urban bicycle journeys

I grew up in Virginia Beach VA, biking with friends up and down the boardwalk in front of all the hotels, hanging around the oceanfront Seaside Amusement Park arcade. As teenagers we all had jobs at hotels and restaurants. After graduating high school in 1974 I could not WAIT to go to college and move Somewhere Else, anywhere else, really. I was not bitter. I just wanted to see the world.

Of course, I always have gone back to visit.

I retain an eye for the details of a beach town. Myrtle Beach SC is like Virginia Beach in a Star Trek inspired parallel universe. It’s the same, but very different. From my home in Chapel Hill NC Myrtle Beach is about the same 3-4 hour driving distance as Virginia Beach, but in an almost opposite direction. On a Thursday morning I drove to Myrtle Beach with my Bike Friday in the back.

The thirty or forty mile long Myrtle Beach oceanfront is billed as the Grand Strand. I wanted to park at the north end, bicycle down most of that strip, spend the night, and cycle back. Around noon I arrived at South Carolina’s Heritage Shores Nature Preserve, where the beachfront road ends near the North Carolina state line. I had parked here on a similar trip seven years ago. They have gotten sophisticated now, payment required and prohibiting overnight parking. I would have to look elsewhere.

I drove two or three miles south back to the main highway. Half a mile from the beach I discovered Old South BBQ Company (“Best Butts on the Beach”).

Men were hanging around the back.

Nobody else was inside the restaurant. The barbecue sandwich with slaw was fine but not great. I don’t normally like this much meat in the middle of the day. I read my book; currently Erik Larson’s “The Splendid and the Vile” about Britain in the beginning of WWII.

After lunch they said “no problem” to park there for the night. I pulled out the bicycle and started cycling, first east to the ocean, then south along the beach. The Myrtle Beach area, like many beach towns, has comfortable cycling along residential streets that usually parallel the principal oceanfront street.

It is sad that I saw no bicycles in an area that offers flat peaceful bicycle cruising. The “locals” seem to use tricked-out golf carts.

I confess I was in Myrtle Beach partly to take pictures of motels. In my lifetime, my hometown of Virginia Beach has lost two generations of architecture. In the 1950’s-1970’s owners tore down essentially every late nineteenth century and early twentieth century wooden hotel and replaced each usually with a Mid-Century Modern motel. Today in Virginia Beach virtually every one of the perhaps sixty motels has been torn down to build a beach shadow-causing high-rise. Myrtle Beach has not experienced such a complete transformation. Here in Myrtle Beach the Blockade Runner looks almost exactly like The Thunderbird in Virginia Beach that was torn down quite recently.

Virginia Beach does do a better job of separating residential and commercial. The city of North Myrtle Beach is a mess, with new high-rises mixing with older beach houses.

On the other hand, North Myrtle Beach has many more of the older beachy houses that my late mother’s Virginia Beach neighborhood continues to lose. Are the real estate values lower here?

I cycled through Atlantic Beach SC which is a separate town on a quarter mile long stretch of beach surrounded on three sides by the city of North Myrtle Beach and its high-rises. A sign in one yard proclaims “An African American Legacy.” The town seems peaceful and underdeveloped.

I am not sure who is walling out whom, but the road along the beach through Atlantic Beach is blocked for car traffic at both the north and south ends. Pedestrians and bicyclists walk around the barriers on a makeshift path.

On the other side of the barrier I continued cycling along the beachfront in the city of North Myrtle Beach. The road ends at some wetlands and this huge newer hotel with Stalinesque architecture.

To bicycle around that swamp I had to go out to US-17 where most of the restaurants and shopping seem to be. The landscape opened up as I cycled for a mile or so on the sidewalk along the big highway. Hooters, Outdoor World, Chick Fil-A, Greg Norman’s Australian Grille, Cracker Barrel.

What looked like a former CVS pharmacy or grocery store has been converted into a gun range.

I had just cycled through North Myrtle Beach, a separate town ten miles north of the actual Myrtle Beach. On the north side of the “real” Myrtle Beach I stopped for a coffee at Starbucks. A woman walked by outside, dressed an American flag blouse.

On that same north side I passed by this motel, on the “land” side of the oceanfront street. I would later decide to stay there.

I continued cycling southward along the oceanfront. Mid-Century Modern motels still exist but the beach is lined with mostly newer high-rises.

I cycled all the way to the end, then turned around and cycled back to my motel, snapping pictures constantly in the golden light of the late afternoon. I stopped at a mini-mart/souvenir stand to buy a beer to drink at the motel. I was shocked to see racks of Trump t-shirts even though the election was done and over two months ago.

Earlier that day I had seen an oceanfront bar with a black flag saying TRUMP WON.

I cycled to my Holiday Shores Motel, on the northern end of Myrtle Beach in a mostly higher income looking residential neighborhood that just seemed, uh, nicer. Hardly anyones walks or bicycles in Myrtle Beach, but a ten minute walk or three minute bike ride from my motel was Lombardo’s Italian Restaurant. I was to learn it is run almost entirely by immigrants and was one of the best restaurant meals I have had in quite a while. It seemed like the classic Italian-American place in somewhere like New Jersey or Long Island. I sat at the bar, one seat down from a guy who looked at his phone the whole time.

The bartender had a French accent. He was from Quebec, Canada but had lived in Myrtle Beach for many years. I asked him what part of Italy the owners were from, and he said

“They’re Albanian. A bunch of Italian restaurants in Myrtle Beach are run by Albanians.”

He said much of the kitchen staff was Belarusian. I asked the nice woman who delivered my meal whether she was Albanian, and she said no, she was Ecuadorian!

First course was bean and pasta soup; simple, light, and very homemade tasting.

I would have ordered one of my Italian-American favorites; eggplant parmesan or linguini with clams but the Quebecois bartender recommended chicken rollatini, little chicken roll-ups a bed of pasta and tomato sauce, something actual Italians would never do. It was so delicious I could not stop eating.

They delivered my after dinner coffee in a frilly china cup and saucer of the style my grandmother would have used. The whole evening a guy played nice Italian sounding violin music. I wished he would play without the electronic accompaniment. This restaurant is small enough for a violin to play the way it was designed, acoustically. His name is Chris Cary and from his website he seems like a local.

I biked back to the motel in the dark. I had checked in with a code they had texted me and never saw anyone there. It was off-season January and I think I was the only guest. Inside, the room was quite nice for the way less than one hundred dollar price.

The next morning I cycled back to my car. I needed to be in Chapel Hill/Carrboro in time for my 4:45 PM bar-room meeting of a group that one of our wives calls The Thursday Boys.

I often carry a fifty dollar uke that I bought last summer in the Czech Republic. On the beach I had to stop and play a song.

The following photos of motels were taken from a moving bicycle. The Sony RX-100 camera lets me turn it on, point, and take a picture, all with the same hand. All over America these kind of motels are being spruced up to sell some kind of Mad Men style. Here is Myrtle Beach most of are still pretty low end. This first one had already bitten the dust.

I drove home to Chapel Hill, arriving there about four in the afternoon.