urban bicycle journeys

“From Spartanburg South Carolina please welcome the Marshall Tucker Band”.

In the early 1970’s I saw several very hot shows by The Marshall Tucker Band;  the Caldwell brothers on guitar and bass that both played with their thumbs instead of a pick.   Between songs they would repeatedly proclaim in a Southern accent  “we’s all from Spartanburg.”  I had not been a fan but stumbled onto them at concerts, mostly at the Norfolk Scope coliseum.    Just a few days after I graduated from high school in May 1974 I went with my group of friends to a concert by The Beach Boys at Scope; backup band The Marshall Tucker Band, opening was the relatively unknown act The Eagles.  (“Hello, we’re the Eagles, from California” followed by opening chord to Take it Easy.)

The Marshall Tucker Band seemed the most exotic of the lot.   Although it is not all that far from Norfolk I had never heard of Spartanburg, South Carolina and I certainly did not know any long hairs who dressed in cowboy shirts.   This video is from that same era.

For some strange reason that braggadocio has stuck in my head all these almost fifty years.  The Marshall Tucker Band still exists but both Caldwell brothers have sadly passed.  I still had never been to Spartanburg.  This was not only MY romantic obsession.  Only about a year or two year ago my brother Alex was musing about cities around the USA where he might like to move to with his wife and child.  He seriously included Spartanburg in his short list mostly because of that 1970’s claim “We’s all from Spartanburg.”  It sounded to him like an interesting place.

I like reading about cities and their planning and development.   Spartanburg is less than forty miles from Greenville, South Carolina.  Greenville has recently become nationally known as an aging textile city successfully reinventing itself.   Both sounded like a perfect destination for a bike ride.

There is long strip of textile cities and towns moving down the central East Coast along the eastern slope of the Appalachians, starting with Danville and Martinsville, VA, through North Carolina and down into South Carolina and Georgia.  In this current century the textile industry has mostly closed down.  Some of these towns and cities have rejunivated themselves better than others.  The entire region remains oriented around manufacturing.

I picked the faded textile town of Shelby NC, forty miles north of Spartanburg SC,  as a place to start my bicycle ride.   Shelby was the boyhood home of banjo great Earl Scruggs.  I drove the three hours from Chapel Hill NC to Shelby in the Prius, and parked in my usual kind of place, a Walmart.

Walmart knows its customers.  To most Americans a one really safe place is your car.   Walmart always has a parking spot waiting for you.  Walmart apparently does not care if you park your car, or truck, or motor home, or tractor trailer for an unlimited amount of time.  Come on over.

On the back of the bicycle my readers can see a large black bag, a new item for me.   It is bulky but lightweight.   Two weeks ago I had bought a hundred dollar ukulele at International Vintage Guitars on Baronne Street in New Orleans.  I cannot seem to get myself to play guitar at home so maybe if I take the uke on bike trips it might inspire me to play in spare moments in a hotel room.  I might learn a new song.

It was just before noon on a Saturday.    This is the map of my bicycle ride for the next two and a half days.

I wanted to get some miles in by bicycle before I had to stop for lunch.   I rode south out of town.

In Boiling Springs NC,  just north of the South Carolina border,  all lunch items at Italian Garden were $ 7.99 including fries. This tiny town is the home of the religious Gardner Webb University.   During lunch I overheard an about nineteen year old fresh faced young man talking to his female companion about how difficult it is to be a Christian today in America.

After lunch I biked out of Boiling Springs.

I passed Boiling Springs Baptist Church, then continued through the countryside across the South Carolina state line.

These flags were in a graveyard outside a country church.

In the late afternoon I rolled into the northern parts of Spartanburg.   I really had expected Spartanburg to be a depressing series of abandoned mills and decaying housing.  Yes, these things existed in places.   But Spartanburg seems to have its act together.   My first stop about a mile from downtown was this attractive former mill converted to housing and shops.  There was a coffee house and I stopped for an almond milk latte.   While sitting there I booked an Airbnb downtown.

After a break I biked further towards downtown.   Spartanburg is a railroad town.  I love watching long trains of double stacked ocean containers.

Just past the railroad tracks was this piece of mid-century modernism, the Congregation B’nai Israel.

Downtown Spartanburg’s one big corporate headquarters is its one really tall building: Denny’s restaurants.   The downtown otherwise seemed quite lively with outdoor bars on this lovely Saturday afternoon.

Cheaper than a hotel the Airbnb was a one bedroom apartment in a 1920’s building in a great location,  just two blocks from Main Street and the restaurants.   I am not picky but this Airbnb failed in the details.  The proprietors had forgotten to put a top sheet in the bed.  When I called them up about it they failed to respond.  The trash can was a plastic grocery bag hanging from a doorknob.  One towel looked suspiciously non-clean.  I have had many Airbnbs with someone’s clothes in the closet, but having her shoes hanging here was a little over the top.  This is atypical of Airbnb and it was disappointing.

I managed to chill for a while in the room and then walked downtown to eat.    The Lime Leaf Thai restaurant is clearly one of the better places in town.   They were full on a Saturday night but I got a seat at the bar.

The food was delicious.   I ordered the less challenging stuff, just pad Thai with a first course of tom yum soup.

Walking back to the apartment in the dark I was impressed that some of the upper floors had their lights on.  Do people actually live above the storefronts in downtown Spartanburg?

The other restaurants downtown looked crowded.

The next morning there are several locally owned coffee houses but at 7:30 AM on a Sunday morning the only one open was Starbucks.

The forty miles by bicycle to Greenville SC had very little farmland.   Instead there are a string of small textile towns; some in better shape than others.

I have learned that in textile lingo a factory is called a mill, not a factory.  One such tiny mill town was Lyman SC, thirteen miles from Spartanburg.   (same name as my frequent bike trip companion).  Many of these vacant mills have recently been rapidly dismembered for the value of their used brick.   All that was left of the Lyman SC mill is the reinforced concrete and smokestacks.

The working class housing surrounding the mill remains, as does the Lyman Cafe.

I stopped for an early lunch.   Fox News played in the background.

A buffet line is typical in Southern restaurants like this.   My lunch was disappointing, some of the stuff seemed like it had sat in the buffet too long.   I should have ordered a la carte; lots of people were doing that.

Most of the remaining twenty-something miles to Greenville were on an older highway, a road less important now but that clearly was a principal highway seventy-five years ago, with the remains of prewar gas stations.   This one included the Mercury version of the Ford Pinto; the Bobcat, with four flat tires.

FIAT 124’s

Approaching Greenville by bicycle from the northeast the streets meander through the steep slopes that were the source of the water power for the textile industry.   Looking from a churchyard, even from a distance downtown Greenville is clearly booming, new construction was everywhere.

On a sunny Sunday afternoon the downtown streets were full of people

I found a coffee shop and sat down with a latte.  After the dirty feeling of the Airbnb the previous night I tossed caution aside and booked a modern room at a Springhill Suites Marriott just around the corner.  It felt good to chill in a clean environment.

Later on I walked just across the street from the hotel to a locally owned brewery that occupied part of the space in a former car dealership.   Construction cranes rose in the distance.

A middle aged woman next to me at the bar told me she was leaving this brewery to drive twenty miles to what she called a biker bar; not a biker bar for motorcycles but a biker bar for bicyclists: mountain bikers covered in mud, as she described.

I drank a delicious cloudy IPA.  Afterward I walked over a few blocks over to what had been described online as one of Greenville’s best restaurants: Soby’s; it boasts of “reimagined Southern fare.”

I am not sure how Southern friend calamari is but it was delicious, as was the second course; roasted salmon on top of sweet potatoes and collard greens.

The next morning I biked north through Greenville and passed this attractive mid-century modern post office.

The Swamp Rabbit Trail originates near downtown Greenville and as a rail-to-trail heads thirteen miles straight north before abruptly ending.   I did this ride as and up-and-back.

I passed more another repurposed mill.

I biked to the end of the trail then turned around and rode back to Greenville.   I had made reservation for an Enterprise rental car.   I drove the hour and a half back north to Shelby NC, back to my car at the Shelby Walmart.   Before picking up my car I looped around downtown Shelby by bicycle.  Shelby is the seat of North Carolina’s Cleveland County.  For years I have thought that Shelby NC was the most commercially sprawled of any city or town I had ever visited.   Essentially every retail business seemed to have moved out to the US-74 Bypass, not just Walmart.  The town seemed to be an afterthought.  On this most recent visit Shelby looks a little better; it even now has a brewery!

Hardly anybody from Chapel Hill goes to Myrtle Beach anymore.  Snobbism has taken hold.   This is too bad because Myrtle Beach can be a fascinating place, and it has a beach!   It is a string of beach towns that are marketed as The Grand Strand.  I wanted to go somewhere for one night.  In Chapel Hill the weather was going to be very cold.  I needed to drive south before I started bicycle riding.

I had considered going to more rural areas of South Carolina.  I often am in the mood for country rides on narrow South Carolina highways.   These sometimes include scary close-passing pickup trucks.  For some reason today I was not in the mood for that.

I have biked through strings of beach towns on a large portion the East Coast.  I grew up bicycling all over a beach town, Virginia Beach.  Biking in a beach town off-season is nice for two reasons:

One, if you follow the ocean it is impossible to get lost.

Two, there are usually residential street grids that follow the beach, and continue for many miles.

If you bicycle in the off-season with hardly any traffic it can be interesting, safe, and pleasant.   Longer beach rides I have done that are quite nice include Sandy Hook to Seaside Park NJ, Atlantic City to Cape May NJ,  Fernandina Beach to Jacksonville Beach to St. Augustine to Daytona Beach FL, and Palm Beach to Fort Lauderdale FL.  Fort Lauderdale to Miami Beach to Homestead FL is a great bike ride but occasionally there are dicey traffic situations.   Of course bicycling from Key Largo to Key West is almost perfect, but I cannot really consider that beach town riding.

Myrtle Beach SC is only just OK for bicycling.   The Grand Strand is at least thirty miles long.   One can bicycle on long stretches of pleasant residential streets following the ocean, but these are broken up in about four places where a bicyclist has to go out to the major highway US17 for short stretches.   There are lots of workarounds, including riding briefly on the US17 sidewalk.

I drove about four hours from Chapel Hill with my new Bike Friday in the back of our Prius, and parked in a municipal boat launch in Cherry Grove Beach, about the northernmost part of the Strand.    I pulled the bicycle out.

I just started bicycling down the beach road, following the line of motels and summer cottages.     There was a big crowd at the Cherry Grove Fishing Pier.

What makes beach town cycling nice is miles and miles of roads like these.

My favorite buildings Myrtle Beach are the modernist 1950-60’s motels.  In my hometown of Virginia Beach these are more or less completely gone.   Other resort cities have chosen to highlight these places.   Apparently not here.  There are a lot left in Myrtle Beach but every year there are fewer and fewer.

Another one bites the dust

Anyone who wants to see more pictures of motels, look at my blog from five years ago.    Some of those motels are still here; some, sadly are not.

https://www.citybiketrips.com/category/modernist-motels

On this current trip I spent the night at the Surfside Beach Oceanfront Hotel.   It is quite nice and cost less than a hundred dollars, at least in November.

This was the view from my balcony.    One does not ever see that POW-MIA flag in Chapel Hill.

I ate dinner across the street at Bubba’s Fish Shack.

Although people were waiting for a table I was able to sit at the bar.

One does not see couples dressed in cammo in Chapel Hill either.

Bubba’s has good food for low prices.    Fried calamari with pepper jelly had a lot of subtlety for a dish costing only $ 6.99.

The next day I more or less doubled back the way I came, passing through downtown Myrtle Beach.

I like the vibe of older parts of Myrtle Beach.

For a late breakfast I sat at a Starbucks, stared out the window, and then read The New Yorker on my kindle.

I biked back to the car and was home in time for dinner.

I had been to Columbia,  the capital city of South Carolina on a couple of occasions, but I had never been all that impressed.  I figured I just had not looked at it hard enough.

My newlywed parents and infant older sister had lived for two years 1953-55 in Columbia, where my father had a job teaching Spanish at Columbia College.   I was born just a month after they left Columbia for him to go to graduate school in Colorado.  (He quit that after two years and we moved back to his hometown of Norfolk/Virginia Beach, where he got into the car business.)  Quite a few times during my upbringing Dad had told me about the social life in Columbia at that time, that “people at cocktail parties always ended up talking about The War.”   And The War he was referring to was not the recently ended World War Two, it was the Civil War.    My late father was from Virginia and my mother is from Texas, so they were both Southerners.   Still, I just recently asked Mom about Columbia and she said the same thing, that the young faculty at the college were mostly from somewhere else, and they were all surprised at the amount of conversation about General Sherman.

It seemed the southwest side of Columbia might be interesting.   I drove down there four hours from Chapel Hill and parked my car thirty something miles from downtown Columbia, in the twin town of Batesburg-Leesville.    There is a Walmart near its downtown where I felt safe leaving my car.   I took out the bicycle.

NORTH Carolina has lost a lot of the atmosphere in its small towns because the NCDOT has put four lane highways right through the middle of most of them.   South Carolina, on the other hand, has built roads with a more nuanced view.   Batesville-Leesburg is nine miles from I-20, but otherwise the town is accessed only by two lane roads.   It allows the town to feel more like a town and less like a strip mall. Even the Walmart fronts a two lane highway.

I had just started biking but it was already time for lunch.   I had actually been to Batesville-Leesburg on one previous occasion and had had great barbecue at Jackie Hite’s.      I was on my way to there when I passed the Inside Out Cafe .  It had lots of cars parked outside, always a good sign.   I really wanted something healthier than pork fat, so I thought I would give this a try.

The staff of the restaurant could not have been nicer and the chicken salad sandwich was delicious, enlivened with bits of fresh grapes.   It was the kind of place women of a certain age would go for lunch.    There was a pleasant outdoor patio on the back.    Christian images were all over the walls.

The bathroom wallpaper was New York City.   It took me a minute to get this, but this is about 9-11, right?

One young woman in particular seemed to be in charge.   I heard her say something about having gone to culinary school.   She had a T-shirt with this quote on the back.

The front of her shirt was more direct; three icons and the words:  PRO-GOD

PRO-LIFE

PRO-GUN

ok…

After lunch I had a nice time watching a freight train pass in front of the restaurant, then climbed back on the bicycle, heading out of town.   It would be nineteen miles down the original US-1 to the next, larger town of Lexington.

The bike ride to Lexington was fine, really.   I eventually managed to get onto some secondary roads.

Lexington has grown considerably in the past few years, new subdivisions in the growing sprawl around Columbia.   I really like a coffee with milk, a latte, in the late afternoon.   I found a coffee house just a couple of doors down from the courthouse in downtown Lexington.    The coffee was nice, the service professional.

Only after sitting here a while and reading my Kindle did I realize that this coffee house was owned by, or served as an extension of, a particular church.     Religious art was on the walls.  People at the next table were three women talking to a guy who I realized was a pastor.   He had ridden his motorcycle to the coffee house, which was full of people on a Friday afternoon.

It was a pleasant atmosphere, no one bothered me, and after reading for a while I got back on the bike and threaded through miles and miles of Columbia suburbs.     I had to go on major roads because all the residential streets were non-connecting.   The bicycling was not that pleasant and neither was the scenery, although I did stumble on one nice piece of googie architecture.

In an African-American part of West Columbia I rode by this place, the Best Hash & Rice in S.C.     Someone was smoking meat in the parking lot.   At four-thirty in the afternoon I just was not hungry.

There was a bike lane on a wide highway, which made it reasonably safe but not pleasant as I saw downtown Columbia in the distance.

I first rode into the Congaree Vista neighborhood, which is a group of recently renovated former warehouses.    Like many such areas that are quickly redeveloped all at once, there were a lot of chain restaurants.

Still, there was a brewpub that looked locally owned, and I stopped so I could figure out what to do next.    I sat around a bunch of preppy looking young people and enjoyed a pleasant beer.     I found a reasonably priced hotel room about a mile away, in the center of the original downtown.

The Sheraton Columbia is in a very narrow seventeen story former bank building from 1913.

The University of South Carolina is a pretty large school, and downtown Columbia now seems to be mostly a college town, with the benefits that brings.    One of the 1970’s office high rises has been converted into student housing.   Later on that evening I went out, determined to have a seat at a bar and a healthy meal but at a reasonable price.  I had felt that on these bike trips I had to quit having $70.00 dinners.   Just two blocks down the street, at Main Street Public House I had an $11.00 Margherita pizza and two $6.00 glasses of wine.   Everybody was watching college basketball on TV.

I could say that I spent the next day looking around the interesting parts of Columbia, maybe finding Columbia College or my parents old neighborhood, wherever that was.   Or maybe exploring early 20th century residential neighborhoods like Shandon.   But I did not.    Cloudy skies were predicted but the reality was a cold rain.    It rained quite hard that morning; when it stopped briefly I had no choice other than to get on the bike and start riding west back toward Batesburg-Leesville.    After about six miles the rain started up again and I ducked into a Krispy Kreme doughnut store.    I sat there quite a while, eating my doughnut and drinking my decaf coffee, watching the West Columbia world go by.

The rain finally stopped.   I headed out.   I passed this interesting building.

Yes, I eventually biked back to Batesburg-Leesville, and the Walmart parking lot, and our white Honda.   But something happened that bothered me.    I have been doing these kinds of bicycle rides since I was about twelve years old, fifty years ago.   I have often bicycled in a way that pissed off some motorist, and they would say something.  The anger was provoked.     But until three weeks ago, 140 miles from here on another ride in Dillon, South Carolina I had hardly ever remembered someone showing unprovoked visceral hatred towards me and my bicycle, whatever that represents.     In Dillon, a pickup truck honked at me and some angry words came out of the window, I cannot remember what they were.    But I clearly was not stopping traffic; there was no traffic around.

Fast forward three weeks and I was on US1, just a mile or two from Batesburg-Leesville, which had a wide shoulder and I was not slowing down traffic.   Two young men in one of those jacked up pickup trucks intentionally roared by me very closely.    The man on the passenger side give me a very vigorous and intense one finger salute.    I had done nothing to him.   Thirty minutes later the same truck roared by me once again, trying to come close and scare me with their loud non-mufflered engine.

As a past middle aged white man with decent social skills, I pretty much can go anywhere and do anything.   This gives me a tiny sliver of knowledge of what it is like to be hated for something one has no control over.   I feel for those less fortunate than me.   I hate to blame this on Trump, but has he somehow inspired people to act on those politically incorrect thoughts that they previously kept bottled up?