The West has Las Vegas, Florida has Orlando, and South Carolina has Myrtle Beach. There’s no Bellagio Resort nor Magic Kingdom here, but Myrtle Beach remains the number one travel destination in the state, with more tourists than even Charleston.

Unlike Charleston, you’ll find precious little history here. With several theme parks, 100 golf courses, 50 miniature golf courses, over 2,000 restaurants—not to mention miles of beautiful shoreline—Myrtle Beach is built for all-out vacation enjoyment. The hot, hazy height of the summer also marks the busy season on the Strand. Its long main drag, Kings Highway (a.k.a. Business U.S. 17), is packed full of families on the go eager for more swimming, more shopping, more eating, and just plain more.

While to many people simply uttering the words “Myrtle Beach” conjures an image of tacky, downscale people doing tacky, downscale things, that’s becoming a more outmoded stereotype by the day. Certainly tacky is still very much in vogue here, but an influx of higher-quality development, both in accommodations and in entertainment value, has lifted the bar significantly.

Rather than slumming in a beat-up motel, quaffing PBR on the beach, and loading up on $2 T-shirts like in the “good old days,” a typical Myrtle Beach vacation now involves a stay in a large condo apartment with flat screens, a full kitchen, and a sumptuous, palmetto-lined pool, dining at the House of Blues, having drinks at the Hard Rock Café, stops at high-profile attractions like Ripley’s Aquarium, and shopping at trendy retailers like Anthropologie and Abercrombie & Fitch.

The Grand Strand on which Myrtle Beach sits—a long, sandy peninsula stretching 60 miles from Winyah Bay to the North Carolina border—has also been a vacation playground for generations of South Carolinians. Unlike Hilton Head to the south, where New York and New Jersey accents are more common than a Lowcountry drawl, Myrtle Beach and the Grand Strand remain largely home-grown passions, with many visitors living within a few hours’ drive.

Despite the steady increase of money and high-dollar development in the area, its strongly regional nature works to your advantage in that prices here are generally lower than in Vegas or Orlando.

To the south of Myrtle proper lies the understated, affluent, and relaxing Pawleys Island, with nearby Murrells Inlet and its great seafood restaurants. Unique, eclectic Brookgreen Gardens hosts the largest collection of outdoor sculpture in America, with one-of-a-kind Huntington Beach State Park literally right across the street.

Even further south, in the northern quarter of the Lowcountry proper, you’ll find a totally different scene: the remnants of the Carolina rice culture in quaint old Georgetown and the haunting antebellum mansions at Hampton Plantation and Hopsewee Plantation.

The Best of the Grand Strand

• Broadway at the Beach
• Barefoot Landing
• Ocean Drive Beach
• Carolina Opry
• Brookgreen Gardens
• Huntington Beach State Park
• Hampton Plantation

Getting to the Grand Strand

The Myrtle Beach area is served by the fast-growing Myrtle Beach International Airport (1100 Jetport Rd., 843/448-1589, www.flymyrtlebeach.com, airport code MYR), which hosts Continental, Delta, Northwest, Southern Skyways, Spirit, U.S. Airways, and United.

Unusually for South Carolina, a state which is exceptionally well-served by the U.S. Interstate Highway system, the main route into this area is the smaller U.S. 17, which runs north-south—with a parallel business spur—from Georgetown on up to the North Carolina border. The approach from the west is by U.S. 501, called Black Skimmer Trail as it approaches Myrtle Beach.

The local Greyhound Bus Lines (511 7th Ave. N., 843/231-2222) terminal is in “downtown” Myrtle Beach.