Back to Day 36

11 AM

In a deli in Calabash, NC, sharing a ham/sandwich and guzzling mango Snapple. Calabash is the last town in NC.

We had a lovely motel breakfast at the Day’s Inn this morning. All of our motel favorites: fake eggs, sausage patties, watery coffee, and cold cereal in cool turn-y dispensers. And it’s been a pleasant morning. We crossed Sauce Pan Creek, which is cool because it’s called Sauce Pan Creek.

We saw our first alligator in the wild

and we did not feed it.

We crossed the Little River.

… and here we are in Calabash.

5 PM

Everyone had warned us about the roads in South Carolina, and it was amazing. The second we crossed the state line

the shoulders just disappeared. The drivers weren’t any nastier than those in North Carolina, it’s just that the roads made it difficult for everyone.

We had to ride on rte. 17 for a while, which is just a big nasty almost-interstate. Then when we got on a side road, we were back to no shoulder. And to make it worse, they put a rumble strip directly into the white line. Like every foot or so, there is a cement mound the size of a small hamburger. So we couldn’t ride on the line, it was dangerous riding to the left of the line, and if we rode on the right, we had to rumble over the line to avoid debris, road kill, etc. On the next road, rte. 90, there was a nice wide shoulder, but the entire width of it was pressed into a rumble strip. Back into the road for us.

We stopped into a supermarket in Wampee on State Road 57. We bought strawberries and ice cream, and we sat on bags of bark mulch watching people grocery shop. Church had just let out, and everyone was dressed in their Sunday best. They were all nice to us, smiling, asking about our trip, etc. It was a lovely butt break.

The most exciting part of our day was when we found a closed bridge on our route. We had seen the “Road Closed” sign a few miles back, but we though “Well, maybe it isn’t really closed. We can probably take a bike over it, right?”

Wrong.

The bridge was out. In it’s place was a giant back hoe. But we didn’t want to go back, so we took the bikes apart and carried them, and the packs, through the sand and the mud and over little fences and basically through the entire construction site. Then we reassembled the bikes, rode about 50 yards, and did it again at the second bridge that was out. It was actually a nice break from riding, certainly a change of pace, and not the least bit boring. However, we had mud caked into our shoes for the rest of the day.

After a 54 mile day, we are at the Cypress Inn in Conway, SC. We’re about 10 miles west of Myrtle Beach, but this was on route. We will probably ride through Myrtle Beach tomorrow, just to check it out.

On to Day 38