Myrtle Beach

I have these friends: Justin and Stacey. Stacey invited me to her sister Heather's baby shower a while back, and while I was there, Justin invited me to join him and a bunch of mutual friends of ours on a trip he'd been planning to Myrtle Beach. It was mainly a golf trip, but not everyone was golfing, I could bring my bike, and we'd all be hanging out together in the evening, so he was thinking maybe I'd have a good time?

Spoiler... I had a really good time!

It was Justin, Will, Steve (AKA Woj), Dave Capotto, Dave Horton, Dave Arthur, and myself. Yes, that's 4 Daves. I'm Bike Dave and Horton is Jeep Dave. Capotto is just Dave, as he's the owner of the pizza place we all hang out at, and so gets that honor. Arthur doesn't have a nickname as yet, so there is still some confusion. Patrick and his son Taylor (down from Minneapolis) drove up separately but stayed in the house with us. Franco met us up there. BTW, his middle name is David. He stayed with two relatives of his who had a place locally. Also, 5 of Justin's friends from college met us up there. All of them played golf, and all of us hung out together, most of the time.

Steve drove eight of us up in a 15 person Sprinter van. All of our stuff managed to fit easily in the back. The drive up was easy and uneventful, other than many, many bathroom stops.

When we got there, pizza was waiting for us, and before we could even finish a slice, me and Jeep Dave felt compelled to go to the beach.

This seagull was hanging out near us, hoping to get some pizza...

...which Dave gladly fed it.

There were also a bunch of dead Cannonball Jellyfish on the beach.

Most of them were already funking out, so we didn't bother throwing them back.

That evening, we watched the NFL draft, some of the guys played poker, and we all went out to the only place in town: Causeway Grill and Pizza. I met this group of like 7 ladies, 4 of whom had names that started with a K sound - Courtney (the birthday girl), Carrie, Kirsten, and Kacey. It turns out that it's tough to remember a bunch of names that all start with the same sound. There were a bunch of Hell's Angels there that night, and on the way out, there was some confusion between Steve and Franco's relative that led to a bit of an altercation. This got everyone's attention, but me and Franco managed got the guys into the vehicles, right as the bikers began to step in.

Adventure already!

The next day, everybody but me and Dave Arthur slept in. I was really feeling the beach vibe that morning. I didn't even put on a shirt, socks, or shoes until like 12:00, and even then it was just my bike clothes. The guys had a 2:15 tee time, but they headed out around 12:15 or so to get in some practice before the round. I rolled out of the house right after they left.

I planned to take some roads north, pick up some local greenway, and hit 3 different trail systems along it. It was a rough plan, and I didn't 100% know where this stuff was, but hey... Adventure!

Along the beach, all the houses were pleasingly colorful.

Pop, pop, pop! Color everywhere.

I eventually ended up on the highway, and saw an e-bike rental place across the street. I figured they might know exactly where the trailhead for the local greenway was, so I stopped in to ask. Nope, the guy had never heard of such a thing. This didn't bode well. Maybe it was super obscure, or maybe it was planned, but never built. I left a little concerned about how the rest of the day would go, as I pushed north.

It turned out that I didn't have anything to worry about though. From the other side of the highway, this skills park caight my eye.

Turned out that it sat right on the greenway, and the corner there was the trailhead for both of them.

I shredded the worn-out jumps for a while before hitting the overgrown singletrack at the back of the property...

...then got back on the greenway and kept moving.

Up near the airport, there was a disc golf couse with a name like Splinter Park or something, and the logo was a sylized A-10. I figured the A-10 trail might be around there somewhere, so I spun around for a while, looking for it. Instead, I found Warbird Park, which had all kinds of interesting stuff along a set of paved trails running alongside the airport.

Among other things, there were 3 planes - an A-10, an A-7, and an A-110...

...a rememberance wall...

...and a 9/11 memorial.

The 9/11 memorial hit me unexpectedly hard. Three-thousand people. It had been a really long time since I'd thought about it.

I rode around for a while, looking for the A-10 trail, but all I could find was the lot for the disc golf course. I eventually pulled up the map that I had in my phone and cross-referenced it with local roads until I figured out where to go. It was kind-of tucked away behind a strip mall. It looked like the only way to get to it was to ride through the parking lot and go around the back of the building.

On the way over, I got distracted by this beautiful field of blackberries...

Man, I ate so many.

Also, Mac had texted me the night before about having some fun for working stiffs like her, and I told her I'd make an effort to specifically think about her while having some kind of fun the next day. Well, it probably wasn't what she had in mind, but it seemed to me that she liked blackberries, so I specifically thought of her while eating all those blackberries. Turns out she has a tatoo of blackberries on her shoulder. Ha! That must have been somewhere in the back of my mind.

I eventually found the trail...

...which was easy to follow, thanks to good signage.

It was twisty like a Dallas trail, and it looked like it would be a lot of fun if it got more traffic.

As it was though, it was somewhat overgrown, and the ground was deep with pine needles. I tend to enjoy trails like that if they aren't super twisty, but if they are, then it can be kind of nervewracking.

The dog park next door was interesting:

I'd never seen a dog park with a lake before.

Back near the airport, it appeared that I had entered Myrtle Beach proper.

Or, at least the metro area.

We called it a trip to Myrtle Beach, but we were technically staying in Garden City, I think.

There was a gas station across the street that looked appetizing. So far, that day, I'd only eaten a donut, the past piece of Vicky's (delicious!) bannana bread, and like 3 clif bloks. It was Bon Apetite apple danish time for sure!

One of my favorite things, ever since I was a kid on a skateboard, has always been sitting on the curb at a convenience store, relaxing and refueling. But, you can't just ride directly to a store and enjoy it. You have to be kind-of tired. The stop has to be a good rest. It's difficult to explain, but I love it.

As I got back on the greenway, a Southwest plane was coming in for a landing.

There was a Helicopter Tours place just past the airport too - $20 helicopter ride!

Shit, that might be a worthwhile diversion, so I checked it out. Yeah, there was a $20 helicopter ride, but it was like a little 2 mile loop. It would have cost like $140 to get a good trip. Plus, I'd have had to wait like 30 minutes, and you had to have a minimum of 3 people in the helicopter, including the pilot, so I'd have had to wait for some other random person to show up and ride with me. Ehh, maybe I could talk one of the guys into it later, but there was no way I was going to sit around hoping for it to work out at the time.

As I continued north, I noticed these little signs.

Apparently, the greenway is part of a larger network that run from Maine to Florida, along the coast? I'll have to look that up.

The greenway itself. was really pleasant to ride.

There was a long stretch that just ran along the highway, so you could get a sense of the town, and another long stretch that ran through some quieter backroads with resorts along it. Some of it was up in the woods. There weren't many people on it though. I passed like one guy on a bike, a runner, and a mom picking blackberries with her adorable little daughter.

The last trailsystem on my list was the Hulk Trail, which was somewhere up by the intracoastal waterway. The greenway diverged a couple of times, and it turned out that the intuitive way to go wasn't the way that led most directly to the trail system, rather, it just continued on to Maine or something.

I ended up backtracking a bit, and wandering around until I finally found this tunnel that led under the road that crossed the waterway.

The trail was on the other side, and I felt like I needed to take that road over it, so I milled around until I found a section of trail that paralleled it. There were a couple of places that I could have bushwhacked up to the road through, but it turned out that the trail itself, climbed the embankment and paralleled the road up over the bridge. Score!

The waterway:

If the trail did anything other than just lead to the Hulk Trail Lot, I didn't notice. It seemed like it might have been built for that purpose alone.

All right! The Hulk Trail.

It was alleged to be the best trail in the area. It was certainly the longest, at 7 miles. The other two had been like 1 or 2 miles each. I was excited.

The map made it look easy to follow, but I took a photo of it, just in case.

It turned out, that there was really good, easy to follow signage.

And there was just one main loop, with little advanced loops off of that. Super easy to follow. The tread was also great, and though there were branches dangling out over the trail here and there, it was just enough to remind you that you're in the woods, but not enough to really slow you down.

I love finding weird stuff in the woods, so I wasn't disappointed to encounter these weird old rusted out vessels.

No idea what they were, but it made me happy to encounter them.

There was a surpising amount of sidehill for a coastal trail.

Lots of very long runs of it, I guess along various levees and maybe along some natural bluffs.

They also employed an erosion control strategy that I'd never seen before, and it looked like it worked really, really well. Coastal soil is sandy and loose. Super-low shear strength. Trails tend to have to be flat and unless the trail runs through a pine forest, and you just let the needles lie, coastal trails tend to erode terribly. Even flat trails tend to develop sand pits. Well, these guys figured it out. Any berm, steep descent, jump, or anything else with a pitch to it had been covered in this landscaping fabric.

Like almost every single one. I want to say I saw a little bit of rock-armoring with chunks of concrete, and maybe a few spots where they just let it erode to expose roots and make it technical, but by and large, anything steep was covered in that matting.

That said, the trail was still long runs of mostly uncovered singletrack.

And it was generally fast and flowy. There were a LOT of jumps though, and the vast majority came up on you pretty suddenly. I rarely had time to set up for them. There were a lot of blind step-downs too. It seemed like the kind of trail that would be a lot of fun if you knew it really well, but the first run through, out of dozens, I probably cleared 3 or 4 total, and was only able to even manual like 4 or 5. Still, I had a lot of fun on the trail itself.

I didn't spin a second loop though. I wasn't sure how long I'd been riding, but it felt like a while, and I still had to ride back.

At that point, the ride had definitely become work. Not yet suffering, but definitely work.

I basically backtracked on the greenway without diverting onto those other two trails, and it was pretty uneventful, other than seeing this goose and her nest less than 10 feet away from the trail.

Hmm... Actually, there was one other noteworthy event. A few miles out from the house, a golf cart passed me. Everybody drives golf carts around on the roads near the beach. They're not super fast though. Like 20mph max, maybe. I wondered if I could pace them, so I bridged up to about a car length behind and managed to keep the same pace as the card, floored, all the way back to the house.

Ha!

When I got back, I had that good, whole body tired.

Steve used to coach at Coastal Carolina and had gotten one of his grad students, Evan, to be on call to drive us all around in the sprinter van all weekend. Jeep Dave loves to cook, and apprently he and Evan had gone to the store earlier and gotten what seemed like an inordinate amount of chicken, ground beef, sausage, and shrimp. When I got back, Dave was just about to start frying chicken.

Goodness, yes. I showered, ate too much chicken, and collapsed on the couch. If I slept at all, it was only for maybe 30 minutes at a time, but it was some of the most satisfying rest I've had in months. I basically had that wonderful relaxed feeling that you get when you're about to fall asleep, but I wasn't tired enough to actually fall asleep except a little bit here and there, so I just enjoyed that feeling for hours and hours. It makes me happy just thinking about it now.

At some point I felt rested and recovered, and wanted to go walking on the beach. Evan had to hang around the house, and Dave was enjoying the jacuzzi or something. I texted those ladies I'd met at Causeway the other night, but they'd just left the beach to go get all-you-can-eat crab legs, so I ended up going solo.

On the way over, I saw this Goat Island sticker on a truck.

Ha! Apparently there's a Goat Island nearby. I sent the photo to my Dad immediately.

Being an east coast beach, the sun sets behind you.

It occurred to me that I wasn't sure I'd ever been to an east coast beach near sunset before.

I could see a pier way down to the southwest, so I figured I'd walk down there.

I got distracted on the way down by the waves coming in...

...and by this sandpiper who wanted to be just ahead of me the whole way down...

...and by this chick with a tazer, tazing the jellyfish that had washed up! I can't make this crap up. She had a freaking tazer, and she was freaking tazing jellyfish! Not wanting to also be tazed, I kept moving, and eventually made it to the pier.

The pier was a little confusing. There were various ramps and steps, but none of them got you onto the pier itself. I eventually realized that you had to walk through a store/arcade/bar to actually get out onto it. It made sense in retrospect. Kind of the opposite of exit-through-the-gift-shop.

The pier was less interesting than I thought it might be, and I caught my right big toe on a nail, so I didn't end up walking all the way down it.

I did take my time walking back though - the beach vibe was really making me happy.

The rest of the guys got back from playing golf shortly after I returned. We went out to the Marshwalk that evening, but all of the places closed kind-of early, so we ended up back at that same Causeway place, and ran into the same ladies again. There were a lot of folks there, which I guess made sense because it was Friday. No Hell's Angels this time, though.

On the way out, we're all waiting for Capotto, and he eventually comes walking out with 3 chicks that none of us had previously met. Apparently they didn't feel like walking a mile home, were about to call an uber, and he was like: "I have a van." You'd think that woud be the creepiest possible thing for a woman to hear when she's trying to get home, but somehow one of them thought it was great, and the other 2 didn't want to abandon her. The only relevance of any of this to outdoor Adventure is that we had one too few seats in the van for all of us, so I ran back while they drove, and running kind-of equals outdoor Adventure, especially when you're running along the beach at 2AM.

Somehow I beat everyone back to the house, and this made no sense to me - they were in a vehicle. It turned out that the ladies (allegedly) couldn't figure out how to get back to their hotel, so they eventually gave up and came back to our place. This seemed sketchy, but whatever. They hung out until about 3:30 when they realized that their place was caddycorner to ours and just walked home on their own. I had to literally carry one of them down the stairs too, so arguably that's another bit of outdoor Adventure, or at least exercise.

I slept fast and got up the next morning to go see the sunrise.

Ahh, glorious sunrise.

I don't drink, and I could afford one short night, so I felt fine at 6AM. Dave Arthur had gone to bed at like 10:00 and though our noise kind-of kept him up, he was up and dressed before I was. The rest of the guys... They had a 7:15 tee time, which they pushed back to 9:15, and around 8:30 they dragged each other out the door for 2 rounds. I made some eggs, texted those ladies we kept running into at Causeway, then hung out with them, wading in the water and lying on the beach for the next 4 hours. The water was ideal - cold at first, but perfect if you commit to it. They also told me about Cannonball Jellyfish... The tops of them are safe to touch, so when they wash up, saving them, by throwing them way out into the water, is a thing.

When I got back, I walked a ways down the beach to the Conch Club for some grilled shrimp. It was alright. Not amazing, but pretty good. Eating with an ocean view was really nice though. When I got back, Jeep Dave was home. He'd bailed on his second round, gotten the grill working, and was busy grilling sausage, shrimp, and burgers. I ate some of that and passed out on the couch for like 3 hours. Somehow, I'd ridden 55 miles the day before and barely slept afterwards, but a few hours lying on the beach had been totally exhausing.

I woke up to all of the guys returning. Dave had apparently been in the jacuzzi the whole time. We managed to consume 100% of the chicken, burgers, sausge, and shrimp that evening. Dave seemed to know exactly how much it took to feed us. Pretty much everybody had struggled to play both rounds. Capotto somehow seemed to have the easiest time of it, despite a bum hip and back.

That night we went back to Causeway. I hung out with those same ladies again, and ran into this one chick who was basically a pool hustler. I got her and Woj together, and they beat everybody that they played, over and over, until Will stepped in and beat the two of them. Apparently Will's great at pool?!

That night we all slept well. The next morning, we had to be out by 10, and we just made it. It stormed on us for the first hour of the trip back, but I slept for a lot of that, then ended up driving for the rest of it.

It turned out to be a really great trip. Great guys. Lots of fun. I got a satisfying amount of time alone, and hanging out with a variety of sizes of groups of people, in a variety of situations. Plenty of rest, Adventure, food, and shenanigans. Oddly, it reminded me of an event at Mulberry Gap... Everything was so well organized that it felt like it all just came together casually. The plan, and its execution were even tolerant to weather, delays, and other eventualities. It felt like everybody was just hanging out and doing what we felt like, when in reality there were lots of specific things that happened at specific times. IDK, I appreciate that kind of thing.

Now I'm back, home, with work to do.

[sigh]

Back to it.