“Vacation” 2008

An interesting thing happened to me on the way to Myrtle Beach yesterday; I found out that there’s a 2nd bike rally that happens about two weeks after the first one…

My wife and I decided on fairly short notice to rent a car and head to Myrtle Beach for a long weekend. After some checking, it looked like there weren’t very many vacancies, especially right on the beach, but we figured we’d get there and find something decent. Talk about being way too optimistic.

We go to within about 15 miles of MB and traffic started getting really heavy. While watching the other vehicles, we noticed a lot of crotch rockets going by, their riders acting really stupid (dodging in an out of cars, going through intersections against red lights or lanes, etc.). The more we watched and the closer to MB we got, the more bikes there were. But this wasn’t the normal bike week (those guys are way more intelligent acting). This was stupidity in motion.

About 1-1/2 hours later, we were finally almost on 17 and near the ocean. Due to the idiocy of the “bikers”, we couldn’t get near the beach since they had nearly all of the access roads blocked by having done something to attract the attention of the cops and/or medical squads. Finally, we drove out of town and south to Litchfield Beach; not a planned destination, just the closest thing with a decent hotel that had vacancy. One vacancy, to be exact. Take it or leave it.

Next morning, we figured it might be better to completely leave MB area and move towards Jacksonville instead. We were hoping that there wouldn’t be a similar “bike” rally there, as we were both anxious to visit the beach and play in the ocean a little. Turns out that, if you schedule your trips right, you can turn a 10 hour drive from KY to FL into a 15+ hour trip. You just have to not do enough research and make sure that everyone you mention your trip to doesn’t bother telling you that the last couple of weekends in May at MB hold a whole new adventure.