“The ice cream truck that circles the campground at 4 PM plays a song nobody can identify, and by the second day every kid in the park is humming it.”

Highway 90 out of Conway doesn't prepare you for anything. It's a two-lane stretch of dollar stores and Baptist churches and hand-painted signs for boiled peanuts, the kind of road that makes you check your GPS twice because surely you missed a turn somewhere. The address says Myrtle Beach, but the landscape says otherwise — flat coastal plain, loblolly pines pressing in from both sides, the occasional mobile home park with a trampoline in the yard. You're fifteen miles from the boardwalk and the SkyWheel and all those seafood buffets advertising king crab legs at prices that should concern you. Out here, the air smells like warm pine straw and somebody's charcoal grill getting started early.

The entrance to Sun Outdoors sits between a gas station and a stretch of nothing in particular. You turn in expecting a campground. What you get is a campground that spent some money — enough to blur the line between roughing it and not roughing it at all, which is the whole premise of the word glamping, a word that still makes some people flinch. Fair enough. But the families unloading minivans in the parking area don't seem conflicted about it. They seem like people who want their kids to run around outside for three days without anyone looking at a screen, and they've found the right place for that.

The tent with a lock on it

The accommodations range from RV hookups to safari-style tents to tiny cabins that look like they were designed by someone who spent too long on Pinterest — in a good way. The glamping tents are the move. Canvas walls, a real bed with actual sheets, a small porch with two camp chairs, and a string of lights that makes the whole thing look like a wedding reception for two. Inside, it's surprisingly solid. The mattress isn't a hotel mattress, but it's not an air mattress either — it's that middle ground where you sleep well enough and wake up feeling like you did something slightly adventurous, even though there's a mini-fridge three feet away.

What you hear at night: frogs. An extraordinary number of frogs. The Waccamaw River runs nearby, and the lowcountry wetlands announce themselves after dark with a chorus that starts around 9 PM and doesn't quit. If you're a light sleeper, bring earplugs. If you're not, it becomes the kind of white noise that makes you sleep deeper than you have in months. Morning is quieter — just birds and the distant hum of a maintenance cart making rounds.

The pool complex is the center of gravity here, and it's legitimately good. A lazy river loops around a splash pad, and there's a waterslide tall enough that adults use it without pretending they're chaperoning a child. The whole setup feels like a small water park that happens to be surrounded by tents and RVs instead of a parking garage. On a hot Saturday — and every Saturday between May and September in this part of South Carolina is hot — you could spend the entire day here and never feel like you're missing the actual beach.

“The families who come here aren't avoiding Myrtle Beach. They're just not in a hurry to get there.”

The honest thing: the bathhouse situation is shared, and it's fine but not great. Hot water is reliable, the facilities are clean, but you're walking across a gravel path in flip-flops at 7 AM with your towel over your shoulder, and that's either part of the charm or it isn't. I found myself timing my showers to avoid the post-pool rush around 5 PM, which felt like a small tactical victory. The WiFi works near the main lodge but gets spotty at the tent sites, which — depending on your relationship with your phone — is either a problem or the whole point.

For food, the on-site camp store sells firewood, s'mores kits, and the kind of snacks that exist only in vacation contexts — gummy worms the size of actual worms, bags of Takis, freeze pops by the box. But if you want a real meal, drive ten minutes north on 90 to Conway proper and find Rivertown Bistro on Main Street, where the shrimp and grits are done right and the sweet tea comes in glasses big enough to swim in. Conway's small downtown is worth an hour of walking — a riverwalk along the Waccamaw, a few antique shops, a mural of a catfish that's either ironic or sincere, impossible to tell.

The thing nobody mentions on the website: there's a gem mining sluice near the activity pavilion where kids pan for rocks from a bag of seeded dirt. It costs a few dollars extra and it is, objectively, a scam — you're sifting through purchased gravel for polished stones that came from a warehouse. But I watched a six-year-old find a piece of amethyst the size of a grape and hold it up like she'd struck gold in the Klondike, and her father's face was worth every penny of whatever that bag cost. That's the energy here. Nobody's pretending this is wilderness. They're pretending just enough.

Packing up

Driving out on the last morning, Highway 90 looks different. The dollar stores are the same, the boiled peanut signs haven't moved, but you notice things you missed coming in — a roadside stand selling local honey, a hand-lettered sign for a church fish fry on Friday nights, a man in a lawn chair under a pecan tree doing absolutely nothing with great commitment. The beach is still fifteen miles east, and some of the families from the resort are heading there now, coolers loaded, towels piled in backseats. But the strange thing is, you don't feel like you missed it. You feel like you found the part of Myrtle Beach that doesn't need the ocean.

Glamping tents at Sun Outdoors start around $120 a night in peak summer, less in shoulder season. RV sites and basic tent spots run cheaper. What that buys you is a pool your kids won't want to leave, frogs loud enough to replace your sleep app, and a reason to discover Conway before everyone else does.