I love this mystic little village...go there often to roam…read more.. Have eaten with regulars at the main drag locals hang out...good fresh seafood...and way friendly folks... The place calls me...love the spirits that abound... Nice gift shop with nautical items...and a nice chat about the history of this shrimp village...the lore...and tales of Hugo... Hidden gem...short drive...

If you really want to hear about it, I'll tell you, but it isn't one of those phony travel…read moremagazines where everything looks like a picture postcard and everybody's grinning way back then, which was when? . ​it was Back in 2010, I ended up in this tiny place called McClellanville. (The McClellanville Dinerbis AWESOME!) It's sitting right off Highway 17, squeezed somewhere between Myrtle Beach and Charleston. Myrtle Beach is pure commercial hell, full of mini golf courses, neon lights, alligator heads and tourist phonies driving around in vehicles dricen in part by android. Charleston is full of old-money snobs pretending it's still 1860, I lived there for over a decade and I'm certainly not a poor guy. But McClellanville was just kinda sitting there as i drive by, quiet as a damn graveyard. It was then. ​The first thing you notice are these massive live oak trees everywhere, draped in all this Spanish moss. It makes the whole town look sort of sad and ancient, like something out of a book you were supposed to read for English class but didn't. You drive down Pinckney Street, and it's just these old, white wooden houses with big porches. Nobody's out there trying to sell you a souvenir T-shirt or a plastic alligator, which was about the only good thing about it. ​I walked down to the water, where they've got these shrimp boats docked along Jeremy Creek. It smelled like salt, mud, and diesel fuel, but in a real way, not like those fake seafood restaurants where they spray artificial ocean mist to make you spend twenty bucks on fried clams. There were a couple of old salty guys in boots hauling nets and working on their rigs. They didn't even look at me, which suited me fine. They were actually working for a living instead of putting on a show for tourists. ​I ended up getting a bite to eat at this little diner spot near the highway, T.W. Graham's, I think it was called. It was tiny, and the floor creaked like mad. I sat at a table and ordered a bowl of She crab soup and some fried shrimp. The lady who brought it out called me "honey," which usually makes me want to vomit because it's so fake, but she actually meant it. She was just this nice, tired old lady who looked like she'd been frying shrimp since the invention of the wheel. And I'll tell you, the food was actually good. It wasn't fancy, but it didn't pretend to be something it wasn't, which is rare as hell. ​What killed me about McClellanville back in 2010 was just how quiet it was. There weren't any billboards, no traffic jams, no synchronized light shows. Just dirt roads running into the salt marsh, a few old churches under the trees, and the sound of water slapping against the wooden docks. It's the kind of place that makes you feel sort of lonely, but a nice kind of lonely, if you know what I mean. Like you could just sit under one of those big oak trees, watch the shrimp boats come in, and never have to talk to another phony as long as you live. However, There's not much that McClellanville has in comparison to Charleston, SC.