 160 days and we never need to test the repairs!