This Year's Visit to Pawleys Island, Times Two...

We visited Pawleys Island last year and liked it. So during our visit to South Carolina last month we decided to visit the beach there again.

If you're not actually renting a house on the island, the best spot on Pawleys Island is the beach at the south end. There's plenty of parking there (parking is at a premium on the island elsewhere). Last year there was a nice area of beach about the size of a football field. Of course, it grew and shrank with the ebb and flow of the tide. It was rather scenic and not particularly over populated. It's a nice place to hunt for shells.

Cheryl and I got up early on Tuesday (June 24) with the idea that we could be out there shortly after low tide. We arrived at about 8am and were surprised at the change since last year. Evidently the inlet behind the island was dredged. The sand was dummped on the south end of Pawleys Island and the beach has now grown to the sized of five or six football fields. It was beautiful and spacious. The channel was shallow enough to walk across at low tide, so we were able to search the other side of the inlet for shells.

We liked it so much, we went back on Thursday morning.

Two warnings. First, there are no facilities of any kind. You cannot change at the site. There are no restrooms. There's no shower. There's no water. Nothing. A few miles away there are gas stations out on Highway 17, and they have restrooms. But that's as good as it gets.

Second, if you cross the channel at low tide (or I suppose at high tide) be forewarned that some powerful currents develop pretty quickly as the tide begins to flow in. It would not be hard to get trapped on the wrong beach. And even for the best swimmers, the current is dangerous. There are a couple of hours around low tide when the water is not a problem.

I'm sure we'll be back there again next year...

Pictures of Brookgreen Gardens

Just a few pictures of Brookgreen gardens near Myrtle Beach. I loved the place. More to come about it...

Back from the Beach (Our Stay at South Beach Resort)

Cheryl and I just returned from a week in Myrtle Beach, S.C. We stayed at South Beach Resort, where we own a time share. It was our first time staying there; we bought the time share at the end of the summer in 2006 and missed out on staying there last year.

The resort is quite nice. Our room was small and a little cramped, but that was mostly our fault. We reserved a studio. Next time we'll get a larger pad...

Other than the size of the room, it was really pretty had to find anything at South Beach to complain about. We tried (since I knew I'd be writing about the place) and came up with almost nothing.

Check-in and check-out were both a breeze. The staff at the place was very friendly. The Owners' Club at the resort entrance had a concierge's station and the three or four people who worked there were very helpful. They were there from at least 8:00am until 8:00pm. You could ask them where to eat, or for directions to some place. They would get you show tickets if you wanted. And much more...

The Owners' Club housed a number of attractions. In the front area you have the concierge's station and the Front Desk. There's a DVD library, a few dozen books to pick over if you want something to read, a couple of computers for Internet access, a few items for sale with the resort logo on them (golf shirts, etc.), and brochures on Myrtle Beach's attractions. Further back in the club there is an exercise room (which I didn't use), an arcade area and a pool table (you buy tokens to play), a sauna, some offices, and an indoor-outdoor pool. As you walk out the back you find the pool area; there are a couple of hot tubs (who needs that in June?), a small baby pool, and a lazy river.

There were a number of activities based at the Club. We didn't take advantage of any of them, but if you had young children the activities would be great.

There was a second pool facility. The Lagoon Pool had a sloped, easy access entrance, a safety rope at about the three foot level, and a deep end that only went to 4 feet 9 inches. There's a waterfall at the deep end. The pool wraps around a small bar (open from 4pm to 9pm, I think) and there's live music most afternoons.

Landscaping at the resort was very nice. There were Palmetto trees everywhere and a variety of flowers and ground cover plants along the edges of the manicured lawns. It's well lit at night. And the grounds are populated by a few dozen squirrels (which were fun to watch). Everything seems wheelchair accessible.

The room itself was pleasant and well furnished. We had a half-kitchen (no stove in the studio units) with a fridge and microwave. There was a TV (complete with VCR/DVD player), a sound system, iron, coffee maker, toaster, and probably a few other things I'm forgetting. In the studio we had a four-place setting of Fiesta dishes. There were knives and a cutting board, flatware, wine glasses - even a corkscrew. Best of all, it was clean.

The air conditioning looked much like what you find in most hotels; but it lacked the musty smell that almost every hotel from Super 8 on up to the Marriott seems to have. There was also a ceiling fan.

Life in a time share is a little different than at a hotel. No one comes in to clean up after you (you can get that for a fee, if you want). We had access to a washer and dryer that we shared with the guests next door.

One of the nicest surprises in our stay was the free tickets. We got eight tickets that let us in to a variety of attractions. They included an all day wrist band at the NASCAR park, free admission to five of the area's mini-golf courses, admission to two of the area's golf courses (I don't golf), and admission to a nearby water park.

On top of that, we got tickets to see the "Good Vibrations" show at the Carolina Opry for sitting down with our Owner Rep.

Because we'd never stayed at the resort before, we didn't actually have an Owner's Rep until now. Our Rep is Mike Meeks (a nice guy who moved down there from the mountains not too far from here). We met with Mike on Saturday morning and went over some of the services South Beach offers its owners.

I'll throw in a plug here: if you're interested in seeing South Beach, give Mike a call. His number is 843-913-5306. He can probably set you up with a tour of the place and talk to you about buying in. Mention my name to him. And if you don't want to talk to him, email me.

If I had to whine about something it would be Internet access. Almost every hotel up and down Ocean Blvd has free wireless access in the rooms. At South Beach Resort it was $4.99 for half an hour, $9.99 for the day, and $49.99 for the week. I thought that the price was kind of steep; but more to the point, I guess, I thought that at a place like South Beach I ought to be able to get the same kind of Internet access that comes free at most Best Westerns. And that was really my only complaint...

All in all our stay at South Beach was a great experience and we'll definitely be back there next year.

Eating in Myrtle Beach

From our house it is 18 miles to an Applebees. A Bob Evans sits beside that Applebees. There is a Shoney's 26 miles from our house. And if we drive 35 miles to Princeton, WV, there's a Cracker Barrel, a new Chilis, another Applebees, another Bob Evans, an Outback, and another Shoneys. The nearest Red Lobster or Ruby Tuesday's? That's 67 miles. The nearest Olive Garden or TGI Fridays? They're about 125 miles from us, in Charleston, WV. heck, it's 55 miles to a danged Waffle House from where we live...

When we go to places like Myrtle Beach, we enjoy the opportunity to eat in nice restaurants. On our way to Myrtle Beach we ate at the Olive Garden in Florence, SC (and discovered you can't buy alcohol on Sunday there); on the way home from Myrtle Beach we ate at the olive Garden in Greensboro, NC. In Florence I had the Chianti Beef and Cheryl had the Mixed Pasta Misto with Shrimp and Alfredo Sauce. In Greensboro I had the mixed grill (skewers of Chicken and beef with grilled squash and zucchini) and Cheryl had the Tour of Italy.

The best food we had in Myrtle Beach wasn't in Myrtle Beach; it was in Murells Inlet, ten or 12 miles south of Myrtle Beach. On Tuesday we ate at Nance's Creek Front Restaurant and Oyster Roast. We both ordered a seafood platter and we got an oyster roast as an appetizer with the intention of having leftovers to take back to our room. The oysters can in a plastic bucket - about 30 of them - along with a shucking knife. We pried them open and dipped them in butter and lemon juice. Shucking the oysters was work; I'd guess we spent half an hour opening them. The restaurant had a beautiful view of the inlet and seated about 200 people, I'd guess. We spent about $60. I gave it a "nine." We'll go back...

Myrtle Beach acts like it invented the buffet. There are probably a couple of dozen buffets in the city. All of them have a variety of calabash seafood items ("calabash" is a batter fried seafood dish where the batter includes milk instead of water and more flour than corn meal). Almost all advertise crab legs (meaning snow crab legs), You get what you pay for. The cheaper places ($17.99 range) have a buffet with 50 or so items and crab legs at an additional price, not included on the bar. The top of the line places have 120 items on the buffet - raw oysters, crab legs actually on the buffet, prime rib or t-bones (though not cooked to order), desserts, soup and salad, etc.

We ate at the Sea Trawler on Monday because it was close by the hotel, on King's Highway in South Myrtle Beach. It was the bottom side of okay; we gave it a four or five on a scale of one to ten. It was abut $33 with a coupon that saved us eight bucks and it did not have crab legs on the buffet. On Wednesday we ate at Bennetts. Bennetts claims to be Myrtle Beach's first buffet; it was started in 1984, I think. The 120 item buffet included prime rib and t-bone (I ate some of both). I tried crawfish for the first time (mostly they were small). There were several shrimp dishes. The raw oysters were still in the shell and soaking in warm water (I'd rather have the cold). And I had a cluster of crab legs. The food was good (I'd be stretching it to say "great") and the buffet was $55 with tax for the two of us. We gave Bennetts a 7.5 on a scale of one to ten.

After Bennetts we stopped eating at buffets. The bottom line is that you get a lot of food (more than we wanted) for the same money you'd pay for a menu item at most restaurants. And the quality of menu food is better (IMHO).

Breakfast buffets are different. It's hard to screw up bacon or scramble eggs wrong. Our best breakfast was at Mammy's Kitchen on the corner of King's Highway and 10th Ave. N. It's a buffet. Our worst breakfast was at County Kitchen the morning we left; the establishment is at the corner of Kings Highway and 2nd Ave. S. My pork chops were good and my hash browns were crunchy. Cheryl's biscuits could have been used for golf balls at a nearby putt-putt. We sent them back because she couldn't cut them and the replacement biscuits never came. The manager figured it out at the cash register and got us to hang around an extra 6 or 7 minutes waiting on a complimentary "to go" order of them. To be fair, it was Saturday and they were busy; but the waitress took a 10 minute break in the middle of our meal. Their bathrooms were truly disgusting.

Other meals included the free breakfast at the hotel, Denny's twice, a dinner at TGI Fridays, and a dinner at Cheese Burgers in Paradise.

Pawleys Island

Note: Clicking on the pictures will take you to a larger photo gallery of Pawleys Islands...

On Monday, June 18, knowing that low tide (the best time for shelling on a beach) would be out before noon, we got up and headed south from our hotel in Myrtle Beach toward Pawleys Island - about 20 miles south of Myrtle Beach.

Pawleys Island is a town that includes a barrier island. The island, for which the town is named, claims to have been America's first resort. The families of South Carolina rice farmers came here to vacation during the 1700's. Twelve homes on the island date to the middle of the 19th Century or earlier.

We didn't look at homes on the island. On Monday we did spend about an hour at the beach on the south end of the island. Pawley Island has a number of beach accesses where five or six cars can park and you can walk 30 yards or so to the beach. The south end has a parking place for 30 or so cars. we parked there on Monday. We weren't sure what we'd find and hadn't brought our swimsuits.

We came back to Pawleys Island on Thursday, June 21. It was the first full day of summer and, wouldn't you know it, the town had chosen that time to close the biggest parking lot on the island and renovate it. Go figure. We parked at an access spot about half a mile away and walked down the beach to the south end. It was a pleasant walk. We found a few nice shells.

In all we spent about three hours on the beach on Thursday - the longest stretch we spent in the sun. Both of us got a little burned. We'll probably be back to Pawleys Island, though....