KOA Myrtle Beach

Saturday, 17 March 2018

KOA Myrtle Beach, SC

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Apparently, North Myrtle Beach has a very large celebration of the big day with parade and Irish music and crafts and stuff.  And there’s some kind of car show this weekend.  That part I saw a bit of because the car owners have been staying here at the campground.

Or Kampground, as we say at KOA.  They have kabins and kampsites.  That’s actually the worst thing I know about them because otherwise they run a very slick operation at all locations.  Here they cover several city blocks (they’re right in Myrtle Beach) and they’ve crammed in 258 campsites – some for tents only and some for us peon RV owners and some for very posh RV owners (those sites have large poured concrete patios and propane barbecue pits and fancy hammocks).  But the many employees keep the whole place very clean and are very welcoming.  This place offers a huge trampoline, except it’s not on springs but instead inflated, and it can hold maybe a dozen kids at once safely.  Quite the business plan KOA has.

our campsite

The drive here from the last campground was absolutely the scenic route.  I got the directions online and they’re clearly intended for cars, not RVs.  In this case, that means the roads were really rough, probably because very heavy trucks use them and they’re just 2-lane county highways and don’t have shoulders so the trucks are tearing up the edges of the lane.  Rough roads in an RV filled with critters and household stuff are a different matter than in a passenger car.  I’m still glad I went that route, though, because I got to see lots of little towns and some very nice scenery.  Wisteria and dogwood blooming like crazy.

I wasn’t expecting it when the road crossed the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, and it looks from the map like I’ll cross it again tomorrow when I go back to the interior.

We stopped for walks and bathroom breaks in Georgetown and parked in a side street next to South Carolina’s 2^nd oldest Jewish cemetery.  I know that because a historical marker told me so.

It turns out Micky Spillane made his home and did much of his writing just down the road from here - in Murrells Inlet by Georgetown, and they got the state legislature to designate the Micky Spillane Waterfront 17 Highway.  Amazing what you can learn just by reading the signs along the road.

I’ll miss these southern accents when I go north.  I enjoy the various northern accents but they don’t have the same lilt the southern ones do.

I’ve spent time today working on my route in Pennsylvania.  It only just hit me that I’ve still got most of 2 weeks before my state-a-month starts, and I don’t have all that much distance to cover to get there.  I’ve been thinking in terms of the number of states between here and Pennsylvania and forgetting about how everything’s so much closer together here in the East than in the West.  That gives me time to slow down a bit, run some errands, read the owner’s manual to figure how to maintain the various parts of the RV, and like that.  What a concept.