Long Bay Club

Myrtle Beach is hailed as the “Golf Capital” of the U.S. You have a huge list of options if you plan on hitting the greens. If that isn’t you style there are elaborate miniature golf courses with giant steaming skulls, broken hull ships and mechanical alligators awaiting you.

I had a chance to do some coverage of Long Bay Club course. The weather, which had been threatening rain earlier, opened up and allowed the bright rays through. Meeting up at the pro shop I was brought on a brief tour. I recorded my guide on a lapel mic and got good footage. I’m pretty amazed at the precarious climbs those little golf carts can master!

I closed my tour at the golf school. The head instructor had played the PGA tour for 14 years. Although my knowledge of the sport is pretty sparse, it was pretty cool to be doing this segment. He, in the left side of the screen, with the range behind him, talking about the distinctive qualities of his school. There were 3 students there working on their putting, driving and general technique. I got some cool shots of the action, which included the conditioning workout equipment, specific to the sport. Ah, that sun felt so nice!

My next appointment was getting a tour of the Hard Rock Park theme park. Having opened this past Friday, the park was practically empty save the employees. But the park is really one of a kind! Why something like this hasn’t existed until now is quite surprising. It is divided into different segments, each representing a different genre of rock. There are themes which include southern rock, reggae, beach and rockabilly. My personal fav was the British Invasion. As can be imagined, each park had the culture of the music incorporated into the rides and architecture. There were spinning British taxis, round-abouts, the crosswalk at Abbey Road, the power plant with the Pink Floyd floating pig and even a bouncy mosh pit, one for kids, one for adults. We went into the Moody Blues psychedelic ride, full of images from Albums (I could only identify that cool wizard with boy cover from Every Good Boy Deserves Favor) and other 60’s-ish imagery. The 3-D glasses helped quite a bit and I’m sure some other mood alteration would help even more.

As you walked through each of the parks there was live musicians playing quite well and all other sorts of imaginative characters, such as a man on stilts, 60’s Go-Go girls and a random punk character. There were impressive roller coasters as well, the biggest being the Led Zepplin one, which looked like it could easily compete with the Arrowsmith one at Disney.

This is one place that I would plan to spend some time at had I some leisure time. Hmm, I might just see if that will fit in. We’ll see.

Another cool experience was seeing two Harrier jumpjets low-flying towards the airbase. How fitting that they were flying over the British section. (The Harrier is a product of Britain and used by our Marines. They can fly vertical and horizontal by pitching their jets. Good gosh! They are truly the loudest jet you will here!) I’ve also seen Ospreys flying up the coast. They are planes with giant props that can rotate forward to fly like a plane and upwards to land like a helicopter. (We just sent them into combat for the first time in Afghanistan.)

The bummer of the day was the cancellation of my backwoods river tour. As it turns out, my guide couldn’t get his boat started. I could tell he was as equally disappointed as myself. Although I was looking forward to that more than anything, it’s best to make most of the situation. I got to see that extremely cool park!