55.8 mi / 15.2 mph / 307 ft. climbing
Home: Comfort Suites

Yesterday afternoon our Motel 6 was literally the first thing on the ground after we crossed the Pee Dee River and entered Georgetown, and my dash back and forth across the highway to pick up Taco Bell for dinner certainly brought no further insight into the town. I also have no memories from 2010 likely because Dennis and I blew through here on the fast-food highway without stopping. But as the third-oldest town in South Carolina, it hides a historic residential center in plain view that required us to only make our left turn in slightly different place.

When the bridge into town raised us up yesterday I saw a towering industrial operation across the river, a sign that Georgetown has a third leg to its stool besides the highway stops and historical center. Except then the headline article in the stack of newspapers sitting in our motel lobby (no small irony) reported that International Paper had just announced that the plant would be closed by the end of this year. Even in this country’s roaring economy, 700 jobs evaporating in a town of 8400 will be quite a blow, especially when our ride today revealed that the steel mill on the other side of the road had preceded the paper mill in death. With that leg kicked out from under Georgetown’s stool, will leaning further into its tourist-attracting downtown be enough to stem its decline? Perhaps, but it’s certainly not a direct job-absorber for the mill workers.

In 2010 I had written that once we got out of Georgetown, traffic on US-17 dwindled to almost nothing, and luckily this holds true 14 years later (though is this about to change with more Georgetown residents making a long-distance commute to the Charleston area?) We had no shoulder, but that was no issue as the vehicles could (and did) easily move fully into the left lane to pass us. We had a generous tailwind flowing down the broad corridor, making it nearly-effortless to fly along at 17-18mph.

And then our wonderful effortless day came literally crashing down. I glanced up from my phone where I’d briefly been checking our route, and while I couldn’t consciously process the impossible fact that Rett’s bike was suddenly immobilized just feet in front of my rapidly-approaching front wheel, at least my instincts let me squeeze hard on my brakes for the fraction of a second before I crashed hard into her. Already unstable, she was thrown forward and stumbled down (luckily to the right) as her bike was shot out from under her. As I leaped off to secure our bikes in the grassy shoulder, I glimpsed that two of our panniers, my right front, and her left rear (terribly, her “Lamby pannier”) were laying in the travel lane behind us. I quickly grabbed them to keep them from being run over, and despite being able to already see a bent tube on Rett’s frame, that was the end of my care about our “stuff”, and the focus was on how badly I had injured her.

Luckily there were no open wounds, but the red scrape on her shin, just below her knee, was already swelling up into a knot. Her hip was also hurting, and maybe most-painful to her, a couple of her nails had been torn and she needed to take them down. We got her cleaned up and then waited to see what else the adrenaline come-down might reveal.

It was a terrible way to “prove” what I’d been hoping to communicate to Rett to help make our busy-highway travel be less-uncomfortable: as scary as it feels for loud vehicles to come roaring by a foot or two from our handlebars, statistics show that the risk of actually getting hit by one of those vehicles is much lower than our over-stimulated brains estimate. I’m glad that I never actually said “the odds of me crashing into you are much higher than a vehicle on US-17 hitting us”, but that’s what happened, and I’m not sure “your husband is a bigger risk to you than these asshole drivers” is a helpful takeaway for us, even if it’s sadly correct.

Nearly all accidents require multiple failures, and while my inattention (however brief) was the most-preventable, the tailwind that had been making our day so good was also doubly-responsible for this dreadful turnaround. For a couple months, Rett’s bike (and mine, to a lesser-extent) has been having a frustrating problem where the chain will “jump” without warning, generating a shock through the bike and into our feet on the pedals. It only happens when we’re in our highest (smallest) rear gears, which we only use when we have strong tailwinds (or a long downhill) allowing us sustained 16+ mph speeds (my unproven theory is that their disuse makes the system “sticky” when it’s in this range). Unbeknownst to me, such a “jump” had happened here, causing her feet to both fly off the pedals, and braking hard was the only way for her to maintain control of the bike and keep from swerving into the rumble strip and passing traffic.

Somehow none of that noise and action had grabbed my attention (or if it did, it was too late), and since we’d been flying along at at least 17mph, my 300 lb. “vehicle” had far more momentum to burn off than it normally does. My best guess is that I was still near 15mph, and she pretty close to zero, when I made contact. It was mostly dumb luck that I was slightly to her left side, which allowed our relatively-soft panniers to absorb the brunt of the impact; it might have been worse if it was direct wheel-to-wheel.

With Rett stabilized and sitting on the guardrail looking up hotel options (and refusing a walk over to the Circle K gas station/store luckily just 50 yards back in this normally-barren stretch of highway), it was time to turn to the bikes. The bent tube that I’d initially glimpsed turned out to be the only physical damage to Rett’s bike. It was one of the struts of her rear rack that is built directly into her frame (now a downside of such an integrated design!), and it still appeared stiff enough to support her pannier (I did need to adjust her rear fender slightly to compensate for the altered position of the mounting bolt). Actually attaching the pannier would be a bit more difficult, since the bolt attaching one of the “CamLock” mounts to the pannier had been sheared off by the impact. I was able to recover the pieces from the asphalt roadway, but for now used a tie-wrap to lock the pannier in place on the rack.

Inspection of my bike revealed that my rear rack had a bolt sheared off too, the one at the bottom that connects it to the frame’s dropout. There hadn’t been any direct contact to my right rear pannier, so only the force of the instant deceleration could have caused it. On the other hand, the break on the bolt didn’t look that fresh, but it’s also hard to imagine that I’ve been carrying my heavy panniers for weeks on a half-connected rack without noticing it. Whatever the answer to the mystery, my experience with the same issue a couple years ago in Vermont helped me back the broken bolt out of the frame and replace it.

We’d picked up lunches back near Georgetown, so we found some shade in an abandoned lot nearby and set up our chairs to eat, breathe, and figure out what to do next. Our bikes were mechanically sound, and our bodies bruised but not broken, so it seemed we at least didn’t need to find a pickup truck at the gas station to lift us out to somewhere.

The problem was that, regardless of this crash, we’d already had trouble finding a place to stay on this long and unusually-empty stretch between Georgetown and Charleston. The plan we’d eventually settled on had been to check in on whether one of the two first-come/first-served sites at Buck Hall Recreation Area was available (all the other sites were booked solid), and in the likely event that there was no room on this Saturday, continue on to a hike-in no-amenity campsite along the Palmetto Trail in the Frances Marion National Forest. The latter option had actually become quite attractive to me (a spot almost surely to ourselves in the woods), as had an offshoot to see a decaying plantation a couple miles ahead that we had just learned about 40 minutes earlier (in the before-times). Obviously neither of those would be happening now, a literal insult to literal injury.

The tailwind was still going, and Rett was able to still propel her bike pretty well (if not without discomfort), so we decided to ride on to Bucks Hall. I left her at the highway while I rode the half-mile into the campground. The first-come/first-serve tent sites were occupied, but when I talked to the impossibly-kind camp host, she and her husband figured out that there was an electric site that had come available due to someone leaving early. But she also said that considering our circumstances (she offered ibuprofen or anything else we might need) we’d be welcome to just pitch our tent by them for the night.

In the meantime, Rett had considered that she might be hurting more tomorrow than today, so even though it was another 20+ miles until the first motels appeared, covering that distance today with the continuing tailwind might be the better option. The motels in Mt. Pleasant were unusually expensive, but at this point money is no object, and simply dropping into a bed is probably a better idea than setting up, sleeping in, and taking down our tent. So with many thanks to the camp host (“take our number, and if you get into any trouble on the way, give us a call and we’ll come get you”), I returned to the highway and we continued south.

As we entered the outer suburbs of Charleston, US-17 gradually morphed back into the nightmare that it had been near other cities, eventually forcing us onto the sidewalk rather than testing if the vehicles would prove me wrong about the biggest source of danger. Just to get off the highway onto quieter roads we needed to wrestle our way through intersections as pedestrians, and at the very end, we couldn’t even get into the left lane to turn into our motel and needed to continue to the next driveway, turn around, and walk back. Still, with all that, and with a bruising, steel-bending crash, we nearly set another average-speed record, and rode some 20 miles further than we’d planned at the the start of the day.

Luckily our expensive motel provided amenities for the price that we’re unused to: lemon water at the reception desk, an elevator, a huge room with plenty of space for the bikes, and a genuine “nice hotel” smell rather than “harsh cleaning products to cover up the smoke and mildew” smell that is normal for us. All that, and a Trader Joe’s right across the road went a long way toward soothing the day’s physical and emotional pain, though we’re also glad that Rett was able to do the push that now left us only 10 miles into Charleston tomorrow.