urban bicycle journeys

I escaped for one night midweek to Myrtle Beach.  The winter wind whipped in the cold.  Even after bicycling up and down the Grand Strand, it was becoming difficult to find a positive thing to say about the whole place.   Almost all the restaurants are a quarter mile from the beach on US 17,  six to eight lanes of American Beauty.  Luckily, you can bicycle on minor roads, only having to go on US17 for short stretches.

Myrtle Beach does have dozens of nineteen fifties and sixties motels.   They are an endangered species.   At least ten that I passed were in the process of being torn down.   Others resembled single person occupancy hotels for poor people on the oceanfront, a hundred and fifty dollars a week in the winter.

Still, many of these motels are lovely to look at, and we can only hope that Myrtle Beach can discover that they are really something worth saving.