Little River to Edisto Beach, South Carolina

From near the South Carolina border, I drove south under grey skies on Hwy 17 through Myrtle Beach and an incredible fifty mile stretch of tourist stuff gone wild: pawnshops, liquor stores, fireworks stores, dozens of places selling discount beachwear, a $2.99 pancake special every mile, membership golf courses and a staggering number of exotic themed miniature golf courses (Captain Hook!  Jungle Safari!  Mayan Adventure! )with the smoke machines going, topped off by a zipline.  This may be the epitome of American beachside ingenuity.  Awesome doesn't begin to describe Myrtle Beach.

Down to Georgetown and the Rice Museum.  Pretty 1842 (burned and rebuilt all at the same time) town on the banks of a river, may boats – just how many pleasure and fishing boats are there on the east coast, anyway?  One per person?  More?

 big recycvling? plant at the end of the waterfront.  The Rice Museum not much, a very old wooden boat made here in very early 1700's and recently fished out of the river,

some good information  in a video about what it took to grow rice in the colonies – a lot of slaves and slave ingenuity from Africa, how big the rice trade was – huge, second to Calcutta, and how much money it produced.  Enough for sprawling plantations, houses in Charleston and in Newport, Rhode Island all the ornaments of a life of luxury.  If nothing else, I came away with a solid reminder that pretty much all the old and glamorous stuff in the south was built on the backs of slaves.  As it was.

Drove into Charleston on a busy road, a stretch lined with seagrass basket stands, most empty, peaceful.

Thje day turning sunny and blue, I crossed over a nice newer suspension bridge,

 many cranes in the working harbor, into narrow streeted downtown, hip shops giving way to Louis Vuitton, etc.

Got on the bike for a couple hours of spectacular houses everywhere (and tourists to go with them), pretty waterfront parks, long brick indoor craft market and incongruous college in the middle.  I rode with the fresh reminder that all of this was built by slavery, yes, long ago, but still.

After a couple of hours, it felt tight, hemmed in on its little peninsula, and I was happy to put the bike away, cross the  river and drive out of the city.  On Hwy 17, traffic lighter past Ravenal, into green countryside, then south on 174 and the 20 some miles to Edisto Beach.  I had imagined wilderness – not so, not crowded, but houses, churches, a senior center, through moss draped oak lanes, past marshes, over the Intercoastal Waterway , into part of Edisto State Park.

  The beachside was full – who would've thought in October – but the marshside unit had room so I camped beside palms under moss draped live oaks dropping acorns galore.