43.7 mi / 13.0 mph / 208 ft. climbing
Home: Edisto Motel

Our AirBNB was on the street that becomes the bridge that crosses the Ashley River that takes us out of Charleston. So that was unfortunately easy, especially since the bridge connecting the peninsula to the west is flat, unlike the huge climb that connects the peninsula to the east. Immediately we noticed lines of backed-up traffic at every stoplight heading back in towards Charleston. It’s been a long time since we’ve been whacked with this level of “damn, commuting to work suuucks!!” traffic; it’s likely a combination of the steady long-term population growth of the region, and the river-cut topography that forces everyone through a limited number of bridges.

Traffic going our way was lighter, but it wasn’t super fun, especially when we needed to branch left a couple times across fast-flowing lanes branching right. Luckily the spot where Rett noticed her tire going flat (ending what felt like our longest stretch of no flats, nearly 3 months!) was the emptiest stretch of road all day. A flat on the rear usually means taking all the bags off and flipping the bike upside-down, but our crash meant that one of Rett’s panniers was cable-tied to the bike, so we finagled the wheel on and off from an upright position.

We were detouring off the “bike touring route” to visit Magnolia Plantation & Gardens, and that’s part of what made the riding more-stressful than it would have been otherwise. But once we turned from the gorgeous tree-tunneled highway into the even-more-gorgeous tree-tunneled plantation entrance, all became calm. They advertise “six miles of trails” that you can bike on, and the guide at the entrance specified that it was the gray trails on the map that were open to biking. But then the actual ticket seller said “it’s empty here now, you can take your bikes anywhere”. Thank you, we very much appreciate that sort of rule-flexibility! And then Rett did a great job of ride-walking our unwieldy bikes, with repeated stops, sections of walking, slow riding through tight turns, all stuff that would have driven her insane a couple years ago. But having our bikes always with us to hop aboard for “boring” sections allowed us to see far more of the expansive grounds in far less time than walking would have.

We’d picked up sandwiches from the cafe when we’d arrived, and had long been looking for the right place to stop and eat them. The Audubon Swamp Garden turned out to be that place, where we set up on a boardwalk pier extended over the water. Well, are we sure it’s actually water? The bright green surface is so motionless and textured that it could be an endless sheet of plastic. The algae mat is so thick that fallen pine needles sit on it just as they would on a sheet of plastic.

In the Google reviews there are a ton of mentions of alligators, but we hadn’t yet seen one in the miles of alligator-friendly waterways we’d already passed, so we thought this was the best place to spend time making a concerted effort. Just as we were finishing up, disappointed, Rett saw the “plastic” ripple. “Neil!! It’s a gator!! It’s coming right at me!!” But we didn’t need the elevated platform or the fence to protect us, since the alligator turned his engines to full-stop some 50 feet away from us. Eerily motionless, he sat there in the muck, waiting.

Then without warning, and in complete silence, he moved forward again, about 30 feet. After the third round (and the third time for us saying “ok, I guess he’s done, we should probably move on”), we finally moved on. But that was worth the admission fee all on its own. I suppose as we continue on into Florida, this might be like bison in Yellowstone: getting progressively less-exciting as you realize there is nothing particularly rare about the encounter. But until there is a second encounter, the first one is rare by definition!

By the time we left (around 1pm, after a 3-4 hour visit) it had gotten a bit more crowded in the central area, but it had pretty much been an ideal visit. Much of the place we had entirely to ourselves (no one else ever saw “our” alligator, despite us watching him for 20-30 minutes), it was cool enough to be wearing sweaters in the shade, and we found none of the mosquitos that many reviews complained about. But now we still had 28 miles to ride, longer than we prefer to have after lunch, and Rett was getting testy when I missed a turn and we had to backtrack after I realized riding down a cart path on a golf course might not be kosher.

After 7 miles of those golf-course residential streets and then an off-street bike path on Bees Ferry Road, we returned to our old friend, US-17. Here the layout was two lanes in our direction with a narrow shoulder, and enough traffic that it was safe but not fun. Then after several miles the shoulder suddenly disappeared, but the transition provided pretty clear proof of the peculiar truth: on the no-shoulder version cars gave us more space than on the shouldered version. 99% of vehicles moved fully into the left lane to go around us, as opposed to the 80% who moved when we were in the shoulder.

Still, we were relieved when we could branch off onto the old highway for a stretch. We paused on the suddenly-quiet road to catch our breath, pulling over in a driveway that lead to a plot of freshly-cleared forest due to become an enormous housing development (the quiet old highway is unlikely to be quiet much longer!) A brown Subaru slowed as it approached, and I thought, “crap, we need to move the bikes to let this person in”. But no, the woman just wanted to tell us she lived nearby and if we needed a bathroom or anything else we were welcome! These spontaneous offers seem to be becoming more frequent for us.

Unfortunately the old highway is now so old that a 3-mile section of it has been de-paved, and worse, we discovered a quarter-mile in that it was too sandy to be safe for us to ride on. So we had to backtrack a bit, and take another (slightly-less-sandy) unpaved road to walk-of-shame ourselves back to US-17. While less-comfortable, it totally got us where we were going much faster than fighting through the sand would have. The old highway then reappeared on the opposite side of US-17, was again good for a stretch, but then also turned to dirt/sand. Well, I knew we’d have to do the final 3 miles on shoulderless US-17 no matter what, so what’s another three on top of that? Pretty annoying, especially since the traffic had gotten a bit heavier, so not all the drivers were able to smoothly merge into the left lane behind us. For the left turn into our middle-of-nowhere motel, we had to pull off into the grass on the right, and then sprint across the four lanes of traffic (now without a median) when a gap appeared.

The Edisto Motel is a portal into another dimension, and a perfect place for us to land. Susan, the delightful owner, fully understood the mental and emotional struggle we’d just been through, and said that when she moved here 30 or 40 years ago, US-17 was just a 2-lane road, and traffic was so light that you could turn out from her driveway with just a “yield”. Coming from the North (or the West Coast), this idea of decades of continuous population growth is still difficult to grasp.

The expanding road had swallowed the gas pumps that once sat in front of the long-closed restaurant, and it brought passing semi-trucks within feet of one of the rooms, but the pink-painted concrete block building stands stoutly against the tides of time, and the rising waters. Essentially unchanged from its 1950s-era construction (but lovingly cared for) the motel also has no website, the key was left under the mat for us, and payment was in cash ($85 for our two-room suite, because Susan knew we’d need the space for our bikes). But in contrast to all of those signs of time-travel, she had sent us a personalized video showing where to turn in and giving a preview of our room(s)! And then when we met, we had a wonderful conversation (she reminded Rett and I of a combination of my mom and two of her sisters), somehow leading to ‘Outlander’ (she’s a Fraser, and photos proved that she was not just being a loving mom when she said that her son looks a lot like Jamie!). She returned while Rett was taking a shower, to drop off a Entertainment Weekly/Outlander magazine because she thought Rett would enjoy it. We’ve stayed in a lot of cheap old motels, but never one like this, and we now know that the 5-star Google rating is completely deserved!