Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

For this post, I'm going to switch things up a bit and talk about a place I traveled to, but did not like. The unfortunate victim of my criticism is going to be Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. I traveled to Myrtle Beach about four years ago on a vacation with my family. My brother, who played AAU baseball, had a tournament in Myrtle Beach one summer, so we made an eight day trip out of it; eight days of my life I will unfortunately never be able to regain.

Let me start with the hotels. The strip of the beach we stayed on had hotels that seemed nice because they were right on the water, but the hotels were piled on top of each other like an overcrowded city. We could literally stand on our balcony and look into the pool of the neighboring hotel. Needless to say, it seemed like there were a lot of people crammed into a very little space, with very little privacy. 

The pools themselves were a whole other story. Again, it seemed like there were way too many people for the capacity that the pool was really built for. Several of the days we were there, diapers were seen floating in the shallow ends of some of the pools. To top everything off, everyone seemed to be walking around either half naked or heavily inebriated. For some people that type of atmosphere works, but I could definitely have gone without it; especially since I was on a family vacation. Initially my family and I thought that maybe it was just the hotel we were staying at, but we knew several other families from the baseball team, who were staying in neighboring hotels, and their situation was just as bad; in some cases worse.

Now I'll talk about the food. When staying in Myrtle Beach you basically have three choices for meals: all you can eat buffets, fried seafood, or fast food. Don't get me wrong, I love all you can eat fried clams just as much as the next person, but I wouldn't willingly eat it every night for a week straight. Fortunately, one night we were able to travel to another part of the beach, and eat at another type of restaurant. It was nice to be able to eat something not deep fried or covered in grease.  

The one redeeming quality about Myrtle Beach was the ocean. The waves were huge and the sand was clean. There were several piers that were a lot of fun to go on as well. Again, you had to look past a few half naked and inebriated people, but it wasn't nearly as bad as the pools. 

In Myrtle Beach's defense, we heard that the northern part of the beach was a lot nicer than the southern part, which was the part we stayed in. If I were to ever return to Myrtle Beach I would make sure to stay in the northern part.

Myrtle Beach, South Carolina