In 1927, a golf course opened in the pines behind a quiet stretch of South Carolina beach. It had no company. The nearest competition was hundreds of miles away, the town around it was barely a town, and the men who cut those first fairways out of the dunes and longleaf could not have known what they were starting.

What they were starting, it turns out, was everything. In 2027, Myrtle Beach will celebrate 100 years of golf — a full century since Pine Lakes Country Club opened as the area’s first course and set the Grand Strand on the road to becoming the self-proclaimed, and rarely disputed, Golf Capital of the World. Today the region counts roughly 90 courses along 60 miles of coastline, hosts more than three million rounds a year, and welcomes traveling golfers by the hundreds of thousands. Every one of those tee times traces its lineage back to that single 1927 layout.

The centennial is more than a birthday. For the golf travel market, 2027 is shaping up as a landmark year — a once-in-a-lifetime reason for every golfer who has ever loved this coast to come back, and for every golfer who hasn’t yet to finally make the trip. Here’s the story of the first hundred years, what’s happening at the course where it all began, and how to plan your own piece of the celebration from a home base in North Myrtle Beach.

1927: The Granddaddy Arrives

Pine Lakes Country Club opened in 1927 under a different name — Ocean Forest Country Club — as the ambitious centerpiece of a resort vision for the young beach town. Its designer was no ordinary architect: Robert White, a Scotsman from St. Andrews who had become the founding president of the PGA of America and a co-founder of the American Society of Golf Course Architects. White laid his holes over naturally rolling ground less than half a mile from the Atlantic, working with the dunes rather than against them, and by 1928 the club boasted 27 holes and a columned clubhouse with 38 guest rooms.

The nickname came later, and it stuck: “The Granddaddy.” For decades the club leaned into its role as the area’s original, greeting guests with kilted bag attendants, spring mimosas, and cups of clam chowder in the cold months. The clubhouse earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places, and it holds one more distinction that has nothing to do with golf and everything to do with sports history: on April 30, 1954, a group of Time-Life executives gathered inside and sketched out the idea for a new weekly magazine. They called it Sports Illustrated. A framed copy of the first cover still hangs in the clubhouse pub.

Eventually consolidated to 18 holes, the par-70 layout retains its Golden Age character — a course of demanding par 4s and old-growth charm, highlighted by the 14th hole framed against the Ocean Boulevard skyline. Nearly a hundred years on, the course that started it all remains one of the rounds every visiting golfer should play at least once, precisely because of where it sits in the story.

A Century in the Making: Milestones of Myrtle Beach Golf

A hundred years compresses poorly, but the arc of the Grand Strand’s golf story runs through a handful of turning points — from a lone course in the pines to a coastline where golf itself became the economy’s engine.

How One Course Became the Golf Capital of the World

For its first two decades, Pine Lakes had the beach to itself. The Dunes Club arrived in 1948, and then the floodgates opened slowly, then all at once. The golf package — lodging and tee times bundled into one trip, an idea the Grand Strand did as much as anywhere to perfect — turned a regional beach town into a national golf pilgrimage. Course by course, decade by decade, the count climbed toward one hundred, with layouts from nearly every great architect of the modern era threaded between the ocean, the Intracoastal Waterway, and the Carolina pine forests.

The numbers behind the modern market tell the story plainly. The most recent comprehensive study, covering 2024, found 78 courses operating across the region, golf supporting more than 13,000 jobs, and traveling golfers pouring over $700 million in direct spending into local lodging, dining, and entertainment on their way to 1.4 million visitor rounds. Tracy Conner of the Myrtle Beach Area Golf Course Owners Association framed it as nearly a century of golf differentiating and developing the entire region, while Golf Tourism Solutions’ Ryan Cannon called the impact on the area essentially impossible to overstate.

Which brings us to why 2027 matters so much. Kyle Oland, marketing director for Golf Tourism Solutions, has noted that golf is simply in the destination’s DNA — a year-round game here, with more courses per capita than anywhere in the world, all of it dating to that first course in 1927. A centennial gives the entire industry, from the courses to the golf packagers to the vacation rental companies, a once-a-century occasion to celebrate — and gives traveling golfers the best excuse in a hundred years to book the trip.

Pine Lakes Today: Dressed Up for Its 100th Birthday

The Granddaddy is not coasting into its centennial — it has spent the last several years getting ready for it. Founders Group International, which took over the course in 2014 and operates more than 20 Grand Strand layouts, has treated the anniversary as a deadline. Company president Steve Mays has said the goal was to make sure Pine Lakes is exactly the course it wants to be when the 100th arrives.

Architect Craig Schreiner — who led the 2006-era restoration that used 1937 aerial photographs of White’s original design to recover the course’s period feel — returned for a comprehensive greens and bunker renovation in 2021 that sharpened the classic 1920s character. Most recently, heading into the centennial, the course expanded from four sets of tees to six, adding new forward tees and a blended combo option. Schreiner’s reasoning, as he has explained it, is that giving every golfer the option to move up — juniors, women, beginners, and veterans alike — makes the course more enjoyable and puts better numbers on the scorecard, without touching the layout’s historic soul.

The result is a hundred-year-old course in arguably the best shape of its life, positioned in the heart of the central Myrtle Beach golf corridor and priced within reach of any golf package. If your group plays one round for history’s sake in 2027, this is the round.

Planning a Centennial Golf Trip

A centennial-year itinerary practically writes itself: play the history. Start at Pine Lakes, where the story began. Add The Dunes Club era’s spiritual successors and the boom-years masterpieces — and because Pine Lakes belongs to the Founders Group family, packages like the Founders Group $100 Rewards Package make it easy to pair The Granddaddy with sister courses such as King’s North, TPC Myrtle Beach, and World Tour in a single trip, earning a $100 gift card along the way. Groups chasing the north end’s best can build around the Myrtle Beach Elite Package, with Tidewater, Arcadian Shores, Arrowhead, and Prestwick, or roam the twenty-plus layouts of the Myrtle Beach Golf Trail.

This is exactly the kind of trip where a local golf director earns their keep. Thomas Golf Vacations — the golf division of the same family company that has served this coast since 1962 — books thousands of rounds a year, keeps current on course conditions and replay deals, and builds custom packages around your group’s size and appetite. Browse the full Myrtle Beach course directory, explore current golf package deals, or call the golf desk directly at (843) 273-3007 to start sketching a centennial itinerary.

Getting here is the easy part: Myrtle Beach International connects nonstop to more than 50 cities, and our golfer’s guide to MYR flights covers routes, golf bag rules, and rental cars. Traveling with the family? The summer Kids Play Free program puts juniors on 50+ courses at no charge, and every July the Family Golf Week tournament turns the golf trip into a family reunion — fitting warm-ups for a centennial year built on generations of golfers bringing the next generation along.

The North Myrtle Beach Home Base

Here is the veteran move for any Grand Strand golf trip, centennial or otherwise: stay in North Myrtle Beach. The town sits within fifteen minutes of the Barefoot Resort courses, Tidewater, Surf Club, and the Little River cluster, within easy reach of the north-end course lineup, and a straight shot down Highway 31 from Pine Lakes itself — all while putting the ocean at your doorstep instead of a hotel parking lot.

Each of the four beach sections has its own personality as a golf headquarters. Cherry Grove Beach sits closest to Tidewater and the state-line courses; Ocean Drive puts the Main Street restaurants and nightlife within walking distance of the 19th hole; Crescent Beach and Windy Hill offer wide, quiet sand at the south end, nearest to Barefoot’s four championship layouts. Big groups spread out comfortably in oceanfront home rentals — some sleeping a dozen or more golfers under one roof — while couples and foursomes do well in oceanfront condos with the morning coffee view that makes a 7:40 tee time feel civilized. Between rounds, the full menu of things to do in Myrtle Beach and the area events calendar keep the non-golfers in the group just as busy.

Frequently Asked Questions

Be Here When the Second Century Starts

Sources: Historical details via Pine Lakes Country Club, Discover South Carolina, and Myrtle Beach Golf Trips; economic figures from the 2024 Myrtle Beach golf economic impact study by the National Golf Foundation, Golf Tourism Solutions, the Myrtle Beach Area Golf Course Owners Association, and SC PRT; renovation details via Founders Group International and course reporting. Figures reflect the most recent published study year.

The barricades go up before sunrise on a Main Street festival morning in North Myrtle Beach. Vendor tents unfold one by one in the half-light, and by the time the sun clears the pier at Ocean Drive, the smell of kettle corn and funnel cakes drifts all the way down to the Horseshoe. Locals know that morning well. This September, it gets a brand-new name.

NMB Live!, the City of North Myrtle Beach’s newest signature festival, debuts on Main Street on Saturday, September 26, 2026, from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM. The tagline says it plainly: one street, three stages, endless vibes. Three stages of continuous live music, more than 150 vendors, a Kids’ Zone, food trucks, and every restaurant and shop along Main Street open and in on the action — all with free admission and free parking, rain or shine.

And the picture is now complete. The city has released the full entertainment lineup along with parking and shuttle details — five bands, fire dancers, live artists, and roaming street performers, plus a free shuttle and three free parking locations for festival day.

For a town that has been throwing street parties on this same stretch of pavement for generations — shag music pouring out of Fat Harold’s, parades rolling past the pastel storefronts, fall festival crowds fifteen thousand strong — NMB Live! is less a brand-new idea than a fresh coat of paint on something North Myrtle Beach has always done better than just about anyone on the Grand Strand: turn Main Street into the center of the world for a day. Here’s everything you need to know, and how to make a full beach weekend out of it.

What Is NMB Live!? The Basics at a Glance

NMB Live! is the City of North Myrtle Beach’s new signature street festival, produced by the city’s Parks & Recreation Department. The inaugural edition takes over Main Street in the Ocean Drive section of town for one big Saturday in late September — prime festival weather on the Grand Strand, when the summer crowds have thinned but the ocean is still warm and the afternoons still feel like beach season. The essentials, all in one place:

Three Stages, One Street: The Full Music Lineup

The heart of NMB Live! is exactly what the name promises — live music, all day, from one end of Main Street to the other. Three stages will run continuous entertainment from 10 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon, and the now-complete lineup covers a remarkable amount of musical ground.

Yacht Rock Radio featuring Carsen Webb

If you’ve ever wanted to hear smooth 70s and 80s soft rock — think Hall & Oates, Toto, Christopher Cross — while standing a block from the actual ocean, this is your moment. Yacht Rock Radio brings the captain’s-hat-and-blazer era back to life, and for this show the revue is fronted by American Idol alum Carsen Webb. It’s hard to picture a better setting for it than a sunny September Saturday at the beach.

Whiskey Run

A hard-touring country and classic rock cover band that plays rooms and festival stages across the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, Whiskey Run is a familiar name to anyone who follows the Grand Strand’s live music circuit. Expect boots-on-pavement country hits mixed with singalong rock staples.

Tokyo Joe

A South Carolina party-rock institution, Tokyo Joe has been filling dance floors around the state for years with high-energy rock and top-40 covers. They’re a regular draw at Myrtle Beach area venues, and they know how to work a festival crowd.

Spare Change

A Grand Strand party-band favorite, Spare Change rounds out the local contingent with the kind of crowd-pleasing set list that keeps a street festival dancing between funnel cake runs.

Trae Pierce & The T-Stones

The wildcard of the lineup and maybe its biggest coup: an award-winning funk and rock outfit led by four-time Grammy-winning bassist Trae Pierce. If you only plant yourself in front of one stage all day, the smart money says this is the set that stops foot traffic.

With three stages running continuously, there will always be something playing — so the right strategy is to wander. Catch a set, grab a bite, drift to the next stage, repeat.

Beyond the Bands: Fire, Art, and Street Performers

What separates NMB Live! from a standard concert-and-vendors fair is everything happening between the stages. The city’s entertainment slate includes performances by local dance teams, hula dance and fire demonstrations, live speed art demonstrations where painters work against the clock, and plein air artists set up along the street capturing the festival as it unfolds. Street performers will roam the length of Main Street, and organizers have promised surprise pop-up acts throughout the day — the kind of something-around-every-corner energy that rewards visitors who keep moving.

The city has also announced interactive contests and audience participation events, including People’s Choice competitions where festival-goers vote for their favorite vendors and performers — a nice nod to the friendly food competitions that made this street’s previous fall festival famous.

More Than 150 Vendors Along Main Street

Festival food and browsing are half the fun of any street festival, and NMB Live! is planning big: more than 150 arts, crafts, food, nonprofit, and commercial vendors lining Main Street, joined by food trucks and the street’s own restaurants and bars serving all day. That’s the kind of footprint that turns a stroll from Ocean Boulevard up toward Ash Street into a slow, happy, two-hour affair.

Based on North Myrtle Beach’s long festival track record on this street, expect handmade coastal art and jewelry, beach-house decor, boiled peanuts and kettle corn, local nonprofits you’ll actually want to chat with, and enough food options that lunch becomes a progressive meal rather than a single decision. Whether you’re craving festival classics, food truck finds, or a sit-down plate at a Main Street institution, the whole spectrum is a few steps away at any point in the day.

The Kids’ Zone and Family Fun

NMB Live! is built as a family event from the ground up. A dedicated Kids’ Zone will feature rides and games for all ages — the kind of setup that buys parents a full afternoon while the kids burn off energy between the funnel cake and the next ride.

The 10 AM to 4 PM schedule is quietly family-friendly, too. You can do the whole festival and still have the kids back at the beach house before dinner, with time left over for an evening walk on the sand. If your crew is staying in the Ocean Drive section, you’re already within walking distance — no parking required.

Main Street Itself: The Real Star of the Show

Here’s what first-time visitors sometimes miss: Main Street in North Myrtle Beach isn’t just a festival venue. It’s one of the most storied few blocks on the entire South Carolina coast — the birthplace-in-spirit of the shag, South Carolina’s official state dance, and the beating heart of the old Ocean Drive beach music scene. During NMB Live!, the street’s restaurants, shops, and businesses will be open and participating, which means the festival flows straight into the places that give Main Street its year-round personality.

Start with the legends. Fat Harold’s Beach Club at 212 Main Street has been keeping beach music alive since the days when jukeboxes did the DJing — if you hear classic shag tunes drifting out the door mid-festival, follow them. Duck’s Night Life has hosted live bands and shaggers on its double-sided dance floors since 1983, and OD Arcade & Lounge keeps one of the busiest dance floors in town just steps from the Horseshoe. Where Main Street meets the ocean, the OD Pavilion holds its billing as the last open-air dance pavilion on the East Coast.

The eating and drinking are just as storied. Pirate’s Cove Bar & Grill, a multi-decade Main Street staple, overlooks the action from its rooftop bar. Flynn’s Irish Tavern pours pints in a converted former jail with a proper beer garden out back. And at the Shops on Main, Dirty Don’s Oyster Bar and Main St. Taphouse serve fresh oysters and cold local pours a short stroll from the stages. Our full local’s guide to Main Street covers the shops, ice cream stops, and strolls in more detail — worth a read before festival day so you know exactly where you’re headed when the music breaks.

From the Irish Italian Festival to NMB Live!

Longtime visitors will notice the timing: late September on Main Street belonged to the Irish Italian International Festival for over two decades. That beloved event ran for 21 years, drawing around 15,000 people annually for cultural food, music, and a famously competitive spaghetti-eating contest.

NMB Live! steps into that slot as a bigger, broader evolution of the tradition. According to Angel Sylvester, Special Events Manager for the city’s Parks & Recreation Department, the new festival was created to deliver a larger, more dynamic event while carrying forward the community-gathering tradition that defined its predecessor — with music spanning yacht rock, country, funk, and party bands instead of a single cultural theme, a third stage added, and an expanded vendor footprint.

So if you’ve made the September pilgrimage to Main Street before, come see the next chapter. If you never caught the old festival, you’re arriving just in time for a new tradition’s very first year — and there’s something special about being able to say you were at the first one.

Parking, Shuttles, and Street Closures

The city has published the full festival-day logistics, and they’re refreshingly generous: both admission and parking are free. Main Street closes to vehicles from Ash Street to Ocean Boulevard from 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM, so plan around the closure if your rental sits nearby.

Free event parking is available at three locations: the corner of 2nd Avenue North and Ocean Boulevard, the corner of 1st Avenue South and Ocean Boulevard, and McLean Park at 93 Oak Drive. A free shuttle runs from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM from Ocean Drive Elementary School at 901 11th Avenue North — the smart play for anyone arriving mid-day, when the closer lots fill with a 15,000-person crowd in town. Golf carts and bicycles, both beloved North Myrtle Beach transportation, work beautifully for anyone staying in the surrounding neighborhoods. And the 10 AM opening hour is genuinely pleasant — cooler temperatures, first pick of the vendor booths, and easy parking before the crowds build.

Planning Your NMB Live! Weekend

Where to Stay

The festival sits in the Ocean Drive section, which makes the surrounding neighborhoods the natural home base. An oceanfront condo near Main Street puts you within strolling distance of the stages, while an oceanfront home rental gives bigger groups room to spread out for the whole weekend.

Each of North Myrtle Beach’s sections has its own festival-weekend personality: Cherry Grove Beach offers quiet mornings and the fishing pier just north of the action; Crescent Beach and Windy Hill sit a short drive south with wide, family-friendly stretches of sand — close enough for the festival, far enough for peace and quiet afterward.

Make It a Full Fall Weekend

Late September is one of the best-kept secrets on the Grand Strand — warm ocean, soft light, smaller crowds, and lower rental rates than midsummer. Build around festival Saturday with a look at our guide to a fall vacation in North Myrtle Beach, browse the wider Myrtle Beach events calendar for what else is happening that week, or go deep on the full list of things to do in Myrtle Beach across the Grand Strand.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources: City of North Myrtle Beach Parks & Recreation Department (nmb.us); Explore North Myrtle Beach; MyHorryNews. Event details current as of September 1, 2026, and subject to change — confirm on the city’s official NMB Live! page before attending.

Every autumn, about the time the first cold front crosses the Great Lakes, the phones at our reservations desk start ringing with the same happy question, asked in accents from Buffalo to Ontario: which one should we pick? The caller has usually been browsing our long-term listings for a week. They have narrowed it to a channel-side cottage in Cherry Grove, a tenth-floor oceanfront condo in Crescent Beach, and a beach house near Main Street, and they are stuck — because choosing a home for three months is a different decision than choosing one for a week.

They are right to slow down. On a weeklong vacation, a so-so kitchen or a missing washing machine is a shrug. Across a whole winter, those details are the difference between a rental and a home. The good news is that the decision follows a logic, and after six decades of settling winter guests into this town, we know it by heart.

This guide walks through that logic step by step: condo versus beach house, the features that matter most on a monthly stay, how to budget the season, the questions worth asking before you book, and how to land softly once you arrive. If you are still deciding whether a Carolina winter is for you, start with our complete snowbird guide and our look at what winter here really feels like — then come back here to pick your front door.

Condo or Beach House? The First Fork in the Road

Nearly every monthly-stay decision starts here, and there is no wrong answer — only a right answer for how you plan to live.

The condo case is a strong one for couples wintering on their own. Our oceanfront condos in buildings like Crescent Shores, Ocean Bay Club, Bahama Sands, and the Ashworth put the ocean outside your sliding door, the elevator down the hall, and — critically for winter — amenities like indoor and heated pools that turn a gray January afternoon into swim time. A condo tower also comes with built-in neighbors: by mid-January, the returning winter residents of a building know each other’s names, walk together in the mornings, and organize the kind of impromptu card nights that make a season fly by. Covered parking, on-site maintenance, and lock-and-leave simplicity round out the argument.

The beach house case is about elbow room and rhythm. An oceanfront home rental gives you a real driveway, a porch with your name on it for the season, room for the grandchildren’s February visit without anyone on a sleeper sofa, and the quiet of a residential street. Houses shine in Cherry Grove Beach, where channel-side cottages come with marsh views and a fishing dock, and in the neighborhoods around the Ocean Drive section, where Main Street’s coffee, groceries, and shag clubs sit within walking distance.

Here is the decision at a glance:

The Features That Matter When You Stay by the Month

A week’s vacation forgives almost anything. A season does not. When winter guests tell us what made their stay — or what they will look for next time — the same handful of features comes up again and again, and none of them are the ones vacation shoppers usually screen for.

The kitchen leads the list. On a monthly stay you will cook most nights, so a full-size refrigerator, a real oven, and enough counter space to roll out a pie crust matter more than any view. In-unit laundry runs a close second; a washer and dryer behind your own door beats a coin room down the hall every single week of a twelve-week stay. Then comes the winter-specific short list: an indoor or heated pool if daily swimming is part of your routine, covered or garage parking if you would rather not scrape frost off the windshield on the cold mornings, elevator access and walk-in showers for anyone thinking a few years ahead, and reliable WiFi — non-negotiable now that half our winter guests take a video call or two between beach walks. Pet owners should filter early, since pet policies vary property by property; our reservations team keeps track of which homes welcome a well-behaved dog for the season.

Every listing in our collection of long term rentals in North Myrtle Beach details bedrooms, baths, capacity, and location, and the reservations team can answer the finer-grained questions — pool seasons, parking arrangements, dog policies — property by property.

Budgeting a One-to-Three-Month Stay

The pleasant surprise of winter budgeting is how few line items there are. Monthly winter rates are quoted as a single figure for a fully furnished, fully equipped home — no furniture to buy, no year-long lease to sign, no accounts to open. Confirm what your specific property’s rate includes when you book, but the classic snowbird arrangement is beautifully simple: one payment, one move-in day, one set of keys.

Two pieces of math work in your favor. First, off-season pricing: winter is the Grand Strand’s quiet season, and monthly rates reflect it, running far below what the same oceanfront address earns in summer. Second, the length-of-stay bonus we detailed in our snowbird guide: under South Carolina law, stays of 90 or more continuous days are exempt from the sales tax on accommodations, which quietly rewards booking the full season over booking it month by month. Layer on winter’s everyday economics — off-season greens fees, uncrowded restaurants, free beach entertainment straight ahead of your balcony — and many guests find a Carolina winter costs less than staying home to heat the house and shovel the driveway.

Questions to Ask Before You Book

A ten-minute phone call settles almost everything, and the guests who ask the right questions up front have the smoothest winters. Ask what the monthly rate includes and how the 90-day tax exemption applies to your dates. Ask whether the indoor pool operates all winter and whether building amenities close for any off-season maintenance. Ask about parking — how many spaces, covered or open, and any rules for a second car when family visits. Ask how mail and packages work at that property, what the housekeeping and linen arrangements are for long stays, and who to call — and how fast they come — if the heat hiccups on a January night. And if a dog is part of your traveling party, ask that one first.

None of these questions is exotic. Together, they are the difference between arriving hopeful and arriving certain.

When to Book for the Best Selection

Winter rentals obey a rule of the season that first-timers learn the hard way: the regulars rebook first. Many returning snowbirds reserve next winter’s stay before this winter’s suitcases are unpacked, which means the most-loved oceanfront units for the January-through-March stretch are often claimed by late summer or early fall. Booking in late summer gets you first pick of the full collection; autumn still offers good choices; and while there is nearly always something worthwhile available later, waiting until the holidays to plan a full-season stay means choosing from what the early birds left behind.

Single-month stays are more forgiving — cancellations and gaps open up — but the same principle holds. The earlier you call, the more the choice is yours rather than the calendar’s.

Settling In: Your First 48 Hours

Move-in day is mostly a matter of carrying suitcases, but a few local pointers smooth the landing. The first grocery run is a rite of passage: national chains line Highway 17 through town, and every winter guest eventually discovers Boulineau’s Foods Plus in Cherry Grove — the sprawling, family-run market that has anchored the neighborhood for generations and sells everything from fresh local seafood to hardware to beach chairs under one roof. Stock the kitchen, find your pharmacy, and note the closest urgent care for peace of mind.

Then begin the pleasant work of becoming a regular. Walk your stretch of beach at low tide and learn its moods. Introduce yourself to the neighbors — in a winter condo building, they will likely beat you to it. Pick a breakfast spot in Crescent Beach or a taphouse near Main Street and start building your usual order. Scan the season’s area events calendar and circle a show or two near Windy Hill‘s Barefoot Landing. By the end of the first week, the rental starts answering to a different name: home.

Frequently Asked Questions

Let’s Find the One With Your Name on It

Sources: Thomas Beach Vacations long-term rental listings and reservations guidance; South Carolina Department of Revenue accommodations tax guidance. Rates, inclusions, amenities, pet policies, and availability vary by property and are subject to change — confirm specifics with the reservations team when booking.

Stand on the beach in North Myrtle Beach at seven o’clock on a February morning and you will understand something the summer crowds never get to see. The light comes up slow and pink over an ocean the color of pewter. The tide has swept the sand clean overnight, and the only footprints on it are yours and a sandpiper’s. Somewhere behind you, a coffee maker is gurgling in a warm oceanfront condo, and the whole long day ahead belongs entirely to you.

That is winter here. Not a beach town gone dark, but a beach town exhaled — the same nine miles of sand, the same shag music on Main Street, the same seafood houses and golf courses and theater lights, all of it running at a human pace for the people who stay. The summer visitors love this place for what it does. The winter people love it for what it is.

Our complete snowbird guide covers the practical side of a winter stay — monthly rates, the 90-day tax exemption, when to book. This is the other half of the story: what those three months actually feel like, week by week, from the first Christmas lights of November to the first azaleas of March.

The Beach You Get to Yourself

The winter beach is a different animal, and longtime winter guests will tell you it is the better one. The air is clearer, the light is sharper, and the sand — raked flat and empty by winter tides — turns into the best walking surface of the year. People who spend the season here develop a daily beach-walk habit the way other people develop a gym membership, except this one comes with dolphins offshore and pelicans gliding the wave line in long, silent squadrons.

Winter is also the shelling season. The stronger tides and offshore storms of the cold months stir the ocean floor and deliver its treasures to the beach: whelks, olive shells, and — on a lucky morning after a blow — whole sand dollars, the kind summer visitors search for all week and rarely find. The fishing crowd works the surf and the Cherry Grove channels through the season, and birders do quietly spectacular business along the marsh edges, where herons and egrets stand their frozen-statue watch all winter long.

Bundle up on the raw days, sure. But the honest secret of a Carolina winter is how many afternoons hit 60 degrees under a hard blue sky, and how quickly a person’s definition of a perfect beach day shifts from a towel and an umbrella to a jacket, a thermos, and an empty horizon.

The Holidays, Coastal Style

Winter on the Grand Strand opens with a bang of lights. Each November, the North Myrtle Beach Park & Sports Complex transforms into The Great Christmas Light Show — a drive-through spectacle of more than two million lights and hundreds of displays, capped by a Santa’s Village with hot cocoa and holiday activities. It has become the anchor tradition of the coastal Christmas, the thing winter guests take their visiting grandchildren to first.

The theaters follow suit. At Barefoot Landing, the Alabama Theatre stages The South’s Grandest Christmas Show through November and December — a full-scale holiday production of music, dancing, and comedy that has been a Grand Strand institution for decades — while the Greg Rowles Legacy Theatre in North Myrtle Beach adds its own hometown holiday production steps from the oceanfront. Around them, Barefoot Landing itself dresses for the season, with its Dockside Village tree lighting kicking off the holidays and McLean Park hosting the town’s own tree lighting closer to Main Street. We keep a full rundown of the season’s stages in our guide to winter concerts and holiday shows in North Myrtle Beach.

And for one unforgettable evening, drive 45 minutes south to Brookgreen Gardens for Nights of a Thousand Candles, when the great sculpture garden glows with hand-lit candles and lights beneath the live oaks. Winter guests who make the trip tend to describe it the same way afterward: quietly, and with their hand on their heart.

January and February: The Locals’ Months

After New Year’s, the Grand Strand settles into its most local self, and this is the stretch where winter guests stop feeling like visitors. The restaurants know your order. The pro shop knows your foursome. The town is yours.

Main Street keeps its heartbeat all winter. The shag clubs of the Ocean Drive section — Fat Harold’s Beach Club, Duck’s, the OD Arcade — run their dance floors year-round, and each January the street swells for a beloved midwinter tradition: shag dancers from across the Southeast return to Main Street for their annual cold-weather reunion, filling the clubs with beach music in the dead of winter. Even if you have never danced a step of the shag, it is worth wandering in on a January night just to watch the state dance of South Carolina performed by people who have been doing it for fifty years.

Winter is also, quietly, the best eating season of the year. The cold months are oyster months on the Carolina coast, and a dozen on the half shell at Dirty Don’s Oyster Bar on Main Street tastes different — better, locals insist — when there is a nip in the air. Flynn’s Irish Tavern pours its winter pints in a converted former jail a few blocks away, and the dining rooms up and down Highway 17 that run waits in July seat you on sight in February. By the end of the season, most winter guests have a “usual spot,” a “usual booth,” and a server who starts the sweet tea when they walk in.

Winter Golf and Blue-Sky Days

Golf does not hibernate here, and neither do the golfers. The courses of the northern Strand — the four championship layouts at Barefoot Resort, Tidewater on the Cherry Grove peninsula, the Little River cluster along the waterway — play straight through the winter at the friendliest greens fees of the year. The winter golfer’s rhythm is its own small pleasure: watch the forecast, spot the string of 60-degree days, call the pro shop, and walk onto a course that spring visitors will pay double for and wait in line to play.

The non-golf outdoors carries the season, too. The Heritage Shores Nature Preserve at the end of the Cherry Grove marsh offers boardwalk trails where winter birding is at its best, and the town’s bike paths and parks stay in gentle use all season. It all adds up to a winter that happens mostly outside — which, for anyone escaping a northern January spent indoors, may be the whole point.

Day Trips Worth the Tank of Gas

Three unhurried months mean you can finally take the day trips a one-week vacation never allows. The historic seaport of Georgetown, an hour south, offers a harborwalk, antique shops, and some of the oldest streets in South Carolina. Brookgreen Gardens rewards a return visit in daylight, when its sculpture collection and winter camellias have the grounds nearly to themselves. Little River, just up the road, keeps its waterfront seafood houses open through the season, and the boardwalk trails of Vereen Memorial Gardens wind through marsh and maritime forest at the state line — free, quiet, and gorgeous in winter light.

Closer to home, the shops and restaurants of Barefoot Landing near Windy Hill make an easy afternoon, and the full menu of things to do in Myrtle Beach stays surprisingly deep through the cold months — with the area events calendar filling in concerts, markets, and festivals as the season rolls along.

Here is how the winter calendar traditionally shakes out, month by month:

Dates and lineups shift a little every year, so check the official venue and city calendars when planning around a specific event.

A Winter Week, Hour by Hour

Ask a returning snowbird what they actually do all winter and you will get a shrug and a smile, because the answer sounds too simple to be as good as it is. A typical week goes something like this. Monday, a long beach walk at sunrise, groceries, and an afternoon book on the balcony because the sun swung around warm. Tuesday, eighteen holes at Barefoot with the regular group, then oysters on Main Street. Wednesday, a raw gray day — perfect for the flea markets, a matinee, and a pot of chili. Thursday, the marsh boardwalk with binoculars, then shag night at Fat Harold’s, mostly to watch. Friday, a Georgetown day trip. Saturday, the grandkids call. Sunday, church, a nap, and the sunset from the beach, which in winter arrives at a civilized hour and puts on a better show than July ever managed.

Multiply that by twelve weeks, subtract the traffic, the crowds, and the snow shovel, and you have the winter that keeps people coming back until the reservations desk knows their voice on the phone.

Where You Come Home To

Every one of those winter days starts and ends somewhere, and the somewhere matters. Guests who winter in Cherry Grove Beach get the marsh birds and channel views with their morning coffee. Ocean Drive winter guests can walk to Main Street’s clubs and oyster bars. Crescent Beach offers the deep bench of condo towers with the indoor pools and full kitchens that make a long stay easy, and Windy Hill puts Barefoot Landing’s restaurants and theater lights five minutes away.

Whether the right fit is a cozy oceanfront condo for two or an oceanfront home rental with room for the February visitors, our hand-picked collection of long term rentals in North Myrtle Beach spans all four beach sections — 89 fully furnished condos and beach homes that welcome stays by the month or the season.

Frequently Asked Questions

Come See What the Summer Crowds Miss

Sources: City of North Myrtle Beach event announcements; Alabama Theatre published show calendar; Brookgreen Gardens event information; Thomas Beach Vacations local guides. Event dates, lineups, and venue schedules change annually — confirm details with official sources when planning.

The first hard frost hits Ohio and upstate New York sometime in late October, and you can almost hear the garage doors going up. Suitcases into trunks, golf clubs on top, a forwarding note taped to the neighbor’s door. For thousands of winter travelers, the road south does not end in Florida anymore. It ends about 700 miles sooner, where Highway 17 crosses into North Myrtle Beach and the ocean turns that hard winter silver that locals will tell you is the prettiest the Atlantic gets all year.

They call themselves snowbirds, and North Myrtle Beach has been quietly perfecting the art of hosting them for decades. From October through March, the beach empties out, the pace slows down, and the oceanfront condos and beach houses that command premium summer rates become monthly winter homes at a fraction of the cost. The town stays open — the golf courses, the shag clubs on Main Street, the seafood houses, the theaters at Barefoot Landing — but the crowds go home. What is left is the version of the beach that people who live here love best.

If you have been thinking about trading one winter of gray skies and ice scrapers for a season of ocean-view mornings, this guide covers everything you need to know: when snowbird season runs, what winter here actually feels like, how monthly rates and South Carolina’s 90-day tax exemption work, and how to pick the right home base for two or three months by the sea.

Snowbird Season, Explained

On the Grand Strand, snowbird season generally runs from October through March, with the heart of it falling in January, February, and March — the months when winter bites hardest up north and the beach down here is at its calmest. Most winter guests book by the month, and many settle in for the full three-month stretch, arriving after the holidays and heading home when the daffodils come up back home.

The guests themselves come from everywhere winter is a serious business: Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New England, Michigan, and a steady contingent of Canadians who have been making the drive for generations. Some are retirees stretching their legs into a new season of life. A growing number are remote workers who realized their laptop works just as well with an ocean view. What they share is the discovery that a furnished oceanfront rental in the off-season often costs less per month than heating a house through a northern January — and comes with considerably better sunrises.

North Myrtle Beach suits the long-stay rhythm unusually well. It is a real town, not just a resort strip — with grocery stores, pharmacies, churches, a senior-friendly recreation scene, and a walkable Main Street — wrapped around nine miles of wide, uncrowded winter beach.

Why More Snowbirds Are Choosing the Carolina Coast

Florida wrote the snowbird playbook, but the Carolina coast has been steadily rewriting it, and the reasons are practical ones. The drive is the first. From most of the Midwest and Northeast, North Myrtle Beach is a full day closer than central or south Florida — one manageable day on the road instead of two, which matters when you are making the trip twice a season and maybe once more at the holidays to see the grandchildren.

The second reason is cost. Winter monthly rates here run well below what comparable oceanfront accommodations command in the traditional Florida snowbird markets, and everyday expenses — dinners out, greens fees, groceries — follow the same friendly math. The third is temperament. Winter on the Grand Strand is genuinely quiet. Traffic on Ocean Boulevard thins to a trickle, restaurants seat you on arrival, and the beach at 9 AM in February may hold more sandpipers than people. For travelers who found the year-round bustle of the bigger snowbird destinations exhausting, that calm is the whole point.

And then there is the golf. The Grand Strand’s dozens of championship courses stay open all winter, greens fees drop to their lowest of the year, and a string of 60-degree January days can fill a week with rounds that would cost double in high season. Winter golfers here play the same celebrated layouts the spring crowds fly in for — without the wait on the first tee.

Winter Weather in North Myrtle Beach, Honestly

Nobody should promise you a tropical January, and we won’t. What the Carolina coast offers is a mild, workable, often beautiful winter — the kind where a light jacket handles most days, hard freezes are uncommon near the water, and snow is rare enough that a dusting makes the local news and empties the shelves of milk and bread by nightfall. The ocean moderates everything: coastal winters here run noticeably gentler than even a few miles inland.

Here is the honest picture, month by month:

Figures are typical historical averages for the North Myrtle Beach area and any given winter will vary — but the pattern holds. While the folks back home are shoveling out the driveway, you will more often than not be deciding between a beach walk and a back nine.

How Monthly Winter Rates Work — and the 90-Day Tax Break

Winter rentals work differently than summer vacation bookings, and the differences all favor the long-stay guest. Instead of nightly or weekly rates, participating properties offer discounted monthly rates for the off-season — typically available from fall through early spring. Because winter is the slow season, those monthly figures land dramatically below what the same oceanfront condo or beach house earns per month in July. You are essentially renting the beach at its wholesale price.

Then there is a detail of South Carolina tax law that surprisingly few winter travelers know about. Under state law, accommodations supplied to the same guest for 90 or more continuous days are exempt from the sales tax on accommodations that applies to shorter vacation stays. In plain terms: book the full winter — roughly January through March, or any stretch of at least 90 consecutive days — and the accommodations tax that vacationers pay on a week’s stay does not apply to your booking. For a three-month stay, that exemption adds up to real money, and it is one more reason so many snowbirds commit to the whole season rather than a single month. Our reservations team can walk you through exactly how it applies to the dates and property you have in mind.

One planning note: winter monthly rates and availability vary property by property. Not every home in a rental program offers monthly terms, which is why we maintain a dedicated collection of long term rentals in North Myrtle Beach — currently 89 condos and beach homes across town that welcome extended stays, each listed with bedrooms, baths, sleeping capacity, and location so you can compare your options side by side.

Picking Your Beach Section for the Season

North Myrtle Beach is really four beach neighborhoods stitched together along nine miles of sand, and when you are staying for months rather than days, the neighborhood you choose shapes the whole season.

Cherry Grove Beach, at the northern end, is the quiet one — a peninsula of beach houses threaded with saltwater channels, where winter mornings mean herons in the marsh and anglers working the Cherry Grove Fishing Pier. Snowbirds who want stillness, water views on two sides, and a residential feel gravitate here, whether to a channel-side cottage or a tower like Prince Resort near the pier.

The Ocean Drive section is the social heart. Main Street — home of the shag, South Carolina’s official state dance — keeps its music going all winter, and staying nearby means the coffee shop, the drug store, and the dance floor at Fat Harold’s Beach Club are all a short stroll from your door. Condo buildings like the Ashworth, Avista Ocean Resort, and Ocean Bay Club put winter guests right in the middle of it, steps from both the sand and the town’s year-round pulse.

Crescent Beach runs down the middle of town and offers the deepest bench of winter-friendly condos — towers like Crescent Shores and Bahama Sands with the full-size kitchens, in-unit laundry, and indoor pools that make a three-month stay feel like home. And Windy Hill, at the south end, sits closest to Barefoot Landing’s restaurants, shops, and theaters — a fine fit for snowbirds who plan to make dinner-and-a-show a winter habit.

Whichever section calls to you, the choice usually comes down to space: our oceanfront condos suit couples wintering light, while our oceanfront home rentals give snowbirds room for the parade of visiting children and grandchildren that a beach house in February reliably attracts.

You Will Not Run Out of Things to Do

The myth about beach towns in winter is that they roll up the sidewalks. North Myrtle Beach does not. The golf courses play all season. The Alabama Theatre at Barefoot Landing runs its show calendar through the winter months, and the shag clubs on Main Street — Fat Harold’s, Duck’s, the OD Arcade — keep the beach music playing for the year-round dance crowd, which swells each January when shag dancers from across the Southeast traditionally return to Main Street for their midwinter gathering. Restaurants that require a wait in July greet you like a regular in February, and by your second week, several of them will actually know your name.

Add the everyday pleasures — flea markets and antique runs, fishing off the pier, day trips to the Brookgreen Gardens sculpture grounds or the historic seaport of Georgetown, and long, empty-beach walks that reset a person’s whole nervous system — and the season fills itself. We keep a running guide to things to do in Myrtle Beach and an area events calendar that both stay busy straight through the winter, so you can layer in as much or as little as you like.

Booking Your Winter Stay

Here is the piece of local wisdom that matters most: the best winter rentals go early. Returning snowbirds are creatures of habit — many rebook the same condo for next winter before they have finished unpacking from this one — so the choicest oceanfront units for January through March are often spoken for by late summer or early fall. If you have your eye on a full-season stay, reaching out in late summer or autumn gives you first pick; even for a single winter month, earlier is always better.

The booking itself is refreshingly simple. Every property in our long-term collection comes fully furnished and equipped — linens, kitchenware, the works — so moving in amounts to carrying suitcases up from the car and deciding which balcony chair is yours. Browse the current lineup of long term rentals in North Myrtle Beach, note the properties that fit your party and your preferred beach section, and call our local reservations team to talk monthly rates, dates, and that 90-day tax exemption. We have been matching winter guests to the right beach home for over 60 years, and it remains one of the most satisfying parts of the job — because snowbirds, more than any other guests, come back.

Frequently Asked Questions

Spend This Winter Where the Sand Is

Sources: South Carolina Department of Revenue accommodations tax guidance; historical climate averages for the North Myrtle Beach area; Thomas Beach Vacations long-term rental listings. Rates, availability, tax treatment, and seasonal details are subject to change — confirm specifics with the reservations team when booking.

Ask anyone who grew up vacationing on the Grand Strand and they’ll tell you the same story: the drive down Highway 17 keeps looking different. New medical campuses where pine stands used to be. Cranes over Carolina Forest. License plates from Ohio and New York that never went home after Labor Day. The place people came to escape their working lives has quietly become a place people come to build them.

Now the data has caught up with the anecdotes. LinkedIn has named Myrtle Beach to its 2026 Cities on the Rise list, ranking the region No. 16 among the 25 fastest-growing U.S. metros for jobs and career growth. It’s the second consecutive year the Grand Strand has made the cut — and the company it keeps on the list says plenty about where this coastline is headed.

For the millions who know Myrtle Beach as 60 miles of vacation coastline, the ranking is worth a closer look. The same momentum drawing new careers and residents here is reshaping the visitor experience too — more flights, more restaurants, more to do in every season. Here’s what the recognition actually measures, what’s fueling it, and why the smartest way to understand the Grand Strand’s rise is still a week at the beach.

The Ranking: No. 16 of 25, Two Years Running

LinkedIn’s Cities on the Rise report spotlights emerging metropolitan areas where hiring is accelerating, employers are expanding, and professionals are actively choosing to relocate. Myrtle Beach landed at No. 16 on the 2026 edition, sharing the list with a striking cluster of Carolinas and Southeast neighbors — a regional pattern that tells its own story about where American career momentum is flowing.

Fort Wayne, Indiana and other rising mid-sized metros round out a list that shares a theme: career opportunity is expanding well beyond the traditional big-city hubs, and quality of life is doing much of the recruiting.

How LinkedIn Builds the List

This isn’t a lifestyle listicle — it’s built on labor market data at a scale few organizations can match. LinkedIn analyzed its proprietary workforce data from March 2024 through February 2026, measuring year-over-year growth in hiring and job creation across U.S. metros while tracking where professionals are actually moving. To qualify, a metro had to perform in the top 50th percentile or above across all U.S. metropolitan areas and show positive net migration over the past year — in plain terms, more talent arriving than leaving.

The report’s framing captures why lists like this resonate right now: LinkedIn’s own survey data shows two-thirds of professionals say they work to live rather than the other way around, weighing career ambition against overall quality of life. By that math, a metro that pairs job growth with a beach has a structural advantage — and the Grand Strand is exhibit A.

What’s Driving Myrtle Beach’s Rise

LinkedIn’s write-up of the region named three engines working in tandem. The first is the familiar one: sustained tourism growth, the industry that built the Grand Strand and still anchors it. The second is healthcare, where investment is scaling fast — including a commitment of roughly $350 million to expand Grand Strand healthcare infrastructure, the kind of spending that creates thousands of durable, year-round positions from nursing to administration to construction.

The third engine is demographic. The Myrtle Beach area holds the distinction of being the nation’s fastest-growing metro for retirees, with residents 65 and older now accounting for about a quarter of the region’s roughly 413,000 people. That wave of arrivals feeds everything else — demand for healthcare, housing, dining, services, and the professionals to provide them. Growth compounding growth.

Layered underneath the three headline drivers sits the quieter appeal that vacationers already understand: a coastal setting, a cost of living below the national average, and a climate that delivers beach weather deep into what the rest of the country calls fall.

Beyond Tourism: A Year-Round Economy Takes Shape

The deeper story behind the ranking is diversification. Tourism remains the economic foundation — nobody here is apologizing for that — but continued investment in healthcare, technology, entrepreneurship, education, and business development is building an economy that supports careers in every month of the calendar, not just the hundred days of summer.

The people arriving reflect that shift: professionals recruited by expanding employers, entrepreneurs opening year-round businesses, remote workers who realized their home office could have an ocean view, and retirees beginning encore careers and community ventures. New infrastructure, housing, and commercial development are rising to meet them — from the road projects reshaping how the county moves, like the recently approved Highway 31 extension to the Highway 17 Bypass, to new nonstop routes landing at Myrtle Beach International.

Matt Pivarnik, CEO of the Greater Myrtle Beach Collaborative, said the LinkedIn recognition confirms what businesses, residents, and investors have been watching unfold on the ground — a region evolving into a place where people can build rewarding careers while enjoying an exceptional quality of life, with the community committed to sustaining that momentum.

A Growing Shelf of National Accolades

The LinkedIn nod joins a run of national recognition that keeps landing on the Grand Strand’s doorstep. Earlier in 2026, Resonance Consultancy named Myrtle Beach the No. 5 Best Small City in America, scoring the destination highly for livability and desirability. In recent years the area has repeatedly topped fastest-growing-city rankings, driven by one of the highest move-in ratios of any American city — a steady stream of newcomers choosing this coastline over bigger, pricier metros.

Each list measures something slightly different, but together they sketch the same picture: a mid-sized coastal region hitting its stride, attractive to visitors and residents for many of the same reasons.

What Growth Means for Visitors

A rising metro makes for a better vacation, and the dividends show up all along the Strand. Air access keeps improving as carriers add nonstop routes to serve the growing population. The dining scene deepens every year, because year-round residents keep restaurants thriving past Labor Day — a rising tide for everything in our guide to things to do in Myrtle Beach. Entertainment calendars stretch across all four seasons, easy to track on the Myrtle Beach events calendar. And expanded healthcare infrastructure quietly matters to traveling families and long-stay snowbirds alike: world-class care minutes from the beach chair is a real vacation amenity.

Growth also explains why the shoulder seasons keep getting better. A region with a year-round economy keeps its restaurants open, its festivals running, and its attractions staffed in October and February — precisely when rental rates are at their friendliest.

The Best Scouting Trip Is a Beach Week

Here’s the pattern locals see over and over: today’s vacationer is tomorrow’s resident. A meaningful share of the professionals and retirees now fueling the region’s rankings first fell for this coast the same way everyone does — a rented beach house, a week of salt air, a sunset walk that made the drive home feel like leaving something behind.

North Myrtle Beach makes an ideal base for that kind of trip, whether you’re purely vacationing or quietly evaluating. Each of the four beach sections has its own personality worth sampling: Cherry Grove Beach with its fishing pier and tidal creek calm at the north end, Ocean Drive with the Main Street shag scene at the town’s heart, and the wide, family-favorite sands of Crescent Beach and Windy Hill to the south. A week in an oceanfront home rental lets a multi-generational crew test-drive the lifestyle together, while an oceanfront condo suits the couple weighing whether those Zoom calls might sound better with waves in the background.

Frequently Asked Questions

Come See What the Rankings Keep Noticing

Sources: Ranking and methodology reported by LinkedIn News (2026 Cities on the Rise), with additional reporting from The Post and Courier, The Sun News, and the Greater Myrtle Beach Collaborative, July–August 2026. Population figures reflect recent U.S. Census Bureau estimates for the Myrtle Beach metropolitan area.

Every seasoned Grand Strand vacationer keeps a rainy-day plan in their back pocket, and for a growing number of families, that plan has a name: the little theater tucked beside Dave & Buster’s at Broadway at the Beach, where the house lights dim, the music swells, and a man who has fooled Penn & Teller makes the impossible look easy from twenty feet away.

Magic has quietly become one of Myrtle Beach’s signature nights out. The anchor is Wonders Theatre, a multiple award-winning venue celebrating seven years as one of the area’s most distinctive live entertainment experiences — home to illusionist Charles Bach’s year-round flagship production, a rotating cast of seasonal spectaculars, and, every September, a gathering that turns Myrtle Beach into the magic capital of the Southeast for one long weekend.

Whether you’re planning a family show night, an adults-only evening of hypnotic mayhem, or timing your fall beach week to catch world-class magicians who rarely share a stage, here’s the complete local guide to magic shows in Myrtle Beach — and how to pair them with an oceanfront home base in North Myrtle Beach.

Wonders Theatre: 170 Seats, Zero Bad Ones

Big showrooms have their place on the Grand Strand, but magic works differently. Magic wants you close — close enough to watch a coin vanish from an open palm, close enough to swear the cards never left your sight. That’s the entire design philosophy behind Wonders Theatre, the intimate 170-seat venue at 1320 Celebrity Circle in the heart of Broadway at the Beach.

The room punches far above its size: professional lighting, sound, projection, and effects wrapped around a stage that no seat sits far from. Add luxurious seating and full air conditioning, and you have the Grand Strand’s best answer to a rained-out beach afternoon or a July day when the sand gets too hot by two o’clock. The theater runs both matinee and evening performances across its calendar, with family-friendly productions sharing the marquee with adults-only comedy — something for every configuration of vacation crew.

Location is the quiet bonus. Broadway at the Beach surrounds the theater with restaurants, shops, and attractions, which turns a 90-minute show into the centerpiece of a full evening out — dinner before, a lakeside stroll after, and fireworks on the right summer nights.

Charles Bach Wonders! The Flagship Show

The resident production — Wonders! A Magical Experience — is the reason the theater exists, and the resume behind it explains the polish. International illusionist Charles Bach has carried his show to 55 countries, appeared on the hit television series Penn & Teller: Fool Us, and performed for years at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and at Hollywood’s legendary Magic Castle before planting his flag at Broadway at the Beach. In 2026, area readers voted him Best Magician in a Reader’s Choice poll.

The show itself runs roughly 90 minutes and plays like a Las Vegas production scaled to an intimate room: grand illusions performed live, beautiful costumes, choreographed dancers, giant puppets, colorful lighting, comedy, and steady audience participation that regularly pulls guests onstage and sends them back to their seats with souvenirs and stories. It’s built deliberately as a show for all ages — the kind of night where the eight-year-old and the grandparents leave equally convinced they’ve seen something impossible.

Performances run year-round in the evenings with matinee options in the schedule, making it an easy add to any beach week. Current showtimes and tickets are at wonderstickets.com.

Magic at the Beach: The Weekend the Magic World Comes to Town

Once a year, the theater stops being a venue and becomes a pilgrimage site. Magic at the Beach — South Carolina’s premiere magic convention — returns September 10 through 12, 2026, drawing magicians from across the globe for three days of shows, lectures, open-mic competitions, and a dealer room set up next door at Dave & Buster’s. The talent roster spans FISM and IBM award winners, America’s Got Talent veterans, Penn & Teller: Fool Us alumni, Magic Castle regulars, and headliners from the world’s major cruise lines.

Here’s what makes it matter for regular vacationers: three of the convention’s evening shows open to the public, and each releases exactly 50 public tickets. The rest of the 170-seat room belongs to the attending magicians — meaning the general public shares the theater with the toughest, most appreciative magic audience on earth. These lineups are assembled specifically for the convention rather than pulled from a touring production, so the odds of seeing these particular combinations of performers again are slim.

Public tickets go through the convention’s official site at magicatthebeach.org, and once the 50 seats for a given night are gone, that show is sold out. Our news coverage of Magic at the Beach 2026 has the full convention details, including registration options for practicing magicians and the special hotel rates arranged for attendees.

Beyond the Illusions: Hypnosis, Candlelight, and Comedy

The magic may headline the marquee, but Wonders Theatre programs like a full variety house. Once the family show wraps and the kids head back to the beach house, the theater flips to its late-night personality: the Comedy Hypnosis Hour, an adults-only show on select nights at 9:15 PM where willing volunteers from the audience become the stars. No two nights run the same, the results range from outrageous to unrepeatable, and the show has been packing the room for six years running. It’s strictly 18 and up — a made-to-order date night or group outing while the grandparents hold down babysitting duty.

The calendar rounds out with candlelight concerts that bathe the room in the glow of live multi-sensory musical performances, plus touring comedy and specialty acts — recent bookings have ranged from internet comedy sensation Vic DiBitetto to high-tech magician and America’s Got Talent semi-finalist Trigg Watson. Checking the current lineup before your trip is worth the two minutes; the schedule rarely sits still.

The Shows That Change With the Seasons

One of the smartest things about the Wonders Theatre calendar is that it refuses to stay the same show twice. Come in October and the family production gives way to Wicked Wonders, an immersive, spine-chilling magic experience built for the Halloween season and recommended for ages 13 and up — the rare Grand Strand fright night that trades jump scares for genuine astonishment. By the holidays, the room transforms again into the Wonders of Christmas Spectacular, wrapping the illusions in full seasonal production.

For repeat Grand Strand visitors, that rotation is the point: the family that catches the flagship show in June has a completely different night waiting on their October return. It slots neatly into the rhythm of a fall vacation in North Myrtle Beach, when the beach is still warm, the crowds have thinned, and the evening entertainment calendar hits its stride.

Making a Full Show Night of Broadway at the Beach

A Wonders Theatre ticket buys more than 90 minutes of magic — it buys the excuse for a full Broadway at the Beach evening. The entertainment complex wraps around Lake Broadway with restaurants for every table’s taste, and the theater’s spot next to Dave & Buster’s means the arcade-inclined half of your group has a built-in before-or-after plan. Arrive an hour early for dinner, wander the shops, catch the show, and let the kids burn off the post-show adrenaline along the boardwalk lights before the drive home.

From North Myrtle Beach, the trip runs 20 to 30 minutes down Highway 17 or the quicker Highway 31 bypass — an easy evening loop that leaves the whole beach day untouched. Pair it with the rest of the area’s after-dark options in our guide to things to do in Myrtle Beach, and keep an eye on the Myrtle Beach events calendar for what else lands during your week.

Where to Stay: Beach by Day, Magic by Night

The formula that works: days on the quiet sands of North Myrtle Beach, evenings wherever the entertainment calls. Each of the four beach sections makes a natural home base. Windy Hill sits closest to the Highway 31 on-ramp, making it the fastest launch point for Broadway at the Beach show nights, with Crescent Beach right behind it. Ocean Drive adds the Main Street beach music scene to your evening options, and Cherry Grove Beach delivers the quietest mornings on the northern end, fishing pier included.

Group size settles the rest. An oceanfront home rental gives multi-generational crews the space to split into show-goers and beach-sitters without anyone compromising, while an oceanfront condo suits couples and smaller families building their week around a show night or two. September deserves a special mention: Magic at the Beach lands in the shoulder-season sweet spot, when rental rates ease, crowds thin, and the ocean holds its summer warmth.

Frequently Asked Questions

Your Front-Row Week Starts at the Beach

Sources: Show, venue, and convention details reported by Wonders Theatre (wonderstickets.com), Magic at the Beach (magicatthebeach.org), and Visit Myrtle Beach, August 2026. Showtimes, lineups, age policies, and ticket availability are subject to change; confirm current details with the venue before purchasing.

Every North Myrtle Beach vacation begins with the same fork in the road, usually debated over a kitchen table in Ohio or a group text in Charlotte: do we get a house or a condo? Both put the Atlantic outside your window. Both wake you with the same sunrise. And yet the two vacations feel genuinely different — different rhythms, different economics, different memories at the end of the week.

After more than sixty years of matching travelers with the right front door on this beach, we can tell you the real answer isn’t about which type is better. It’s about which type is better for your crew, this trip — and that answer shifts with your group size, your dates, your budget math, and a few honest questions about how your family actually vacations.

This guide walks the whole decision the way our reservationists do on the phone every day: the true strengths of each option, the side-by-side comparison, how the choice interacts with North Myrtle Beach’s four distinct sections, and — because it changes the arithmetic — why booking directly with a local company delivers more beach for the same money than the national listing platforms.

By the end, you’ll know exactly which search to start. Let’s settle the great house-versus-condo debate.

The Short Answer

If you want the one-paragraph version before the full tour, here it is. Choose an oceanfront home when togetherness is the point: multigenerational trips, family reunions, golf crews, any group big enough that “whose room do we gather in” becomes a question. Choose an oceanfront condo when simplicity is the point: couples, small families, shoulder-season escapes, and anyone who reads “lazy river and indoor pool” as essential vacation infrastructure. And when your group sits in the middle — eight to ten people, say — the smartest move is a ten-minute phone call, because that’s the zone where a large condo, a small house, or two units in one resort can each win depending on the week.

The Case for an Oceanfront Home

A beach house runs on a simple, powerful idea: one roof, one kitchen, one long table, everybody home. The mornings tell the story — coffee going in a real kitchen while three generations drift downstairs in no particular order, kids already in swimsuits, granddad reading on the porch with the ocean forty steps away. Nobody coordinates an elevator. Nobody texts “what floor are you on.” The vacation simply happens, together, all week.

The practical advantages stack up from there. Houses bring space no condo can match — multiple living areas so the early risers don’t wake the teenagers, dining tables that seat the whole reunion for the shrimp-boil night, and bedroom counts that climb high enough for the largest family gatherings. Many of our homes add the extras that turn a stay into an event: private pools, game rooms, and parking that welcomes the golf cart, the boat trailer, or the motorcycle crew rolling in for rally week. Along the Cherry Grove channels, a distinctive local breed of house adds floating docks, boat ramps, and fish-cleaning stations — waterfront living with your kayak launch in the backyard. And for families who won’t leave a member behind, pet-friendly homes are far easier to find than pet-friendly condos; our dog-friendly rentals list is the place to start.

The honest trade-offs: houses are the pricier headline number (though rarely per person — more on that below), most run Saturday-to-Saturday in summer, and the resort-style amenities live at the condos. A house asks you to bring the entertainment; for the groups it suits, the group is the entertainment.

The Case for an Oceanfront Condo

The condo’s superpower is effortlessness. Park once, ride the elevator up, drop the bags, and the vacation is fully operational: pool below, ocean beyond, balcony chair waiting. For a couple or a family of four, that compact perfection is exactly the right size — nothing to manage, nothing unused, the whole stay running on resort rails.

The amenity package is the other headline. North Myrtle Beach’s oceanfront resorts compete hard on extras, and guests reap the arms race: lazy rivers, outdoor pool decks, hot tubs, kiddie pools, and — the shoulder-season secret weapon — indoor heated pools that keep swim time alive on a March morning or a November evening. Towers like the Ashworth and Mar Vista Grande put luxury finishes behind the amenity decks; Prince Resort sits beside the Cherry Grove Pier with fishing outside the lobby; Crescent Shores rises over a quieter stretch of Crescent Beach sand. Condos also offer the widest budget ladder on the beach — from cozy one-bedroom efficiencies to sprawling four-bedroom penthouses — and far more flexibility on arrival days and shorter stays, which makes them the natural play for long weekends, fall festival trips, and snowbird-season escapes.

The trade-offs run opposite the house’s: less square footage per dollar, one gathering space instead of three, shared walls and elevators at check-in time on summer Saturdays, and pet policies that mostly say no. For the crews a condo fits, none of that registers — the balcony sunset covers a multitude.

Home vs. Condo: The Side-by-Side

Matching Your Choice to the Four Beach Sections

The house-or-condo question has a geography, because North Myrtle Beach’s four sections each lean a little differently. Cherry Grove Beach, up at the northern end, is the kingdom of the classic beach house — rows of stilted homes on the oceanfront and the famous saltwater channels, where the dock-equipped channel houses give boating and fishing families their natural habitat, with the pier and Boulineau’s anchoring the neighborhood. Ocean Drive mixes both types in the heart of town, where either choice puts Main Street’s restaurants, shag clubs, and the Horseshoe within a stroll — the walkable pick for festival weekends and nightlife lovers.

Crescent Beach runs quieter and residential, with condo towers like Crescent Shores sharing wide family sand with comfortable homes — the balanced middle of the market. And Windy Hill, at the south end, leans toward newer resort towers with the deepest amenity decks, all of it a five-minute hop from Barefoot Landing’s dining and shows. A good shorthand: the more your dream week sounds like docks and crab traps, look north and look at houses; the more it sounds like lazy rivers and dinner reservations, look south and look at condos; and if it sounds like Main Street music, look at Ocean Drive and take your pick.

Why Booking Direct Beats the Big Platforms

Wherever you land on house versus condo, the where you book it decision quietly moves real money and real peace of mind. The national listing platforms — Airbnb, VRBO, and their kin — layer service fees on top of the rental rate, fees that exist purely because a middleman stands between you and the property. Booking directly with the local company that actually manages the home removes that layer: the same property, without the platform’s markup.

The money is only half the argument. Direct booking means the people answering the phone have walked the property you’re asking about — they know which building’s pool is heated in March, which house’s third-floor view beats its photos, which unit suits a bad knee. It means someone local, with keys and a maintenance team, is minutes away if the air conditioner hiccups on a July afternoon — not a host three states away messaging through an app. It means access to the full inventory and the current specials, including deals that never surface on the national sites. And with a company that has served this one beach for more than sixty years, it means being a guest with a history — the kind whose favorite house gets held an extra day when next summer’s calendar opens.

Timing Your Booking: A Local’s Calendar

A little calendar wisdom stretches any rental budget. Summer’s prime Saturday-to-Saturday weeks — especially the big houses — go earliest, with returning families rebooking their favorites nearly a year out; if a specific large home for a specific July week is the dream, book the moment plans firm up. Condos forgive procrastination more generously, particularly outside the peak weeks, when flexible arrival days open up and shorter stays become easy.

The savviest money on this beach, though, is spent in the shoulders. September and October deliver the year’s warmest ocean, a packed festival calendar, and rates well below summer’s — the case our guide to a fall vacation in North Myrtle Beach makes in full. Spring golf season fills homes with foursomes, winter brings monthly snowbird value to the condo towers, and the events calendar reliably tells you which weekends will tighten first — festival overlaps like this September’s have a way of clearing the walkable inventory early. Whatever the season, the full menu of things to do in Myrtle Beach waits outside either front door.

Frequently Asked Questions

Property types, amenities, and policies vary by individual listing — confirm details for any specific property when booking. Related reading: our guides to oceanfront home rentals, oceanfront condo rentals, and planning a fall vacation in North Myrtle Beach.

Stand at the north end of Cherry Grove Beach at low tide, where the sand curls around toward the inlet, and look across the water. What you see on the far side breaks every rule of the modern Grand Strand: no houses, no piers, no umbrellas for rent. Just dunes rolling back into dark maritime forest, a beach with nothing on it but bird tracks, and three miles of coastline that looks today more or less the way the whole coast looked three centuries ago.

That is Waties Island — spelled Waties after an early colonial trader, though half the maps and most of the search bars render it Waites — roughly 1,000 acres of untouched barrier island at the absolute northern tip of South Carolina, separated from the beach chairs of Cherry Grove by the narrow ribbon of Hog Inlet. It is one of the last undeveloped barrier islands in the state, reachable only by water, and for generations it has been North Myrtle Beach’s open secret: the wilderness next door.

It’s also, quietly, the subject of one of the most significant conservation stories in South Carolina. Over the past few years, a public-private effort has been assembling the island piece by piece with a stated destination that would change the Grand Strand map: a brand-new state park. This summer brought the latest milestone, a $4 million federal grant pushing the project another 107 acres forward.

Here’s the full story — what the island is, why it never got developed, where the state park effort actually stands, and how (and how not) to experience it in the meantime.

What — and Where — Is Waties Island?

Geographically, Waties Island is the final link in South Carolina’s chain of barrier islands — the last stretch of Palmetto State sand before Little River Inlet and the North Carolina line. It runs about three miles end to end, bounded by Hog Inlet and Cherry Grove to the south, the open Atlantic on its front, and a magnificent sprawl of salt marsh and tidal creeks behind, where the island shelters the mainland of Little River Neck.

Its roughly 1,000 acres hold a complete, intact barrier island ecosystem — the kind that coastal scientists cross states to study. A wide, unraked beach gives way to natural dune fields, which roll back into shrub thicket and genuine maritime forest, all of it wrapped in productive salt marsh. Nothing has ever been built on it beyond remnants of its farming and family past. No causeway was ever laid. When a hurricane pushes water across it, the island does what barrier islands are engineered by nature to do: it absorbs the blow, shifts its sands, and carries on protecting everything behind it.

That protective function isn’t abstract for North Myrtle Beach. Waties is the flood buffer, storm shield, and nursery ground for the waters that make the Cherry Grove marsh one of the liveliest estuaries on the Strand. The island most visitors never set foot on works around the clock for the town they’re standing in.

Why It Stayed Wild: A Century of Stewardship

Every undeveloped acre on this coast has a story about the development it refused, and Waties Island’s story runs through a single family. The Boyce family and their Tilghman forebears have owned portions of the island and the adjacent mainland for more than a century, holding it through every boom that transformed the beaches to the south — the postwar cottage era, the condo tower age, the golf course gold rush. Where nearly every comparable island became a gated community or a resort, Waties simply… didn’t.

The first great act of permanence came in 1995, when Anne Tilghman Boyce placed her share of the island into conservation and education, a landmark gift made in partnership with The Nature Conservancy and Coastal Carolina University. That land became the Anne Tilghman Boyce Coastal Reserve, and today Coastal Carolina owns roughly a third of the island through its educational foundation, using it as a living laboratory where marine science students study everything from dune dynamics to nesting sea turtles.

The remainder stayed in family hands — a jigsaw of parcels across the island, the marsh, and Little River Neck — which is where the modern chapter begins.

The State Park Question: Where Things Stand

Since 2022, the Open Space Institute — a national land conservation group — has been methodically acquiring the family-held pieces of the puzzle, working with the Boyce siblings, state agencies, and an alphabet of funding sources. The running total now exceeds 600 acres protected on and around the island, and the publicly stated end game is remarkable for a coastline this developed: a new South Carolina state park paired with a Heritage Trust Preserve, managed cooperatively by the state’s parks and natural resources agencies alongside Coastal Carolina University. It would be just the third state park on the Grand Strand, joining Myrtle Beach State Park and Huntington Beach State Park — and the first new one in generations.

The most recent milestone landed this July, when South Carolina received a $4 million grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration funding the acquisition of another 107 acres on and around the island — federal recognition of what conservationists have argued for decades about the island’s ecological value.

The honest caveat, and this article insists on it: no park exists yet. There is no visitor center, no ferry, no opening date, and no announced plan for what public access will ultimately look like. Land assembly of this complexity moves in years, not seasons — a lawsuit over ownership questions already stalled the effort for a year and a half early on before being dropped. Anyone who reads a headline and expects a ranger station on the beach next summer will be disappointed. What visitors can reasonably expect is that one of the wildest places on the South Carolina coast is being permanently locked away from development, with thoughtful public access as the long-term goal. On a coast where the default answer has always been more towers, that alone is front-page news.

The Conservation Timeline

How a wild island gets saved, one parcel at a time:

Visiting Today: The Right Way to See Waties

Until a park opens, Waties Island belongs to the tides, the turtles, and the visitors willing to earn it by water. No road or bridge reaches the island; the crossing is made by kayak, paddleboard, or small boat over Hog Inlet from Cherry Grove. Under South Carolina law the beach below the high-tide line is public, and respectful day visitors have long walked that magnificent, empty strand — but everything above it, the dunes and forest and marsh, is protected reserve and private conservation land, and it stays underfoot only in the sense that you admire it from the beach.

The wise first trip is a guided one. Great Escapes Kayak Expeditions runs regular paddling tours from the Cherry Grove area — a roughly four-hour round trip through the marsh creeks and across to the island, timed to the tides by guides who read Hog Inlet the way most of us read a menu. That local knowledge matters more than it may sound: the inlet’s currents are genuinely strong, the tide swings reshape the route, and an ill-timed solo paddle can turn a pleasure trip into a long, hard slog. Experienced paddlers who go on their own should plan around slack tide, file the classic float plan with someone onshore, and pack out every scrap they pack in.

The rules of the visit are the rules of every wild beach, enforced here by conscience and by the handful of researchers who share the sand: stay off the dunes, leave the shells with living residents inside them, give nesting birds and turtle crawls a wide berth, and take nothing but photographs and that particular calm that comes from standing on a beach with no buildings on it. During summer nesting season, that care doubles — the unbroken darkness of Waties is exactly why loggerheads still choose it.

The Wildlife: Who Actually Lives There

An undeveloped barrier island on a developed coast becomes an ark, and Waties plays the role fully. Loggerhead sea turtles haul out on its dark, quiet beach each summer to nest — one of the reasons the island’s undisturbed state carries such scientific weight. Bald eagles and ospreys work the inlets, great blue herons and egrets stalk the marsh, seaside sparrows nest in the spartina, and the sandbars host wheeling congregations of shorebirds that thin out to nearly nothing on busier beaches. Bottlenose dolphins patrol Hog Inlet closely enough that kayakers sometimes share the channel with them, and the unraked beach is legendary among local shellers — the best odds on the Strand of an unbroken sand dollar lie on sand no machine ever combs.

For visitors staying in Cherry Grove, the island’s wildlife spills generously across the inlet. The same marsh system feeds the herons you’ll watch from a channel-house dock and the fish you’ll catch off the Cherry Grove Pier; a stay on the north end of town is, ecologically speaking, a stay on Waties Island’s doorstep.

Cherry Grove: The Wild Island’s Front Porch

Every wilderness needs a gateway town, and Waties Island’s is Cherry Grove Beach — the northernmost section of North Myrtle Beach, where the kayak tours launch, the inlet views begin, and the beach walk north ends at the sight of that wild shoreline across the water. A stay here puts the island trip, the pier, the saltwater channels, and Boulineau’s provisioning runs all within a few blocks; an oceanfront home rental on the north end even puts Waties in your morning-coffee sightline. Couples planning a paddle-and-relax week do just as well in an oceanfront condo anywhere in town — from Ocean Drive, with Main Street’s restaurants for the post-adventure dinner, down through Crescent Beach and Windy Hill, the whole town sits within twenty minutes of the launch.

The island trip slots naturally into a fuller North Myrtle Beach itinerary — a wild morning to balance an evening at the shag clubs, a nature day between golf rounds, the story your family tells afterward when someone asks what you did at the beach. For the rest of the menu, our guides to things to do in Myrtle Beach and the area events calendar round out the week, and fall visitors — prime paddling season, with soft light and thin crowds — should see our guide to a fall vacation in North Myrtle Beach.

And when the state park story advances — the next acquisition, the management agreement, someday an opening plan — we’ll update this page. Few developments could mean more to the future character of North Myrtle Beach than its wild neighbor staying wild, officially and forever.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conservation details verified as of August 2026 via the Open Space Institute (openspaceinstitute.org), reporting from The Post and Courier and WMBF News, and Coastal Carolina University materials on the Anne Tilghman Boyce Coastal Reserve. The state park effort is ongoing and details may change; this page will be updated as the story develops. Related reading: our guide to Cherry Grove Beach and planning a fall vacation in North Myrtle Beach.