4/24/23 – Beaufort to Hollywood, SC

Miles: 80.44 Today / 920.57 Total
Elevation Gain: 610 ft. Today / 7606 ft. Total

What if I told you that the days are starting to be a blur? Would you believe me? Starting out, today, I knew it was going to be an 80 mile day, so my top priority was to hunker down and just ride. I did see a few interesting sights along the way, though.

Before I get going on the sights, I need to back up a little to last night, when we stayed at a church in Beaufort. This church had 3 different rooms for us to spread out it in, and I got lucky and wasn’t in a room with any snorers. After cleaning my chain and cassette, charging all my devices, eating a wonderful chicken and rice dinner prepared by the pastor of the church, doing a load of laundry at a laundromat a block away, hanging clothes on my clothesline that could not be dried in the dryer, laying out my clothes for tomorrow and posting to my blog, I was able to get some quality sleep. I need more of that!

I was on the road at 8:08 AM, and we started out where we left off—on the Spanish Moss rail trail. It was cool out, the scenery along the trail was beautiful, and in 4 miles of riding, we didn’t pass a single person on the trail. Unbelievable. That would never happen AZ.

At the point where the rail trail ended, we passed the entrance to Parris Island, the Marine Corps training base here. Didn’t have time to ride on base and check things out, but I did get a photo of this static display.

Off and on, I rode with 6 different guys. I would pass a couple of them, they would catch back up and pass me, then I’d catch up with others in our group, then we’d all meet up at a rest stop, repeat, repeat, repeat. We rode in some gnarly traffic and on some gnarly roads with little or no shoulder and a healthy rumble strip, and we all lived to see another day.

South Carolina is a beautiful place. We rode the Heritage Corridor Discovery Route through a lot of swamp land, over several rivers and creeks, and passed through areas with the huge lush trees that are everywhere in this state.

At one point, the route took is over 2 miles of gravely bumpy dirt road. Why? I’ll never know, as there were alternative roads to get to the same destination. Someone at ACA must have decided to throw in the dirt section to shake things up.

There were quite a few historic markers along our route, but most of them were about a house or church—not a historic battle or event. The one above was my favorite.

A couple of stories:

This morning, when one of the guys pulled his phone out of his pocket to take a photo, his phone caught his wallet and pulled it out too. He didn’t notice that his wallet was missing till he was several miles up the road on one of those sections of gnarly traffic and roads I just mentioned. You would have to be completely desperate and/or insane to ride that section backwards, looking for a missing wallet, then re ride it again to get back to where you began the search. This particular fella is pretty easy going, and he decided just to accept that the wallet was lost and move on. Well shortly after his wallet fell out of his pocket, one of the guys in our group who was behind the guy with the lost wallet saw it laying in the middle of the road and picked it up. Lucky break for the guy who lost his wallet. Definitely made his day.

Then this evening, we camped in a campground at a group site with a huge pavilion with probably 18 plywood picnic tables to lean our bikes against, spread our gear out on, and cook and eat our dinners on. I have a Soto backpacker stove that you screw a propane canister to, and when I went to light the stove, at first I got a flame like I always do. A few seconds later, though, flames—BIG flames—started shooting out from the connection between the stove and the fuel canister. The picnic tables were going to go up like torches if I didn’t get the flaming stove and canister off the table. I knocked the canister off the table and onto the concrete floor and shoved it away from anything wooden with my foot. With all the flames, we were concerned that the fuel canister would explode. While I was doing what I could to keep the flames away from all of the nearby wood, my hero, our ride leader Jade, ran to the trailer, grabbed the fire extinguisher and was back snuffing out the flames in a matter of seconds. Hallelujah! The fire was out, but now fuel was leaking from the canister and pooling up on the concrete floor. We turned on a big fan to move the flammable fumes out of the area and waited for all the fuel to leak and evaporate before getting back to fixing our dinners. And yet again, we lived see another day.