Horry County has been one of the fastest-growing counties in the United States for most of two decades, and nearly all of that growth arrived from somewhere else — Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Michigan and Ontario, mostly. That changes what a birthday order looks like here. A great many of the addresses on this page belong to someone whose children and grandchildren are six hundred miles north, which means the person ordering has never stood in front of the house, does not know whether the front door faces the street or the fairway, and is working from an address a cousin texted them. So this page is built around getting that part right. Carolina Forest (29579) is the inland master-planned sprawl between US-501 and SC-31 where most of the families with school-age children landed, street after street of two-storey houses behind a single subdivision entrance and a lot of repeated street names. Market Common (29577) is the walkable district built on the runways and hangar aprons of the closed Myrtle Beach Air Force Base — condos and townhomes ringing Valor Park and Farrow Parkway, with a garage-first layout that hides the actual front door. Socastee and Forestbrook (29588) are the older year-round neighbourhoods inland of the Intracoastal Waterway. Surfside Beach (29575) and Garden City are grids of raised beach houses on pilings, a large share of them rented by the week. The north end (29572) holds the Dunes Club, Pine Lakes, Grande Dunes and Arcadian Shores, where a guard gate is the normal first obstacle. Briarcliffe Acres is its own small incorporated town wedged between Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach. Past the city line the same birthday runs carry on to North Myrtle Beach (29582), Little River (29566), Conway (29526 and 29527), Murrells Inlet (29576) and Pawleys Island (29585).
Then there is the heat, which decides more about a Myrtle Beach birthday delivery than traffic does. From May through September a vase left on an unshaded south-facing step is finished in well under an hour, and a foam-based design in a black car door pocket is finished faster. Both studios build with that in mind and neither will abandon an arrangement to cook, so the useful thing an out-of-town sender can do is tell us where the shade is. Screened porches and carports are everywhere in Socastee, Forestbrook and the older streets off Kings Highway, and they are the right answer — a carport is the coolest spot on most of these properties and it is out of the wind. Raised beach houses in Surfside and Garden City present a flight of exterior stairs and a ground-level entry that is often a storage room; say which one. Gated communities are the other recurring snag, and the north end has several: Grande Dunes, the Dunes Club and the Pine Lakes streets all run guard or code entry, and Prince Creek down in Murrells Inlet does the same. A gate code or a resident phone number in the notes turns a failed attempt into a delivered one. Oceanfront towers on Ocean Boulevard are a category of their own for birthdays, because a surprising number of these celebrations happen while the family is here on holiday: the handoff is at the front desk under the guest's own name and arrival date, never a room number the sender guessed. And be aware of the rental calendar — weekly vacation rentals turn over on Saturday morning across the Strand, so a Friday-evening birthday delivery to a rental is fine and a Saturday-morning one risks landing between tenants.