Whoa!

We stopped slurping our coffee and started laughing as we read a headline in our little newspaper back in January. It said: “GROUP PUSHING FOR MOUNTAIN BIKE TRAILS IN BEAUFORT COUNTY”

Whoa, we said to ourselves.  Have these people ever been to Beaufort County?  They really want “mountain bike trails” here?  Here, where, not for nothing, we’re known as The Low Country?  Here where the elevation is somewhere around a twelve inches at its highest?.  Here where ” Flat as a pancake” best defines our topography?  

We chuckled at the mere and seemingly ridiculous idea of mountain bike trails here, on this sea-level Island. What are those people thinking?  Or smoking?  We chortled, snidely as I recall, at their naivety and ignorance.    Mountain bike trails, indeed!  When pigs fly! Or donkeys. What nonsense, we said.

We were wrong, of course.  As we so often are.

Had we continued reading beyond the headlines, as we hadn’t, we’d have learned that that the group is simply asking for “trails” for “mountain bikes.”  As opposed to “trails on mountains” for bikes.  Big difference.  We swallowed our chuckles, ate some crow and reminded ourselves to stop jumping to conclusions quite so fast.

I hope they get their trails.  It sounds like fun.  Good family fun.  Exactly what Beaufort County is supposed to be all about. Our apologies to the group. We hope they carry on with their mission. If they build it, people will most definitely come.