"Anarchy is not chaos, but order without control." »» David Layson

Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! - Myrtle Beach, SC

Posted on May 17, 2008
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The first actual tourist trap Z and I visited in Myrtle beach was the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum. Ripley’s actually has five different venues in Myrtle Beach: the museum; Haunted Adventure, a permanently installed three story haunted house;Ripley’s Moving Theater, a 4-D movie/ride experience with two different films; a Super Fun Zone arcade; and Ripley’s Aquarium, which is in a different part of Myrtle Beach that we didn’t explore.

The museum was pretty standard Ripley’s fare (yes, that’s Z kissing a six-legged calf). A little on the small side and definitely less impressive than the museum on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. The two big highlights for us were the “floating ball” out front and the matchstick roller coaster.

The ball is a huge chunk of granite that ‘rests’ on an extremely thin sheet of water which means that it not only freely rotated continuously, but anyone can change its speed and direction pretyt easily as well. A very nifty toy. Z informed me that they had a similar floating ball at Disneyland, but no one was allowed to touch it. Well, pffft on Disney again .

The roller coaster, named “The Dragon” was made from more than 30,000 matchsticks and nearly 40 feet of track. Contained within its circuitous track is also a 16 seat ferris wheel. This is truly a thing of beauty and a testament to Jack Winkler’s dedication. Be sure to flip through the other pictures of it in our Ripley’s photo gallery to get a better idea of the craftsmanship involved.

We also bought tickets to Ripley’s Haunted Adventure which was amazingly themed on both the front facade and the waiting area inside. But Z chickened out before we went in. Last halloween as we went through the haunted mazes at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk we admitted to each other that neither of us are really fans of the things. Still, I had hoped to see just what Ripley’s could do with a haunted attraction. Maybe next time.

We tried to use our tickets at the Moving Theater next door (and we would have gotten away with it to if it weren’t for those meddling computers and their dinosaur!), but got busted by the ticket scanner inside That was disappointing as Z has throughly enjoyed her other 4-D theater experiences. They were showing Motion Madness (apparently a hodge podge of different moving sequences - kind of a 4-D demo reel) and Monster Trucks: Get Behind The Wheel which coulda been kind of cool. It was even rated G for Great! Seriously.

The Super Fun Zone arcade was neither super nor very fun. It was the smallest arcade we saw in Myrtle Beach by far. But their crane game did have two-headed calves in it, which I seriously wanted as a souvenir. Even though I’m horrible at crane games I dropped a few bucks into it, failing each time, before the clerk on duty informed me that it was out of order and he’d already called it in for maintenance. Even a proffered $20 bribe couldn’t get him to open the machine up for us, so no two-headed calf for us