Once again my travel plans went askew. My plan was to take the short (less than 120 mile) trip from Summerville to Myrtle Beach. I located an older hotel that faced the ocean for a reasonable price, so was all set. I started earlier than usual so I would have plenty of time to dip my feet into the ocean, explore the area and have a bit of a relaxation vacation. However, since the trip promised to be so short, I decided to make it a looping trip going a bit west into the “body” of South Carolina as a sight seeing expedition – nothing big, perhaps adding an hour to the trip.

I noticed a pair of big lakes not far to the west with a road running north between them, and then an easy loop back toward Myrtle Beach and my room. This started out fine for the first 15 or so miles, but then I found myself on a newly constructed section of road – making my GPS show me out in the middle of a field or something. The road wasn’t in it’s memory, so it gave me no suggestions. After a few more miles I came to a big brand new road running north, it was Volvo Road, it was also not on my map. Out of curiosity I took since it was going in the general direction as my planned route. The first thing I came to was a giant, new solar farm. And then many huge new buildings, some obviously intended for manufacturing new Volvos. The new building projects went on for miles, from the names on the signs I gather many are for Volvo’s suppliers. I believe I was traveling in a brand new manufacturing city intended to make Volvo vehicles, perhaps cars, perhaps trucks, perhaps both.

Finally getting through the new construction I came to an older road that turned out to be close to my intended route. I find it difficult to program my car GPS for a route with several waypoints, it keeps insisting on the shortest and/or fastest route. That is not what I am doing, so my solution has been to set a destination along my preferred route, changing it as I go to follow my waypoints. I did that and away we went. However, after traveling for about 30 miles I found myself back at the exact same location that I had been when I set the new destination. I had gone in a big circle. I then tried another route, which worked – sort of, but I found the GPS to be trying to take me on more circular routes along the way. I had to pay much closer attention to my paper maps to prevent just driving in circles all day long. My machine seemed to have had a stoke or something, I hope it was temporary.

I finally got to 1001 S Ocean Blvd in Myrtle Beach, but there wasn’t actually an address like that on the buildings. There was a 986, and a 1023, but no 1001. Apparently I was to the wrong 1001. I had noticed a north Myrtle beach on the paper map, so I put that into my GPS and it was happy. Of course that was also 30 miles away through city traffic. I finally got to that location, but once again there was no address and no hotel. I broke down and called the hotel. They laughed and said I was at the north end, I needed to be at the south end telling me to enter the zip code into my GPS. My GPS has no place to enter a zip code. So, based upon their new directions, I set a new destination to 1001 S Ocean Blvd – only to end up taking a different route to the non-existent place that I had originally found. Back on the phone with the hotel, this time they admitted that they didn’t know how to tell me where to go, but that some customers had found the place with Google Maps. I don’t have Google Maps on my phone, so after about 15 minutes of messing around with that I managed to get it installed and when I typed in the address it took me off into yet a different direction, perhaps in between the first two attempts. My phone showed the new map in a square of the display that was about 1″ x 1″, totally invisible under the best of conditions and totally useless while driving. However, it seems to get me to a general location that was different from my first attempt. I pulled over and entered the name of the hotel into my car GPS for “around here” businesses and apparently I was finally close enough to be considered “around here.” It then took me to the hotel and a third 1001 S Ocean Blvd, Myrtle Beach. I wonder how many more instances of that address are on that road. At least my room has a great view of the beach and ocean. The photo is taken from a little balcony of my room.

So my “quick” trip ended up with an added hour of circling in the country and two and a half hours driving back and forth from one end of Myrtle Beach to the other. I finally got settled in to my room a little after 5:00 pm – in just enough time to go get a beer or two and dinner before settling in for the night.

While driving back and forth through town I noticed a rather odd thing. I started noticing miniature golf courses – huge, fancy ones. I counted nine of them, and didn’t start counting until it became obvious that they are a “thing” here. They feature large man-made mountains, spectacular water falls, lots of tropical trees and bushes, and theme things like pirates, dinosaurs, space ships, aliens, and much more. In between the miniature golf there are things like go-cart tracks, climbing structures, big artificial trees strung together with ropes that people swing, climb and scramble along. Arcades of various sorts fill in some of the other spots. It is a 30 mile long adventure park with amusements of all sorts – from kids to adults.