The Great Pie Quest….
Part2
So here we go, Shar finds all the “bakeries” in the entire Myrtle area. One she even found from a My Space page. We get up the next morning, sunny, about 65 degrees. Off we go Shar, her mom, Wyatt and yours truly. Shar plugs the first address into “Vallah” (our GPS) and off the Great Pie Quest begins. We drive all the way north through the touristy areas of Myrtle, about 15 miles and make the turn left into Conway S.C. the address we are looking for no longer exists. The street addresses jump from the 500’s to 100900…. The entire area where the bakery was supposed to be is now a by-pass. Sane goes for the next 5, luckily Shar programmed “Vallah” in reverse order. Now we are heading back towards South Myrtle. Finally we find a bakery… it is ALL sugar free. It has Danish, pie and sugar free candies. We get a dozen Danish and are on our way. The pies did not look great. The next 4 are busts as well. At this point Sharon asks one of the bakery workers about pie…”sure, we nake pies… during the holidays”, “you should try Costco…. They always have pie”. Sheesh!
The Danish are pretty good, but still no pie.
The next day we decide to drive 2 hours south and west to the Florence Pecan Festival. Now being “foodies” we have watched many specials on FootTV about local food festivals and were pretty siked for attending a Pecan Festival in South Carolina.
Once we get to Florence Wally decides he is hungry, so we stop at a KFC… the first thing we hear is “yalls can’t be bringing yalls dawg up in heres”…. We told them of course we can he is a “seeing eye” dog. They were skeptical but let us stay none the less. Wally got he food, the rest of us were waiting for the Pecan Festival….maybe there would be pie….
The Pecan Festival was “interesting”. Very little Pecan stuff, one big stand from a local Pecan Farm. And yes, they had pie and everything else Pecan. Of course they wanted $15 for a pie. The festival itself was held in the center of Florence…. Picture Mayberry but in 2008. Food was abundant, corndogs, roasted corn, deep fried everything, Oreos, Twinkies, candy bars, you name it they were frying it.
There were bands at the end of each block and the festival covered about six blocks in the center of town. The bans ran the gamut, gospel to classic rock and Doo Wop.
No pie eating contests, no Pecan bake offs or best Pecan dishes. There was definitely not a dude walking around dressed up in pecan suit or a Pecan Queen. What there were, were way too many people and way too many guys running around with names like Tarik Johnson and Mohamad Smith. Oh yeah, let’s not forget the two blocks of Bubbas with all their “Classic Cars”…. Like theres not enough air pollution that we need 100 rednecks revving up uncatalytic converted engines.
I guess we won’t be attending the Florence Pecan Festival again.
The highlight of this trip was stopping at another of Alton Brown’s “Feasting on Asphalt” stops. The Route 61 Pharmacy.
In case you’re keeping score:
Diners, Drive-ins and Dives- 2
If nothing else we are eating well.
Feasting on Asphalt- 2

As we enter Myrtle, Wally states “ let’s stop by Costco. I wanna pick up some more ….” So, off to Costco for the second time in 3 days….be sure to keep score.
To be continued…..