A North Myrtle New Year

Tuesday, December 30, 2025

To celebrate New Year's, Brugger and I usually go... somewhere... more often than not with friends. This year, we'd settled on North Myrtle Beach, including special guest stars Terry & Beth and Bob & Yvonne. As it turned out, Bob & Yvonne couldn't get away on Tuesday with the rest of us, so they opted to come down on Wednesday morning.

Brugger and I took off about 9:30 a.m. this morning, bound for a nice condo called Crescent Sands we'd found in North Myrtle. On a previous trip southward, we'd stopped for lunch at La Cabana Mexican Restaurant in Rockingham, NC, which was really excellent, so we visited it again this time. Again, excellent. I highly recommend their margaritas.

I snagged a handful of geocaches along the way, and we rolled into our lodgings at the beach about 4:00 p.m. Terry & Beth had just arrived themselves, so we opened a couple of bottles of wine—the really good wine—and generally made merry. Just before sunset, I hoofed it up the beach to find a cache. Done and done. We enjoyed some fabulous smoked pulled pork for dinner, courtesy Terry & Beth's son, Brian, and then spent the evening shooting all kinds of shit. As of now, as it's closing on midnight, we're about shit-shot out, and our beds are calling us loudly.

 

Till tomorrow.

Wednesday, December 31, 2025

I was up and at 'em first thing this morning, heading into the wilds of North Myrtle for some caching—after a bucket of coffee, of course. I set my sights on two relatively nearby hides. I found one; the other one, a puzzle cache, was missing a vital piece of information for the final coordinates, so it was, unfortunately, a bust. The scenery was cool, at least.

Shortly, I got back to Crescent Sands, Bob & Yvonne arrived. We had a fairly massive charcuterie spread for lunch, courtesy of Beth, Kimberly, and Yvonne, along with a few lovely beverages (Dark & Stormies for Brugger and me). During the afternoon, I went trucking around the long outdoor corridors to get in my daily steps and burn off the lunch drink. It was pretty danged cold out there, I can tell you.

 

Toward the end of the afternoon, we gathered ourselves up and headed to Wine Therapy, a nice little wine bar a couple of miles up the road. It was happy hour, so we sampled several wines, all of which were very good, and some were even better.

 

We had reservations for 6:00 p.m. at The Brentwood Restaurant in Little River, not far up the road, so we arrived right on time and had a fine feast for our last dinner of 2025. I had escargot, duck confit, and bread pudding, with a very good Willamette Pinot Noir to accompany. I think everyone was satisfied with their choices, and our servers were excellent. They've been implementing a new payment system, though, and it didn't work properly, so we had to spend a fair while afterward trying to sort things out. I think it's all good, but if not, I think everything will be made right. (This was NOT a cheap dinner.)

I picked up a nearby cache afterward, and then we retired to Crescent Sands, where we played dice games and generally made merry for most of the evening. A little before midnight, Ms. B. and I went walkies on the beach, though we found neither fog nor fireworks, which have traditionally been the hallmarks of New Year's Eve at the beach. It was frigid and windy out yonder, so we didn't walk far.

At the strike of midnight, we old folks enjoyed a champagne toast and then crashed for the night. Happy New Year.

Thursday, January 1, 2026 Bob & Yvonne made a fantastic breakfast of bacon, eggs, and toast this morning, and talk about hitting the spot. It hit the spot, yes. Afterward, I ventured out on the caching trail, i.e., south toward Myrtle Beach proper. The highlight was a long walk on the East Coast Greenway, where I found three caches and a couple of cool sights—a large fossil rock and a big tree trunk carved into a bench, labeled "Caution." I found it amusing. At the end of it all, I found eight caches, which, for me, cleans out most of the Myrtle Beach area, except for several way down south toward Surfside. I expect I'll have an opportunity to hunt those on a future trip—and it'd be nice if some new ones come out between now and then.

L: Interesting fossil rock found along the trail; R: My first signed log of 2026

Don't sit on THAT bench!

Once back at Crescent Sands, I had a wee lunch, courtesy of Yvonne, who made some ham & cheese sliders. Soon, the women all went shopping, leaving Bob, Terry, and me to our own devices. These devices included going to a nearby liquor store and buying Bloody Mary fixings. We took advantage of those and made Bloody Marys. Twice over.

During this little spell of mellow time, I made reservations at a nice VRBO in Providence, RI, in August, when Kim and I will be heading up to Necronomicon and very likely Newport.

 

For dinner, we opted for Landshark Bar & Grill at nearby Barefoot Landing, a resort area where we spent many good times in years past with my late, much-lamented friend Bridgett and her husband, Gerry. Dinner was very enjoyable—good food, drinks, and service.

 

And so that pretty much completed our New Year's adventure. In general, this trip turned out to be fairly low-key; a bit more mellow than some in recent years. All in all, though, this made for a welcome respite from some of the lunacy in our "normal" day-to-day states of being.

 

May 2026's light shine bright for all of us.