38.3 mi / 12.5 mph / 170 ft. climbing
Home: Motel 6

“It can’t actually be this hot”, I said to myself as I stepped outside. “The only reason it feels this muggy is because we’ve spent three days inside an air-conditioned house and we’ve forgotten what normal air feels like”. But no, a couple miles of riding revealed that it actually is this hot! It was “only” 78F when we started rolling in the morning (and maxed at about 80F), but the humidity was close to 100%, and in the sun my thermometer read 96F at one point.

The resort center of Myrtle Beach proper was slightly-more populated than the deserted North Myrtle Beach canyon we’d passed on the way in, but it was still clearly deep off-season. Many of the hotels declared “walk ins accepted” (I’m not sure what that was trying to communicate that “vacancy” doesn’t?), and advertised special rates in the $39 to $49 range. Unlike more-seasonal resort centers, it seemed like most places here (hotels, restaurants, shops) remained open, as if prepared for a sudden influx to fill the emptiness. But it was impossible for me to imagine this place filled, with its literal hundreds of hotels, thousands of floors, and tens of thousands of rooms. Who are all the people who come here for vacations, and why?! Is this why National Parks have become permanently overwhelmed in the post-COVID era, because people finally figured out that there are better ways to vacation than cramming into a high-rise with a million other unimaginative people?

Eventually we had to bump back inland to where people live and drive, on Kings Hwy, where we made a relatively-early stop for the air-conditioning of a McDonald’s lunch. We were able to swerve away from US-17 at the last second by heading down the “business” alternate through Murrells Inlet, where moss-dripping trees and incutting waterways made it feel more and more like the Outer Banks (the Netflix show) the further we got from the actual Outer Banks.

When the business loop returned to the main US-17, we didn’t actually need to join the monster highway because a bike path parallels it through dense woods. It was a narrow, super-twisty, and bumpy bike path, wet either still from yesterday’s rains, or because humidity in this forest is enough to dampen the ground, but it was still preferable over the busy highway. If only because “carefully negotiating a trail ride” is a mentally and physically distinct style of riding from the “pedal straight and flat and watch out for traffic” riding we’ve been doing for weeks, so the contrast was exciting. On the previous road the also-not-ideal but-still-welcome bike lane appeared suddenly at the Georgetown County border, so there must have been someone in Georgetown County government trying to do what they could to make crossing their county by bicycle a little easier than their neighbors.

We did several miles down a two-lane road that must have threaded between a dozen golf courses, and didn’t get beaned by any errant shots. Most drivers were respectful and gave us plenty of space while slowly passing, but that made me realize that even oncoming cars seemed to be driving at well under the 45mph speed limit. It was a continuation of the slow drivers I’d observed through the Myrtle Beach resorts, which I had attributed to being “taught” by mobs of tourists on foot and in golf carts, but maybe slow driving is just a wider part of South Carolina driving culture? Whatever the reason, no complaints from us!

For the last 5 miles we finally were forced onto US-17 as the only option. For the first stretch we had the narrow-shoulder-with-rumble-strip setup, where the white line communicated to a sizeable minority of drivers that they didn’t need to shift over in their lane at all to give us space (much less merge into the left lane). But then for the 1.5-mile bridge, where the shoulder disappeared and we needed to ride to the left of the white line, 98% of drivers merged completely into the left lane to pass us, and the other 2% even gave us a decent amount of space. Since it was the same road and effectively the “same drivers”, it was a clear experimental result showing that a shoulder doesn’t always make things safer (or more-comfortable) for us.