Myrtle Beach State Park

Tuesday April 8…10:45pm

Today we drove the 100 miles or so to Myrtle Beach. The state park is on the far south side of town. It’s a large park, with over 350 sites. We didn’t have a reservation, which turned out to be okay, although this park does get very busy at times.
 
Around 4pm, we went for a bike ride to the main beach hotel area. Now that March break appears to be pretty much over (although there are still some kids here) the hotels and motels are definitely not busy. We see signs outside the hotels advertising rooms for between $28 and $50 dollars a night. Most are below $40. Our bike ride takes us along the main beachfront road, about 10 km’s (6 miles) and we could have gone further, but we had a map that had a cycle path marked on it. So we tried a short cut to make our way to the bike bath that we figured would take us back to the main highway and the campground.

We soon found ourselves on the “wrong side of the tracks” so to speak. It was easy to tell we were in a neighbourhood we shouldn’t be in. The beachfront area is mostly white people, but heading inland the scenery quickly changes. In fact, a black guy on a bicycle even asked us if we were lost because we looked so obviously out of place. We weren’t really lost, we just didn’t know that our chosen route was taking us through an area that’s not very nice. The next intersection we flagged down a cop going the other way, and just confirmed that the way we were going would take us to the bike path. He asked where we were from and said that the area is not really very safe. Anyhow, we did make it back to the main road without incident.

We continued on a roundabout route back to the campground and had done a 28 km (17 mile) bike ride by the time we arrived back at about 6:30pm.

I then noticed that our water hose was leaking. We had hooked up direct to the water line at the campsite. The hose we were using was one made specifically for RV’s and we had only bought it back in October when we left Ottawa. But somehow it had developed a little cut in it. I guess the guy in the campsite across from us overheard me showing the problem to Ruth, and the next thing I know, he’s over offering us a brand new hose that he happened to have extra because his recently purchased RV had come with another one, so he had a spare. I asked him how much he wanted for it, but he declined saying he was happy to have somebody use it because he still had another spare not being used. Maybe in the morning we’ll go over and see if Ruth can offer a haircut in return. We noticed they have Ontario plates too…many vehicles here are snowbirds returning home.

Total Nights Sleeping in the RV… 172

April Fuel $ 232.86

April Grocery $ 96.64

April Overnight Costs $ 34.33