United States · first visit
First Time in Myrtle Beach: What to See & Do — Trip Planner
Your Myrtle Beach plan for this trip — when to go, how long you need, and what to prioritise. The essential first-timer's hit list for Myrtle Beach — the tours, tickets and experiences worth your limited days, all bookable in one place.
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Top experiences in Myrtle Beach
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What first-timers get wrong in Myrtle Beach
US-17 splits into Bypass and Business and satellite navigation confuses them constantly, which turns a three-mile trip into twenty minutes. Ocean Boulevard meters run March through October. Glass containers and alcohol are banned on the beach inside city limits. Two separate motorcycle rallies fill the spring, and Memorial Day weekend books out months ahead at rates double the shoulder season.
What's actually worth your time in Myrtle Beach
Brookgreen Gardens in Murrells Inlet is the ticket that repays itself: four former rice plantations turned into the largest collection of American figurative sculpture, assembled by Anna Hyatt Huntington from 1931, and admission stays valid seven consecutive days. The SkyWheel on the boardwalk is a pleasant twelve minutes and a photograph. Broadway at the Beach is a shopping centre wearing a costume.
What things cost in Myrtle Beach
Brookgreen admission runs around twenty-five dollars and is valid a week, which makes it the best value on the coast. The SkyWheel is under twenty. The Chapin Art Museum is free. Metered beach parking sits near three dollars an hour. An all-you-can-eat Calabash buffet lands around thirty; golf packages are where the money actually goes.
Myrtle Beach's museums, and which one to pick
Admission costs nothing at the Franklin G. Burroughs and Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum on Ocean Boulevard, which occupies a 1920s beach house and closes Mondays, making it the most underused building on the Grand Strand. At Huntington Beach State Park, Atalaya is the Huntingtons' unfinished Moorish-style winter studio, open for self-guided walks through its brick courtyard and sculpture rooms.
What to eat in Myrtle Beach
Calabash-style is the local format: seafood barely battered, flash-fried and served by the platter, named after the North Carolina village twenty miles north, and delivered through the buffet houses lining US-17. For actual cooking, cross to the Murrells Inlet MarshWalk, where Lee's Inlet Kitchen has fried the same way since 1948. She-crab soup and boiled peanuts are the Lowcountry markers here.