The third week of our “Cycling Beyond 70” expedition begins with a steady drizzle.  It has been raining all night.  There is no breakfast service at our motel, and no restaurants nearby, except for a Subway in one of the two convenience stores nearby.  The motel proprietor told us there was a Dunkin Donuts on the other side of the freeway, but we aren’t going that way.  We eat what we purchased in the village of Hardeeville the day before and venture into the rain.

We discover that the rough roads yesterday have dislodged the trailer hitch, which is dangling loosely from the chain stay.  We tighten it under the motel lobby canopy, under the gaze of one of the elder members of the owner’s family, curious about our mode of transportation, no doubt wondering if this is a side of America he didn’t count on when he emigrated.  We bid him farewell and push off into the rainy morning.

The old road parallels Interstate 95, carrying tourists, snowbirds, and freight between Boston and Miami.  Our road is relatively traffic-free, but has enough local traffic to keep us on the side, where it was widened haphazardly in 1964 when the freeway was built and poorly maintained since, heavily grooved in both directions and sloppily patched here and there. We have decided to stop at the next town, Ridgeland, making a short day in the rain, 21 km, half the distance we came yesterday.  The road improves near town, but traffic builds, where large trucks grind to a crawl behind us until it is safe to pass.  There is no shoulder, of course, and the white line, which touches the grass, is ribbed with a rumble strip, so we ride in the lane. 

Ridgeland greets us with a row of derelict or defunct motels and eateries, but the center of town is still alive, with a grocery and other thriving businesses.  This time, the freeway interchange is less than a kilometer from the city center, and surrounded by businesses.  We finally get a hot meal, at the Waffle House across the street from our motel.  We order off the placemat “favorites,” unaware that there is a full menu available.  Waffle House is such a fixture in the South that no one else needs a menu, and the staff expects you to know your order without looking.  Our waitress is amazed that we come from a place where there are no Waffle Houses.  As usual, it is necessary to order ala carte to leave out the meats.

The rain has subsided, but it is windy (a headwind, of course), and cold.  Too early for normal check-in, we wait in the warm lobby for our room to be ready, then shower and nap until dinner time, which is a trip back to the Waffle House, then to the grocery behind (a town with two groceries–unheard of), and to the pharmacy next door for protein bars, our staple meal choice on the road, along with our jar of peanut butter.

Headwinds are forecast for Saturday as well, so we head out early, back into town and north, where the old highway merges with the freeway and we turn onto a frontage road, which is actually adequately paved–until we reach the gravel pit at the top of the next rise, where heavy trucks have hammered it into the same broken ruts we have been riding since Savannah.  We meet a fellow traveler, a homeless person of indeterminate gender and age, who turns out to be a 60-year-old woman pedaling a bike with an enormous backpack and various other bike bags and buckets.  She carefully examines our trailer setup (two stacked suitcases on wheels attached to the bike with a short hydraulic hose).  We move on. eventually coming to a pair of gas stations where we indulge in a bottle of Gatorade and use the rest rooms, which have no towels and a printed set of directions on how to find the light switches, which are down the hall on the hinge side of the doors.

A looping climb to an overpass takes us over the freeway and onto another rough road widened ages ago by covering the old road, including curb and sidewalk, with new asphalt, with the usual drainage and settling issues that make it unsafe even for trucks.  After working hard against the cold north wind for several hours, we come at last to the only restaurant for many miles, a Denny’s attached to a Best Western, having passed a number of defunct motels and footprints of long-disappeared eateries.  Denny’s is packed with locals and freeway travelers.  We wait for a table, then wait some more while the staff regroups from the rush, shivering in our wet bicycle clothes.  Finally, we are served approximately what we thought we ordered, wolf it down, and push off into the wind once more.

Despite the four-lane strip in front of Denny’s, there is no real town of South Point, and the shoulder runs out near a church where a funeral is being held for a prominent citizen, so cars are parked along the highway in both directions.  A bit farther on, the highway divides: we turn left onto the old highway again.  grinding away for more kilometers and up a long hill, past children guffawing at the strange apparition of old white folks on a funny bicycle towing suitcases, then turn toward the freeway once more.  It turns out that Yamassee, South Carolina is not so much a town, but a collection of neighborhoods.  At various times, we pass an auto repair, a decrepit thrift shop, the Family Dollar and Dollar General stores that serve as general stores and groceries for the rural south, and finally, under the freeway to our motel, a former Super 8, now a Rodeway, with the faded yellow ‘8’ still visible on the sign.  The desk clerk writes out the WiFi password in flowing Hindi script, spells it for us in English, but it doesn’t work, despite her insistence that is what it is.  We get sporadic connections to a Comcast xfinitywifi hotspot somewhere nearby, perhaps at one of the three convenience stores across the highway.  Some advertise “dairy,” which consists of a frozen yogurt counter or ice cream bars in a freezer.  There is a Subway in one of them, also.  We retreat to our room, eat peanut butter from our stash, nap, then sleep.

Sunday morning, we drop the key in the key box, then notice we have a flat trailer tire.  We find a leak and patch it with one of the cheap patches that came with the tire tools, of dubious merit, then wait for the Subway to open, wolfing down one of their pre-cooked egg sandwiches before heading off into the cold north wind.  A circuitous route through a neighborhood, where the Deliverance church offers 9:00 am Sunday services, but it is after 9:30 and the building is empty and silent.  Maybe they have been Delivered, or maybe people in this non-town have lost hope.  We finally emerge on the old highway and grind away past the swamps.  We pass up one small grocery at the first intersection we come to, pushing up the hill and continuing on.  At the outskirts of the next “town” on our map, we find Jim’s Grocery, a small concrete block building at a crossroad.  Jim is a retired state trooper and keeps an eye on the restless young men who frequent the store.  He says the town is just past the school where his wife works.  So it is, but “town” is a church and a few houses,  situated on a high spot of ground.

We pass a group of homeless persons on bikes, camped at a ball field near a more-prosperous-looking church.  Church is just letting out, so we have a flurry of  traffic overtaking us ahead, as the terrain becomes more hilly and homes become horse ranches and estates.  We reach the outskirts of Walterboro to note our trailer tire is going low again.  We pump it up and continue on, meeting a young man on a bicycle and chatting a bit as we both push our bikes uphill into town on a busy road with a curb, no shoulder, and busy traffic.

In town, the main street is being repaved, down to one narrow lane, which we share with cars and trucks, dodging around construction barriers placed around the drain grates, then pulling into driveways to let cars pass.  Walterboro is hilly: we make a left turn, again toward the freeway, and push on the sidewalk up a long hill before riding through the freeway interchange to our motel.

We have discussed this, before and during our trip, that we will have mission checkpoints that depend on our abilities and the conditions to continue:  The road ahead, through Charleston, has some long days between towns, and more old, no-shoulder roads with heavy traffic.  The last few days, we have battled rain, headwinds, and heavy traffic on increasingly bad roads, making, at most, 40 km, sometimes half that.  The path ahead has some 60 km days, then up to 80 km.  We have arrived at the end of our daily rides exhausted and hungry, with few places to eat.  Walterboro is big enough to have car rental agencies, so the die is cast–we will continue our East Coast Expedition, but on a more equal footing with the traffic and distances, by rental car.

Since leaving Orlando, we have pedaled nearly 600 km (370 miles).  We’ve had some good days with great scenery, and some bad days, with a lot of pain, struggle, and poor accommodations.  We’ve met interesting people, and been met with the indifference to outsiders that comes inevitably around freeway service stops in poor rural areas.  We’ve tried to be cautious and flexible, as when we elected to bypass stormy weather and dangerous roads by self-sagging between Folkston and Savannah via U-Haul truck, an expensive but necessary solution.  We have committed to a three-week car rental, that will take us through the most important points on the East Coast  on our “must-see” checklist, then cross-country to the midwest to visit relatives before returning home early, where we will ride again, on our beloved rail trails and quiet byways in the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain West, in a manner befitting our station as senior cyclists.

To be continued…