Busy time ahead April 21-24

Chances are during one weekend next month that if you look over your shoulder the person standing next to you is someone you don’t know.  And he or she is likely to be a visitor who will bring a smile to the face of Ken Sloan.  The executive director of the Mountain Lakes Convention Visitors Bureau is all about welcoming visitors and the impact they make on the local economy.  Highlighting the period of Thursday through Sunday, April 21-24 will be a Mud Run in Seneca; Issaqueena’s Last Ride at Walhalla; a home series for the Clemson baseball Tigers with Georgia Tech, and the USA Triathlon National Championship at Clemson’s Y Beach.  Part of that Triathlon will feature a grueling bicycle ride, remembered last year for the disruption to highway 123 traffic in the Oconee-Clemson area.  Sloan says the congestion came about because the right hand did not know what the left was doing, and he says it won’t happen again.  “There was a Color Run last year at the same time, two different organizations scheduling this.  Neither one of them knew what was going on and the Color Run already had the interior of the Clemson campus.  So, now we have the Triathlon on a different date and they’ll have the interior, so they won’t be anywhere near the area.  That congestion will not happen,” Sloan insists.