Myrtle Beach, S.C. October 16th and Georgetown, S.C. - October 17

On our drive to South Carolina, we stopped into a McDonald’s for lunch. The real south immediately hit us as we sat down and overheard a minister talking to a young couple preparing for marriage. He warned them about how the devil will try and place himself between the both of them, and how hanging out with other Christian couples would bring them closer to God. We even got to hear the minister bring up the subject of sex! I think if you took a tour of the local McDonald’s in this country you would get a feel for the locals. The couple could not have been older than 19 years old. This is definitely different than Northern Virgina. We played Monopoly and have 2 of the orange pieces!! We’re hoping to get the other on our roadtrip so our winnings can pay for the entire trip. Maybe our odds will be better b/c we’re moving around so much and eating McDonald’s in a variety of places? One can hope.

After lunch we traveled another 30 miles and took a quick stop at South of the Border. How can you resist as you see the Pedro signs proliferating all over 95 south? SOTB is full of some of the nation’s tackiest items, and bad food. It’s everything that is wrong and right with America.

It progressively got warmer the further south we traveled! Yay!!! And we began to see more and more RVs. And accents started to get thicker!

We’re staying at the Seabanks hotel, one block from the beach, for $27 with tax!! Woohoo! The room is nice enough, though the cats staying with a couple upstairs look a little out of place. People can stay here for the month for $350. There really is another side of America that we’ve already begun to see on this trip….

We took a walk on the beach and dipped our feet in the Atlantic Ocean for the first time on this trip. At the end we’ll dip them in the Pacific Ocean!

We took a walk on the beach and then Josh made us some dinner on his campstove. Spicy Thai Chili. Yum.

The main drag in Myrtle Beach, the Grand Strand/Route 17/Kings Highway, is full of firework stores, tacky tourist shops and every restaurant you can imagine. It’s just basically an ugly strip where tourist traps abound. Not that I have much room to talk, Wildwood, is similar, but it’s not nearly as big as this place! It’s like Ocean City, MD but 10 times the size. Billboards every 50 yards…it’s the epitome of American coastal decadence. Myrtle Beach hails itself as the second most popular beach town in America. Any guess on what the most popular one is? I’m not sure either…

We left Myrtle around 11.30 a.m. b/c it was raining and didn’t look like we could get any beach time in. The beach looked nice enough last night, though hotels line up right along the beach.
We stopped at Krispy Kreme (yay, they had a doughnut-making factory there) and Dollar General. We were driving through Georgtown, South Carolina when we decided to stop for a break. I’m glad we did – Georgetown is full of 18th century homes and has a cute main street. We stopped in at an internet café and sat outside and had some tea and coffee, which is where I am typing this entry now. There were a lot of pictures that had bible quotes on the wall. We plan to mosy on to Francis Marion and Sumter National Forest, where we can camp out for free. Then we’ll wake up early and head 20 miles to our next stop: Charleston, South Carolina