Labor Day Weekend '15
Holy Mack!
The traffic coming into the beach. I should say, the beaches. Four or five local towns are named after them: Myrtle Beach, Surfside Beach, Atlantic Beach, and so on.
Tens of thousands of cars.
My errands took me in the other direction. In an earlier post, I discuss lack of shoulders, bike lanes, paths, etc. in this area. You don't want to hear me complain about all that again.
Perfectly beautiful late summer afternoon! My Hilsen. My errand. Cars in every direction, the holiday weekend beginning. The busiest weekend of the year. During the next 75 minutes, I'm the only bicyclist I see.
Where I ride, it's really dangerous -- or is it? I'm well marked (orange/red triangle flag attached to my lower back, bright shirt, light blue Hilsen) and confident enough to flatter myself that I'm respected by the motorists (no one honked at me, even when I was holding back a lane of cars as I ascended, pumping as furiously as I could, the shoulder-less Waccamaw River Bridge out of Conway) -- confident but careful too, watching the road and listening very carefully, the possibility of an accident always in the forefront of my mind, pedalling as briskly as I could, earning and keeping my place on the various roads I had to take to do my errands, including a two-mile stretch of the bypass with a speed limit of 55 mph.
One mere mile into my ride I came upon a car on the side of the shoulder-less road. The driver's front wheel, just installed at a Tire Town down the road, had flown off. The front driver-side of his Caddy had crumpled where the car, suddenly without a wheel, had dropped down into the road. The wheel had bounded off into the ditch. Someone at TT hadn't finished the job!
He was a good kid, obviously shaken. I advised him to call the police, document everything on his cell phone, and so on.
What if the wheel had flown off when I (or some other cyclist or pedestrian) was riding by on my errand?
So yes, dangerous. It's always dangerous riding around cars. Anything can, will, happen. On this 75-minute ride, the drivers gave me space, didn't spook me, didn't honk; drivers didn't curse or shout "get out of the road!" So I was lucky today. A wheel could have flown off a car and hit me and killed me. But it didn't. I made it home . . . and I'm going back out right now on another errand. Wish me luck!
Holy Mack!
The traffic coming into the beach. I should say, the beaches. Four or five local towns are named after them: Myrtle Beach, Surfside Beach, Atlantic Beach, and so on.
Tens of thousands of cars.
My errands took me in the other direction. In an earlier post, I discuss lack of shoulders, bike lanes, paths, etc. in this area. You don't want to hear me complain about all that again.
Perfectly beautiful late summer afternoon! My Hilsen. My errand. Cars in every direction, the holiday weekend beginning. The busiest weekend of the year. During the next 75 minutes, I'm the only bicyclist I see.
Where I ride, it's really dangerous -- or is it? I'm well marked (orange/red triangle flag attached to my lower back, bright shirt, light blue Hilsen) and confident enough to flatter myself that I'm respected by the motorists (no one honked at me, even when I was holding back a lane of cars as I ascended, pumping as furiously as I could, the shoulder-less Waccamaw River Bridge out of Conway) -- confident but careful too, watching the road and listening very carefully, the possibility of an accident always in the forefront of my mind, pedalling as briskly as I could, earning and keeping my place on the various roads I had to take to do my errands, including a two-mile stretch of the bypass with a speed limit of 55 mph.
One mere mile into my ride I came upon a car on the side of the shoulder-less road. The driver's front wheel, just installed at a Tire Town down the road, had flown off. The front driver-side of his Caddy had crumpled where the car, suddenly without a wheel, had dropped down into the road. The wheel had bounded off into the ditch. Someone at TT hadn't finished the job!
He was a good kid, obviously shaken. I advised him to call the police, document everything on his cell phone, and so on.
What if the wheel had flown off when I (or some other cyclist or pedestrian) was riding by on my errand?
So yes, dangerous. It's always dangerous riding around cars. Anything can, will, happen. On this 75-minute ride, the drivers gave me space, didn't spook me, didn't honk; drivers didn't curse or shout "get out of the road!" So I was lucky today. A wheel could have flown off a car and hit me and killed me. But it didn't. I made it home . . . and I'm going back out right now on another errand. Wish me luck!
Roadysseus
So glad you're back!
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