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The Myrtle Beach Bucket List — Trip Planner
Planning this trip in Myrtle Beach? Here’s how to decide what’s worth your time. The once-in-a-lifetime experiences that define a Myrtle Beach trip — the bucket-list tours and tickets worth planning around.
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Top experiences in Myrtle Beach
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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.
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.
Myrtle Beach after dark
Most visitors' evening is a theatre seat rather than a barstool. The Carolina Opry, the Alabama Theatre and Pirates Voyage run variety and dinner shows that let out around ten and shape the whole town's rhythm. Celebrity Square at Broadway at the Beach is the club cluster, and the Murrells Inlet MarshWalk puts live bands on decks over the creek.
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.
Myrtle Beach with kids, realistically
Family Kingdom sits directly on the sand and still runs the Swamp Fox, a wooden coaster from 1966. Ripley's Aquarium anchors Broadway at the Beach, and the Grand Strand carries an absurd density of miniature golf courses, several with fibreglass volcanoes. The boardwalk is flat and stroller-friendly for its full mile and a bit. Myrtle Beach State Park has the calmest pier and nature centre.