Hola Beach
See, I was thinking of writing something about how the longer I stay in the "big city" the more I feel disconnected from the non-big-city parts of this country. I wrote that and then started thinking about all the fine non-big-city places that I like and realized that this feeling I had during last week's vacation was not due to some sort of "American disconnect" or big city bias but to the fact that Myrtle Beach (SC) is a goofy tourist trap town and you can't use those types of places as some sort of barometer for your country connectedness.
I shouldn't complain about MYR (as we call it (and by "we" I mean the "FAA")). Our family meets there every summer and we have this big condo that can sleep eleventy people (an actual number according to my nephew) and our days are spent basically doing the same thing.
Those same things are:
- Wake up
- Drink coffee
- Eat breakfast
- Go to beach
- Eat lunch
- Go back to beach
- Eat dinner
- Play Scrabble
There's nothing really to complain about. The amount of stress in my body disappears and it happily eats and drinks whatever it wants without any disagreement. We sleep (although niece and nephew cut into that a bit). We fix dinner a lot and make tasty foods.
I guess it's just when we had to go back on the "grid" to buy supplies (i.e. beer) and to contend with MYR proper. My snark gland ached every time we did.
I don't want to be mean. Obviously people love this shit. Big theme restaurants, airbrushed t-shirts, buffets with fried food, going to the "shows", and playing cornhole.
(wait, why are people playing cornhole in the south all of a sudden?)
(cornhole is one word - contrary to what my spell-checker says)
Hot
It was really hot. A few days it was just too hot to even hang out on the beach. But those evenings provided additional entertainment with crazy storms and lightning!
Oh, legitimate complaint!
Connectivity. We were disconnected.
Cell service and in-room Wifi stunk. We've been coming to this exact same resort place and the cell service has always stunk. T-Mobile: Stunk. Verizon: Stunk. My parent's crazy local cell phone company: Stunk. AT&T: Stunk.
This meant we had to stand on the porch in order to get a bar or two of service. What kind of annoyed me was that they have a huge convention space there and near the convention area you get zero bars. There's nothing. It seems like they might want to actively figure out a way to fix that.
Then there was their stupid Wifi. $10 a day. Not the end of the world, but there was no way to sign up for more than a day (we were there a week). You have to just keep subscribing every 24 hours. Also, it was miserably slow and it was device specific (awesome! we have two laptops and four iphones!).
My bed was also a bit lumpy.
#FirstWorldProblems
HB Jeff!
Jeff had a big birthday party the night before we left. It was kind of rough going the next day when we had to wake up early and get to the aeroporto.
Good times.
