beer bottle whizzed by his head - hardly his first run-in with a hostile motorist.

Again, he was lucky.

"There have been stories of people getting hit upside the head with a beer bottle," said Feeser, who owns Lowcountry Bicycles in Beaufort.

For the serious cyclist, the streets can be mean.


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"You want to turn the other cheek and let it go, but sometimes you need to roll up to them at a stop light and say, 'What are you thinking?' " he said. "There's always an issue when you're out there in traffic with automobiles getting too close and thinking you should be on the sidewalk."

Stephanie Chiang and her boyfriend planned to have a great day.

In the morning, they bought helmets and rode their bicycles out to Tybee Island. They were riding back to Savannah along U.S. 80 before it got dark.

That is all they can remember.

"The next thing I remember, I was waking up at the hospital," Chiang, 20, said Tuesday afternoon.

She is at her mother's home in Pooler, recovering from injuries she suffered last Friday by a hit-and-run driver.

Chiang and Matt Barrow, 22, were struck by an older model white Dodge Ram pickup near Fort Pulaski as they biked toward downtown Savannah about 7:30 p.m.

Chiang, who was pulled from the marshes, suffered a fractured vertebra, a bruised lung and scrapes to her backside, arms and legs, and she required stitches in her chin.

Barrow, who had a chain-link bicycle lock wrapped around his chest, has three fractured vertebrae and a cracked rib and is stitched up under his arm.

"I can't lift anything," said Barrow, who runs Smooth, a downtown shop that serves frozen treats. "I'm in excruciating pain."

A couple riding behind the hit-and-run driver were crucial to the survival of Chiang and Barrow.

"You hate to think it was intentional, but it sure looked that way," said Jim Pedrick, who witnessed the incident along with his wife.


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++



Here is a quick search of the news in my area. I could not find any reports of bicyclists getting hit on the sidewalks.