Myrtle Beach is at the 2,000 mile marker.
This East Coast Greenway mile marker is at the kiosk on the southern end of Myrtle Beach.
And Barb and Bev are among a handful of riders in our group who have biked all 2,000 miles from Calais, Maine, taking it one week a year.
Me? I’ve ridden south from Newark, NJ, plus 350 miles from Calais to Portland, Maine, and some of the Connecticut trails and the New York City route. Got a bit of catching up to do!
A crazy amount of rain, plus an alligator sighting.
Wow did we get drenched today. Even though we tried to wait out the worst of it. And the flooding on Ocean Boulevard in Myrtle Beach … at one point I swear I biked through water halfway up my wheel. At least my chain got “washed.” And, yes, my shoes are soaked. I’m on the hunt for newspaper to help dry them out.
Thankfully the ride through heavy rain was only for 4 miles, with rear light flashing for visibility and almost no traffic to cope with. And it wasn’t a cold October rain like it would have been up north.
Still, when you show up at a hotel soaking wet, you are grateful for a hot-out-of-the-dryer towel and a warm chocolate-y cookie before you even check in. 300-and-some-odd calories be damned. Thank you, Lillie.
(Oh, and when you say that county name in the photo at the state line, it’s a silent H. Otherwise it sounds illicit.)
Photo of the day: an alligator in a neighborhood pond just off the road. How it got there… and why it can stay there … is beyond me. Last night, a kid at the general store’s fish counter explained to us how to hunt alligator (bait is bits of chicken dangling from a string, followed by a bullet to the head). He was selling a block of frozen Georgia gator meat for $17.99 a pound, but who knew North Carolina meat was so close? (Why you will pay that much for gator and then essentially turn it into chicken-like nuggets when chicken breasts are regularly on sale for $1.99 a pound is something someone still needs to explain to me.)
You never want to call a gator friendly, so let’s say this one was … curious. He kept drifting closer to where we were standing, as if wanting to check us out as much as we wanted to check out him.
And why do I say 40ish miles? It was supposed to be a 46-miler but at one point in North Myrtle Beach, some riders started following East Coast Greenway signs instead of our cue sheets. The signs date back to an interim on-road route with bike lanes that follows Ocean Boulevard rather than the new trail route further inland. Just another opportunity to debate the route! I ended up with the road group. Think the long side of the triangle. Maybe I lopped off 6 miles? But I missed the only real trail segment of the day.
We were just 4 miles from our Myrtle Beach hotel when some other riders called out from a meh beachside grill restaurant. Most of what was left of our group stopped to eat, figuring we could still find the trail afterwards — and then came the deluge. At least we could hide out and watch a bit of baseball; others were on the trail with no place to hide for quite a while.
Does getting soaked count as doing laundry?
Read what my fellow blogger has to say about the day.
This photo sums up why we need the East Coast Greenway.
This photo, taken by another rider today, sums up why we need greenways — off-road trails like the East Coast Greenway that serve cyclists, runners, walkers and others of all ages and ability.
Look at that intersection. Wide roads, no bike lanes. How many would cross it on a bike? And with children?
And once we got past intersections like that, we were on roads that sometimes had tiny shoulders.
If people speeding by in their cars thought all these cyclists were nuts, would you blame them?
One rider in our group is a distributor for a major bike brand and says he’s not surprised by the poor bicycle infrastructure around here. Even in beach towns, there’s not a culture of bicycling to the beach, unlike, say. the Jersey Shore. And he doesn’t have a bike store between Wilmington and Savannah selling his brand aside from one in Charleston.
What did look familiar? People trying to slow down traffic in front of their homes. Beyond those commercially available red “Drive like your kids live here” signs, these two homemade signs in front of one house caught my eye (but probably not those speeding):
And today’s ride? All roads. The plan had been to ride East Coast Greenway trails in Wilmington, then follow the beach south to Fort Fisher, catch a ferry for a few miles to Southport and then make a big loop inland to cross a river before heading to the beach again.
Many of us were looking forward to the ferry ride. Only the state transportation department, which runs the ferry, decided that today and tomorrow (Columbus Day) was a perfect time for maintenance. And we couldn’t come up with a replacement service. So no ferry ride. (Shades of my first WAY tour in 2014 when the boats didn’t show then either!) Instead we were shuttled across a bicycle-unfriendly bridge and started riding a few miles outside Wilmington.
The flip side is that today was a 62-mile day instead of the 70 miles that had been billed. It was hot and humid, so a bit less is good as those of us from up north adjust to Carolina weather. Got to keep remembering to reapply sunscreen, including under the edge of my bike shorts (shorts ride up when you sit and that’s where the rash from too much sun shows up).
My roommate on this ride is blogging too. Here’s how she summed up the day.
This is what I call breakfast plus lunch!
When all you had for breakfast is a Clif bar and you spot barbecue being sold under a simple white poop-up tent on the side of the road… of course you stop.
Good thing too, since the scenic route back from Moores Creek to Wilmington ended up on a different route, missing the planned lunch spot and stopping instead at a “famous” hot dog place after 45 or so miles, which most certainly wouldn’t have been what I was looking for.
This signed lured us in.
And this is what I got for $10. More than enough for breakfast plus lunch! Sorry, vegetarians, even the rice and okra had meat in it. No idea about the collard greens. Awesome ribs, with meat falling off the bone.
We were told the sale was to help one of the workers get his own place. Just a mobile home, nothing fancy. Hope it works out.
The day’s ride was to close the gap from the end of last year’s abridged ride at Moores Creek from Elizabethtown and the start of this year’s in Wilmington. But with our detour, it was more than I bargained for — probably 60 miles all in, including my ride to and from the start.
I explored more of the Virginia Capital Trail. Five stars!
First, the Virginia Capital Trail is a fabulous trail. I wish other areas would take a look and see how they can copy it.
Continue reading “Virginia Capital Trail, part 2: around Richmond”
I explored part of the Virginia Capital Trail.
I gave up trying to talk myself into driving in one day to Wilmington for the start of the East Coast Greenway’s annual weeklong ride, deciding to break it up with a stop in Richmond.
The appeal: the Virginia Capital Trail, 50 miles of off-road trail from Richmond (the state capital) to Jamestown, the first settlement. It was finished a few years ago and is a spur route of the East Coast Greenway.
I had time for an afternoon ride and debated where to start: Richmond or somewhere mid-trail? I only knew of Charles City, so that’s where I went. Turns out I was 20 miles from Jamestown … that would be 40 miles round trip. Could I do it?
Continue reading “Virginia Capital Trail, part 1, or the back half of “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too””
A 15-mile route from Riverside, NJ, to the Roebling Museum.
This is part of an old Roebling factory, the company that built the Brooklyn Bridge. The East Coast Greenway goes past it — now on the road but eventually (I hope) on an off-road trail. That would be the Delaware River Heritage Trail, which is slowly pushing south from Trenton and Bordentown, and then up from Camden. It would be an alternative to riding from Trenton to Philadelphia on the Pennsylvania side. (And it’s no secret what I think of the current route.)
Here’s some news about the progress being made on the heritage trail.
Like the mini bridge outside the Roebling Museum? Stopping for a proper museum visit next time! Several picnic tables too, so it’s a prime rest stop.
We decided to explore from Riverside, following the Delaware River north. Our route took us through small communities and shuttered factory sites, like a large one for U.S. Pipe, once the largest employer in Burlington. (here’s some history about the company in New Jersey.)What will become of this prime riverfront location … and how much environmental cleanup is needed? Can gentrification reach this far, aided by transit? Waterfront condos one day? Or a new warehouse? The RiverLine light rail (which tracked our route) is right there … but so is a freight line. I just hope there is public access to the river (and yes, a trail).
Today, the 15 miles to Roebling are almost all on road; the East Coast Greenway route has a brief trail moment through a park, and we tested out a riverside walkway with a sign ordering you to walk your bike past an apartment building, per city ordinance. While there is usually a shoulder (I would not call them bike lanes), this is a route for people comfortable riding on roads, even on a Sunday morning. As we rode through an industrial area, I wondered about truck traffic during the week. One had a multi-use path out front… that dead-ended in the grass.
For those who don’t want to bike back (and yes, we did bike) or suffer mechanical trouble, there’s always the RiverLine. We were never that far from a stop.
Here’s a bonus for those who don’t ride on a Sunday: Junior’s Cheesecake. We biked past the company bakery in Burlington (sorry, New York). There’s an outlet there, apparently selling both “perfect and imperfect” cakes. Of course, you’d then have to balance it on your bike. Or be with a large group of hungry cyclists who can eat it all at once. (We went for a Portuguese restaurant in Riverside with scarily huge portions.)
Are there really free tours on the first Monday of the month?
Spotted along the way:
Christine Todd Whitman lives on as governor in this sign. Whether the vision of 2,000 more bike miles does too is another question.
I stumbled across this sign by a multi-use path in Woodbine, deep in southern N.J., on our back-to-back metric century overnight.
See the bike in the background of the sign? I figured the 2,000 miles referred to bike miles, hopefully in the form of trails and not just paint on the side of the road or, worse, sharrows. After all, it was right by a paved trail.
And I thought: Imagine if this really was what government wanted to do. New Jersey has 21 counties, so divided equally, it would be nearly 100 miles per county. Or do it by population, which would come at the expense of those really south and west, where they are too far to commute to the job hubs of NYC and Philadelphia. And if ideas for trails that were at least 5 miles long were prioritized, encouraging projects across municipalities and reducing the odds of random, disjointed trails not even connected by bike lanes … wow. (And the East Coast Greenway in New Jersey would be done! So would the Capital to Coast Trail, which may be coming back to life.)
But this is why I know this was all just talk around the time of the millennium: the governor on the sign is Christine Todd Whitman, who left office in early 2001. Usually every new governor gets his name on every sign possible as quickly as possible. Guess none of them wanted to own this one.
And the trail itself? We stopped at the Woodbine municipal center on the other side of the grassy median to ask where it goes. The receptionist had no idea. No clue about the name either. Turns out it’s the 3-mile Woodbine Railroad Trail following a section of the Pennsylvania and Reading Railroad. It connects the Cape May National Wildlife Refuge and Belleplain State Forest. Or at least peters out on what I hope are quiet roads. Downtown Woodbine looks like it has seen better days; the only commercial activity we saw was a Family Dollar store and a butcher’s shop/grocery. Would promoting the trail (and creating a small loop for casual riders) create a bit of economic pop?
Two metric centuries in two days and lots of sights along the way.
Thursday was the last day of summer and Friday was the first day of fall. What better way to mark the change in seasons than with a long bike ride to the Shore and one last chance to wade into the ocean?
The inspiration for this ride was NJDOT’s High Point to Cape May route, which runs 238 miles from the northwest corner of the state down to its southeastern point. Some people are crazy enough to ride a version of this in one day to mark the longest day of the year, but we were only aiming for a little over 60 miles each way (also known as a metric century), starting and ending off that route.
120+ miles in two days? Call us crazy for doing even that if you like. But I see it as good training for that big East Coast Greenway ride next month.
We picked Batso Village as our starting point because it was a convenient meeting point for the three of us, coming from two parts of the state — and the people running Wharton State Forest would let us leave our cars overnight. Our destination was the North Wildwood home of Mary Jo and Bill, good friends of one rider. Thank you again for hosting us … and for feeding this famished rider!
Thursday was a beautiful sunny day with a wind from the north, so when we reached Mays Landing, it wasn’t a hard decision to head east for the Shore and then let wind keep pushing us along. We quickly discovered that our route to the beach was the same that the MS City to Shore ride would be using two days later. Ocean City was our first beach town, proudly boasting its bike-friendly credentials as soon as we crossed the modern bridge with sweeping views of the Great Egg Harbor Bay and used by plenty of pedestrians getting in their steps.
We rolled through several beach towns, each with their own personality (some clearly for weeklong party rentals, others with fancy second homes), all with plenty of construction and often separated by old two-lane toll bridges (bikes exempt, yay). The joys of off-season riding: no traffic keeping you from quickly getting from one distant traffic light to another. The downside: what’s open is limited — and by that I really mean ice cream shops.
Given that Hurricane Sandy wasn’t that long ago, it was disconcerting to see how many homes aren’t elevated on these narrow spits of land. Condos have gone up above marshes on the inland side of bays, which just seems to b begging for trouble. And you don’t need a hurricane to hit to do damage, as we discovered in North Wildwood, where just the waves from Hurricane Jose took out much of the sand dunes a few days before we arrived. Pumping sand back onto the beach every year must just be something a town budgets for.
Sunny day flooding here?
On Friday, we opted not to fight the headwinds along the coast and quickly made our way inland, picking up the more direct High Point to Cape May route. The roads felt a little busier, though with generous shoulders. I wondered if someone who biked the area regularly would have picked out some quieter (if longer) stretches, or whether the smallest roads would have turned sandy. Regardless, good training for traffic in the Carolinas.
The day might win for strangest road trash ever: a wetsuit. Was it flung out of a car or pickup truck in anger? Or did it bounce out of a truck bed or from the roof of a car? It wasn’t something we could pick up (unless we wanted to wear it), so we just whizzed by. Hopefully someone went back to retrieve it (and the plaid shirt nearby). We also passed on stopping for what appeared to be a bike lock, figuring that, too, was of little use to us.
What else did we find?
North Wildwood was getting ready for its Irish Weekend, described as the largest Irish festival on the East Coast and attracting about 200,000 visitors. Even if you’re not Irish, you want to pretend that you are and hang something green from the house, just to keep away the drunks. Glad we missed the crowds.
Spotted along the route:
A hat tip to the Revolution and an unusual 9/11 memorial in Mays Landing (have you ever seen one with photos from all three sites?):
Looks like there will be competition for a one-star rating.
The East Coast Greenway’s big fundraising ride starts in a couple of weeks, and I’m one of 40 cyclists on it.
After a briefing about the route from Wilmington, N.C., to Savannah, I’m rethinking that one-star rating I just gave the Trenton-to-Philadelphia stretch. Should I raise it to two? At least busy roads there had shoulders or bike lanes. Not so along similar parts of this year’s Week-A-Year route, it appears. That may make it more deserving of the bottom rating.
No shoulders on major roads surprises me. I get no snow means not needing a place to push it to, but surely cars break down there too and need to be moved to the side of the road. We’ll be cycling in the “Low Country,” so plenty of water and marshes means few road options for us. Not many options for the route. We clearly will be riding in groups for extra visibility and taking shuttles as needed. We’ve had bad roads before. At least it will be flat. And yes, there are some trails. Just not enough. (Note to my mother: I promise I’ll be safe.)
The good news is this isn’t the final word. Much of the route is considered interim as the East Coast Greenway works to create an off-road route safe for all, and hopefully South Carolina in particular will make big improvements. For the record, South Carolina ranks 44th in bike friendliness, according to the League of American Bicyclists. Note that Adventure Cycling’s route along the Atlantic Coast goes much further inland at this point, bypassing Charleston (though there is a spur route) and Savannah.
But what tourist wants to miss those cities? Exactly.
The East Coast Greenway is all about connecting cities. As I’ve said many times, that is much tougher than sticking to rural America. It’s also where more people live and need choice in how they get around. The work done by this group combined with local and state advocates is vital!
If you want to support the East Coast Greenway, here’s the link to my fundraising page — and thank you for your support.
Exploring by bicycle 