Hello! Yes, I’m back from vacation to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. My folks like to go every year around now and I hadn’t gone the last couple years so I opted to join them this time. I thought things would be more fresh after so long and I wanted to get away from my “real job” for a while.

We ended up staying at Compass Cove Oceanfront Resort. Though a fine place with a great breakfast buffet, we oddly couldn’t pick which specific room we wanted so we ended up on the ground floor. Our back wall was all windows with a door that opened directly into a popular pool area so, feeling the lack of privacy, we had our room moved up a couple floors the next day.

Overall I had fun. I hardly did any swimming, I’m not the swimming type you see, but I always enjoy shopping and sightseeing. We brought bicycles for everyone but a minor traffic accident on the way damaged them. No one was injured, but my bike lost a couple spokes and my mother’s developed a bend in the frame so that was a bit of a bust. We found other things to do though. My mother became almost addicted to hunting for shark teeth, and my father and I went to the Grand Strand Pick and Pull, a car parts store that has the patrons go in and take the parts off themselves. Behind the fence was row after row of junked cars and my father found a few small pieces he wanted, removing them with the modest bag of tools he keeps in the car for emergency maintenance.

Another day we went to the, sad to say, mostly defunct Myrtle Beach Mall. As an aside let me just say, I love malls. Maybe it’s my having grown up in the 90’s and the role they played in popular media during that time, but I just really love the idea of all those stores under one roof with other diversions to fill an afternoon. I know malls in general have lost a lot of traction these days with the popularization of online shopping but I’d be very said if my local mall ended up closing its doors. Anyway, the reason we wound up at this eerily empty mall was for the Grand Strand Model Railroad Club. Call me a nerd if you like, but I just really wanted to rep these guys.

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The amount of detail that went into these displays was astounding with all sorts of little secrets to find. In fact, each separate display had an accompanying scavenger hunt list for visitors to look out for as a way to really experience the little worlds created here.

A couple doors down from them was a comics and game store called Player’s Choice. With a rather large footprint, they had everything you might expect from comics and games, figures, anime and manga and clothing and accessories. Additionally, they had a lot of unique pinball games and arcade cabinets for sale. Next door also housed a small arcade with classic offerings from Pac-Man to Double Dragon, all for only a quarter a play.

Exactly as it should be.

We’ve had arcades come and go locally, but they each fail to understand the draw of just dropping in a quarter and playing to get your money’s worth, instead charging ridiculous by-the-hour prices. Wish I owned an arcade. . . Funny story, I almost bought an arcade cabinet once of my favorite game, The Lost World: Jurassic Park. It was $3000, which would have been all my meager savings at the time, but I wouldn’t mind seeing how the timeline in which I did buy it turned out.

Well that’s about all I got, hope you enjoyed my little beach vacation summary. I know it’s not exactly the type of thing I post on here but hey “variety is the spice of life,” yeah? Stay tuned for a new piece of art I started while I was there, a beach landscape if you can believe it, using an old set of pastel chalk pencils I found in my closet.

God Bless.