The Litchfield Local's Case for Treating the Bikeway as Infrastructure, Not Recreation

Pull into the north lot at Litchfield Beach & Golf Resort on a July morning and you will see two kinds of people. Visitors are loading a rack. Locals have already clipped a tote to the handlebars and are heading south with a grocery list. The Waccamaw Neck Bikeway is marketed as a scenic ride. For anyone who actually lives in Litchfield, it is closer to a service road with a shoulder of live oaks.

That reframing is the whole point of this piece. The bikeway is not a weekend attraction you drive to. It is the connective tissue between the grocery run, the coffee stop, the beach, and the Saturday festival, and the trailheads that matter most are the ones tucked into places you were already going anyway.

The route, in plain terms

The Waccamaw Neck Bikeway parallels the coast and Highway 17 as part of the developing East Coast Greenway, a 3,000-mile stretch of trails that runs from Calais, Maine to Key West, Florida, and offers a twelve-mile paved stretch from Litchfield to south of Murrells Inlet. Visit Myrtle Beach lists the Waccamaw Neck Bikeway at 26 miles long as part of the East Coast Greenway, and South Carolina Trails notes that eventually the bikeway will stretch 27 miles from the Horry/Georgetown county line in Murrells Inlet to the bridge connecting Georgetown to Waccamaw Neck.

Read those numbers together and the picture gets useful. The paved, continuous portion residents actually use daily is closer to twelve miles. The rest is planned or in progress. If someone in your neighborhood group chat is arguing about the length, both of them are half right.

The trailheads a local uses

Forget the destination lots. The lots that make the bikeway functional are the ones attached to errands. South Carolina Trails lists the practical parking points, and they read like a resident's weekly to-do list:

• Morse Park Landing in Murrells Inlet; Huntington Beach State Park; the north parking lot at the Litchfield Beach & Golf Resort; the Piggly Wiggly and Bi-Lo grocery stores in the Litchfield community; and the Food Lion at the South Causeway.

Two of those five are grocery stores. That is not a coincidence. It is a design cue. You can, without stretching the concept, chain a Piggly Wiggly stop, a stretch of pedaling, and a beach access into a single outing that never involves fighting for a parking space on 17.

The Huntington Beach entry is the one that most rewards a residents' pass. The bikeway takes riders into Huntington Beach State Park, where access to the park will give you the chance to view the salt marsh and freshwater lagoon and potentially observe more than 300 species of birds. The admission fee is $5 for adults and $3 for children ages 6 to 15. If you are riding in from the Litchfield side rather than driving, you are already inside the park's best sightlines before most gate arrivals have found a spot.

What the bikeway threads together in Litchfield

The Litchfield stretch is the one where the ride starts doing double duty. From the resort lot you have Starbucks and Coastal Dish Lowcountry Dining, which sits in the same place as the previous restaurant, Webster's, and has undergone construction and design updates as well as a reboot of the dinner menu, both on site. A ten-minute pedal south lands you at the Hammock Shops Village at 10880 Ocean Highway, Pawleys Island, where over 20 specialty stores fill charming, cottage-style storefronts, with shops like Coastal Wine Boutique, Whitmire Fine Jewelry, and Pawleys Island Shoes bringing a distinctly local flavor. Lunch on that end is BisQit, where burgers and craft cocktails steal the show, or Pawleys Island Tavern just down the road for a more laid-back, music-filled atmosphere.

The point is not the list of places. The point is the sequence. Every one of those stops is within a comfortable ride of a trailhead you already use for something else. The bikeway makes them a single afternoon instead of three separate errands.

The rope hammock, a hand-woven bed with two wooden spreader bars and a clew knot with a ring for hanging, perfectly represents the relaxation and laid-back atmosphere of Pawleys Island.

That is how the Georgetown County Chamber describes the object the whole village is named for. It is also a fair description of the pace this bikeway rewards. Nobody is setting a Strava record on the causeway.

The Saturday that reorganizes July

There is one day this summer where the bikeway plan changes entirely, and it is worth putting on the calendar now. National Hammock Day Celebration returns to Pawleys Island on July 25, 2026 at Hammock Shops Village, and the family-friendly event features live music, local shopping, food trucks, a beer garden, kids' activities, and interactive experiences throughout the day. Last year's version, per the Chamber, drew folks from more than 200 ZIP codes to Pawleys Island on Saturday, July 19, 2025, with live musical performances by The Embers and The Tams, vendors, food trucks, kids' activities, merchandise, and prize giveaways.

If you live within riding distance, the smart move is to skip the parking question entirely. Chamber organizers historically arrange overflow parking at South Atlantic Bank and the McGill Law Firm complex, with parking entrances on Lachicotte Drive and the Hammock Shops Village south entrance, and shuttles from the lots to the event, which tells you what the day is going to look like from behind a windshield. From a bike, the whole calculus flips. You lock up, listen to a set, walk out with a hammock raffle entry, and pedal home.

The north end, and why residents keep going past it

Most local ride plans stop at Huntington Beach. That is a mistake in the shoulder seasons, and it is a mistake even in July if you time it right. The paved segment continues north toward the Murrells Inlet MarshWalk area, and the connective points at Morse Park Landing put you inside walking range of the eight-restaurant Marshwalk cluster without ever queuing behind a boat trailer on 17.

The trick is direction. Ride south to north in the morning, when the sun is behind you and the marsh is quiet. Ride north to south in the late afternoon, when the resort side has shade from the oak canopy and the Hammock Shops crowd has thinned.

A resident's cheat sheet for the summer

A few practical notes that do not fit neatly into the route description but that anyone new to riding the Neck year-round should file away:

• The bikeway is flat and paved, which sounds obvious until you have ridden a coastal trail that is neither. It handles a beach cruiser, a road bike, a jogging stroller, and a kid on training wheels equally well.
• The grocery-store trailheads are the ones with shade, restrooms inside, and a reliable water refill. Plan around them.
• The Grand Strand boasts 215 sunny days out of the year, but the useful summer riding hours are the first two after sunrise and the last two before sunset. The middle of the day is for the beach.
• Huntington Beach's Hopsewee Plantation, Hobcaw Barony, Brookgreen Gardens, Atalaya Castle orbit is easier from the bikeway than from the highway, especially on festival weekends.

Why this matters if you already live here

Litchfield's public identity, per the Visit Myrtle Beach page, is a place established in 1978 that continues to be popular with residents and visitors alike because of its quiet, natural beauty, with world-class golf courses, fine dining, a relaxed pace of life, and soft sand and sea oats taking center stage as beaches are more sparsely populated here. That is a fine brochure line. What it leaves out is the quiet piece of infrastructure that lets the quiet stay quiet. The bikeway keeps a meaningful amount of local traffic off 17 during peak season. It gives residents a way to move through their own neighborhood without ceding it to visiting cars for three months a year.

Treat it as recreation and you will use it once a month. Treat it as infrastructure and it changes the shape of the summer.

If you are settling into life in Litchfield or thinking about how a home here would fit the way you already like to spend your weekends, William "Bill" Moody is happy to talk through the neighborhoods along the Neck without any pressure. Let's connect.