Day 4 - Little River, South Carolina

Day 4 Murrells Inlet, Pawley's Island, South Carolina

This is our first full day staying with our friend at his home in Little River, South Carolina. Little River is just north of Myrtle Beach which is a major tourist destination. Beaches, hotels, restaurants, golf courses and other forms of recreation are everywhere. This is me in front of the home where we are staying.

After a great evening of conversation around the back yard fire pit, we turned in pretty late and were in no rush to head back on the road this morning.  In fact I finished yesterday's blog entry this  morning since I had trouble connecting to the Internet last evening.

When we did get on the road we decided to skip Myrtle Beach proper, which we have visited before.  Instead our destination was a concentration of tourist attractions called Murrells Inlet, about 33 miles south on the coast.  We arrived at noon, so our first stop was lunch at the Inlet Crab House and Raw Bar.

The Inlet Crab House has lots of character and good food.  From the varnished wood plank tables to the undersized cushions on the hard benches, the meal was an experience. We sampled shrimp, crab and flounder entrees which were all great and modestly priced.  We will definitely return.

Murrells Inlet proper was a few miles down the road,  bordered with more restaurants, bars and boat rental places.  Our destination was a long boardwalk that borders a huge salt water marsh.  We had been told that the boardwalk was surrounded by shops, and there were a few vendors selling t-shirts and souveniers, kayak rentals, and boat charters, but several restaurants were closed (it is early in the tourist season) and mostly the walk was lined on the inland side by a long chain of bars. Bars are okay if that is your kind of thing, but it takes more than alcohol to amuse us (although it does help) so we moved on down the coast.

Our next stop, another 20 miles down the coast, was a community called Pawley's Island.  There we found a collection of specialty shops called The Hammock Shops Village, probably named for the craft shop on the property in which artisans hand make rope hammocks.  Despite my previous comments about alcohol, we passed a pleasant hour at a wine tasting in one of the specialty shops pictured below.

The village was filled with blossoming azaleas in pink and red filling the air with a perfume that was worth a few sneezes to enjoy. Dozens of shops and restaurants are organized along wide crushed stone paths.  In all we spent a couple of hours wandering around the shops looking for gifts to bring home after our trip. This is a very pleasant stop.

My overall impression of this section of the South Carolina coast is the intense commercialization. Most of the fifty miles of coast we traversed today was is littered with seemingly endless sequences of national restaurant chains, hotels, big box stores punctuated by over the top entertainment like helicopter rides, a huge "upside down" house, theaters, car dealers, and the like. Our host joked that bypass route 17 is just a commercial and busy as business route 17 which runs closer to the ocean. There is clearly a lot of entertainment here, and activities for all ages and tastes.

Of course there is much more to the region than the heavily tourist oriented coast and we look forward to exploring some of the rest of North and South Carolina over the next several days. 

See you tomorrow along the road.