Philaahzophy » South Carolina

Considering A Return To Myrtle Beach, SC

Aahz — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 08:00:47 +0000

Zaira and I were reminiscing about what a wild and crazy year it’s been while putting up our Christmas tree last week and each mentioned our favorite trips and activities. The only place our rather varied lists crossed over was our trip to opening day at the new Hard Rock Park amusement park in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Of course, her top favorite was getting to celebrate Miley Cyrus’ Sweet 16 Birthday Party at Disneyland, but that was definitely a once in a lifetime event. The Hard Rock Park trip may well be repeatable. The question is, do we want to go again next year or strike off in some new direction.

Of course, 2009 faces a whole slew of new economic issues, so if we fly somewhere for a week again we’ll have to find other places to save. Which led me to start researching vacation rentals at various entertaining destinations around the U.S. (as the government still won’t let me travel outside the country’s borders). Top on my list right now is St. Louis as it would allow Zaira to see the St. Louis Gateway Arch, allow me to finally take a riverboat cruise (albeit a short day trip), and allow both of us to experience some new roller coaster thrills at Six Flags St. Louis (where our season passes will add to the savings).

I managed to find some good deals for St. Louis through Rentalo.com, but none that came close to the bargains they had for myrtle beach vacation rentals. So, perhaps we’ll return to Myrtle Beach – check out Hard Rock Park’s second year (assuming they have one), revisit Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, and maybe even explore a couple of the haunted houses that Zaira backed out on this May.

What do you think? I tend to look for new experiences, but some families have almost the same vacation every year. Please feel free to share any experiences you’ve had at either Myrtle Beach or St. Louis and let us know what you’d do with your vacation.

Post from: Philaahzophy

Considering A Return To Myrtle Beach, SC

Tags: amusement park, experience, Hard Rock Park, Miley Cyrus, Myrtle Beach, Roller Coaster, saving, savings, SC, Six Flags, South Carolina, Travel, vacation
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Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! – Myrtle Beach, SC

Aahz — Sat, 17 May 2008 08:23:11 +0000

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

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Post from: Philaahzophy

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

Tags: 4-D theater, aquarium, haunted house, museum, Myrtle Beach, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Ripley's Haunted Adventure, Ripley's Super Fun Zone, SC, South Carolina
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Vacation Posts Are Coming Soon – I Promise

Aahz — Thu, 15 May 2008 16:00:59 +0000

I know, I know, I’ve been back four days and still haven’t posted very much about our vacation last week. The truth is I’ve been working at it, but processing dozens of videos and well over a thousand photos is taking much longer than I expected.

Everything’s been processed now and it’s just a matter of getting all of the photos uploaded to ShareAPic and all of the videos uploaded to Revver that’s holding me back at this point. Well, that and catching up on all thework (both online and off) that I missed while we were gone.

Meanwhile, here’s a video to tide you over. At Family Kingdom they had a mock surfboard/wave where you could have your picture taken and it would look like you were surfing. Unfortunately there was no one manning the booth, so we decided to just take a picture in front of the booth ourselves. Alas, I’m still quite the idiot with this camera and I had it set for video rather than still shots. Here’s the results…

Post from: Philaahzophy

Vacation Posts Are Coming Soon – I Promise

Tags: Family Kingdom, Myrtle Beach, SC, South Carolina, surfing, video, Z
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World’s Largest Visitor Center? I Think Not!

Aahz — Thu, 15 May 2008 06:45:15 +0000

As my regular readers know Z and I love to road trip. To me part of the joy of road trippin’ is finding all the great local spots that the tourists normally miss. After all, isn’t that what travel is supposed to be all about? One of the resources we use to find interesting unadvertised attractions is local visitor’s centers. So we’ve seen quite a few. However, Myrtle Beach may well be the Visitor’s Center capital of the world with no fewer than a dozen all within one mile of each other on South Ocean right along the beach.

As if that wasn’t enough, Myrtle Beach is also home to what claims to be the World’s Largest Visitor Center. Now, I must admit that we never actually went into this visitor’s center as they were closed when we discovered it and took our pictures, but we both instantly agreed that it’s not only far from the world’s largest, but was really nothing special at all.

It was basically a lot of empty space with the same racks of flyers and posters as every other visitors center in town. It did have an awning over the back door which none of the others did, but overall, we’re simply not very impressed.

Post from: Philaahzophy

World’s Largest Visitor Center? I Think Not!

Tags: Myrtle Beach, road trip, SC, South Carolina, Travel, Visitor's Center, Worlds Largest, Z
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A Brief Vacation Report

Aahz — Tue, 13 May 2008 20:59:23 +0000

Man, did I need that! Four days of not having to worry about anything or anyone was exactly what the doctor ordered. There was way too much happening on this trip to dump into a single post. But instead of making y’all wait until I have time to write and publish the 25 or so individual blog posts I have planned about it allow me to just say that I used to feel like the kitten on the left (barely hangin’ on), but now feel like the cat on the right – completely relaxed.

Here’s a brief rundown of how we experienced this once in a lifetime opportunity-

Wednesday-

Z was skipping school in the morning because they weren’t doing any actual educating. So I had her Mom tell her that I’d be taking her to breakfast. Which I did – at Buck’s in Woodside. She still had no idea we were going anywhere and was simply under the impression that since we had until noon to get her to school we were free to roam a little farther than normal.

It wasn’t until we’d been at the airport for over an hour that Z finally figured out what was going on The rest of the day was spent on the flight from hell, which is a full blog post unto itself. Let me just say that I was literally crying at one point as we approached Charlotte airport.

Thursday-

With Hard Rock Park not opening until 4pm we spent the morning exploring the touristy section of Myrtle Beach where we discovered a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, two haunted houses, dozens of souvenir shops, and no fewer than three different arcades (Believe It, Or Not!) There was much fun and frolicking, Z even dipped briefly into the Atlantic Ocean, and many, many redemption tickets were earned at the various games in the arcades.

We arrived at Hard Rock Park a few minutes before four only to discover that it was not actually a Sound Check day as I had thought (and bought tickets for), but Season Passholders Appreciation Day. Luckily the kind folx at Guest Services allowed me to simply pay the difference between the Sound Check tickets and the General Admission tickets and allowed us to enter and explore. This park … wait for it … ROCKS! Sorry, couldn’t help myself.

Friday-

By mutual agreement we slept in Friday morning so didn’t arrive at Hard Rock Park until about noon. The park is small by California standards and several of the rides were having technical difficulties so we only stayed for a few hours. Still we had a great time and are both completely enamored with the park and all of its employees.

Returning to the motel in early evening we rested a bit and then headed to yet another amusement park: Family Kingdom. We bought “all day” wristbands and spent about four hours there, until they kicked us out at closing.

Saturday-

Having a late afternoon flight meant we had a good part of the day left to explore Myrtle Beach some more. We had considered a couple of rounds of miniature golf, but instead decided on a buffet breakfast and more time in the arcades. Z cashed in a bunch of her tickets to get me a pirate Scooby Doo (like ones we’d seen at the Six Flags Discovery Kingdom midway the week before), picked up some more goodies for herself, and then we called it a trip.

While the flight home wasn’t as bad as the flight out, TSA was living up to its secondary name (Totally Shitty Agency) and caused us all kinds of grief, but again, that’s for another post. We arrived home intact and pleasantly exhausted.

More details on everything will be posted over the coming week (or maybe two) so keep your eyes out for those, but until then, just know that we both had an amazing time and it was absolutley worth the full month of my life I spent earning the cash to go!

Post from: Philaahzophy

A Brief Vacation Report

Tags: amusement park, Discovery Kingdom, experience, Fatherhood, Hard Rock Park, midway, Myrtle Beach, Scooby Doo, South Carolina, surprise, tickets, Travel
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What Happened To Aahz And Z?

Aahz — Wed, 07 May 2008 16:30:03 +0000

Although I’m going to try to update Philaahzophy over the next few days I don’t know if I’m going to be able to. Why?

Because I’m taking Z on a surprise trip to both the Soft Opening and the Grand Opening of the new Hard Rock Park amusement park in Myrtle Beach, SC!!!

We’ve been tracking the progress of Hard Rock Park since first learning of it last summer and had all but decided that we’d be unable to visit at all this year due to a combination of financial constraints and Z’s outbreaks of bad behavior. But this is truly a once in a lifetime opportunity. Imagine if you’d had the chance to visit Disneyland on its first day. How long would you beat yourself up over missing that?

Hard Rock Park is either going to wind up being a huge destination for both roller coaster/amusement park fans and music lovers or it’s going to crumble under its own weight in just a few years. Either way, opening day is only going to happen once. And we’re going to be there!!!

I vent about X a fair amount here on Philaahzophy (and even more in person ) but this couldn’t have happened (much less been a complete surprise for Z) without X’s help. So a giant THANK YOU to her as well!

Final preparations for this trip are the explanation for the lack of regular posts here over the last few days as well as for the next few. The fact that even as this is being published Z still has no idea what’s going on (I’m not telling her until she figures it out for herself – I’m guessing boarding the plane, but we’ll see) is why II’ve dropped so many cryptic sentences into my posts the last few weeks. Yes, the opportunity to check out all those new rides is why my weight deadline was today (I’m at 232 right now) and the seven hour plane rides are the reason the quit smoking deadline was approaching so rapidly.

We’ll be back in time for Mother’s Day celebrations on Sunday and at that point I’ll start through the backlog of posts to be made here (many political ones, a few more discoveries I’ve made on the ‘net of late, as well as trip reports for not only the Hard Rock Park visit and last weekends carnival and Six Flags Discovery Kingdom visits). As I said, hopefully I’ll be able to blog from the road, but the adventure has far higher priority.

After eight months of planning, saving and swearing people to secrecy it’s finally here… I didn’t think I’d be able to contain my excitement! If you’re the prayin’ type a few words to the Big Guy about keeping the threatening thunderstorms away from Myrtle Beach until Sunday ouwld be much appreciated

Post from: Philaahzophy

What Happened To Aahz And Z?

Tags: Fatherhood, Hard Rock Park, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, surprise, Travel
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