Leaving for Myrtle Beach

We spent the day on Friday mowing and packing for our time at the beach. Unlike most West Virginians, I had never been to Myrtle Beach. However, my friend, Larry has had a timeshare at Garden City, between Myrtle Beach and Murrells Inlet, that he wasn’t using for his week so he let us rent it from him. Neither of us are really all that into the beach but we enjoy seeing new places and eating seafood so we decided to give it a try. We invited our friends, Rex and Natalie Dillinger to join us since they enjoy the same kinds of things that we enjoy and they have traveled to this area many times and are familiar with the attractions.

Rex had recently been involved in a legal issue involving a traffic ticket in Alleghany County, Virginia. He had passed a police car on I-64 and, in the officer’s opinion, didn’t move far enough into the left lane. He has secured an attorney to challenge the reckless driving charge to an offence with fewer points on his driver's license. In addition, he has had a health scare following a tick bite resulting in a diagnosis of ehrlichiosis. He had been very ill until starting a course of antibiotics that will hopefully prevent any chronic health problems. We hoped that the beach trip would be a pleasant diversion from his legal and health issues.

We really didn’t know what to pack since we hadn’t been to the area before and hadn’t really taken a “beach vacation” other than as a stop on one of our visits to Florida. We packed more clothes that we thought we would need despite knowing that our lodging, the Kingfisher Inn, would have a laundry. We packed a good bit of food since we planned to eat breakfast and lunch at the condo. We took water shoes and camp chairs as well as fishing gear to take advantage of whatever the area offered.

We turned the water heater and under-sink water heater off, locked the doors, set light timers, security cameras and the entry alarms. We were on the road by 4 pm. Although the shortest and most direct route for us would be by taking I-75 through Knoxville but we opted to spend Friday night with Dillingers in Milton then we could leave from there taking the West Virginia Turnpike avoiding most large cities. We ate our dinner of cold cut sandwiches along the drive arriving at Dillinger’s before 7 pm. We enjoyed catching up then turning in to bed before 10 pm.