Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

I always wanted to play this old-school mini-golf course in Surfside, across from the old Wild Water & Wheels, but in the event we usually ended up at one closer to Pawleys. Still, you really haven't had the beach golf experience unless you've played a course with an octopus!

The course was opened in 1989, making it a 34 year run. However, it sounds like the current plan is (or at least was) to build two new courses in the space, so we'll have to see what happens. As of December of 2023, the place had been razed down to the ground.

Here is a story about it from WPDE, and also one from WBTW

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Sol was the follow-on in this space (which was built as a Sam's Corner hotdog place) to the idiosyncratically named Joe Loves Lobster Rolls.

It was a rather upscale Mexican place, the kind where they don't have the items you expect, and you don't get free chips & salsa. In the event, I only ate there once, with my college roommate & his wife after we had taken in an evening at Nights Of A Thousand Candles. The only thing I saw on the menu that appealed to me was the Chile Rellenos, which were fine, but on the whole for that type of concept, I prefer Luna in Murrells Inlet.

One thing I did notice driving by in the years after that, was that the hours of the place were rather unusual, and they tended to take the winter completely off. The Sun News has the story on the closing. The given reason is that the rent in this spot is too high, which seems odd as it is a building which has had trouble holding restaurants, and it is a bit off the beaten path. At any rate, the owner hopes to re-open somewhere on the Grand Strand.

I got a late start to this year's Nights Of A Thousand Candles because a) I'm slack, and b) It was raining a bit earlier, but on getting there, found it dry, and the warmest of any of the years I have been there. There have been a number of years that it has been so cold I could barely take pictures since I couldn't feel the camera buttons, but this year I hardly needed a sweater, and the new "S'mores" pits were actually a bit too hot.

The basic theme of candles & lights in trees remains the same, but there are always a few new setups, this year's lighted bottles, for instance to keep things fresh, and I always highly enjoy it. The festival continues through New Years, and if you have a chance to check it out, you really should.

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To my memory, I only ate at Scatori's once, probably about five years ago, and it was fine, though not any better than my normal Strand pizza venues. I did think whenever I heard of it that the name was a bit unfortunate.

The Sun News says that the place had been open 15 years, which would have made it an early storefront in this shopping center, which I still think of as 'new' itself. The chef, who featured on TV's Cutthroat Kitchen has gone on to West Virgina to run a food truck which seems like an odd progression, but I guess that's what he wanted to do.

Both news articles say that Scatori's was sold in January (though it did not close then), but it appears that as of yet, the new owners have not done anything to the interior setup or furnishings.

(Hat tip to commenter Dan R)

I'm not a golfer, though some of my friends are very into the game. That said, I always thought it would be neat to ride the cable-car gondola across the waterway here at the Waterway Hills Golf Club.

This article on the closing of the club says it was designed by Robert Trent Jones and opened in 1975. As it closed in 2015, that's a 40 year run, which is not bad given the pace of change on the Grand Strand. The course was purchased by the company owning the adjacent Grande Dunes, but it appears to me that as of yet, nothing has been built on the former course.

You can see a picture taken from a gondola here. Also, I am going to try something new (for me) here. Google Streeview often has images I am unable to match, as they preserve things that have been long torn down in their year-by-year views of the same spot. My assumption had been that I could link to those, but not embed them, but in looking at the actual terms of use, it appears that embedding is OK. So, below I am embedding an image from June of 2013, which shows the course in operation, and a gondola en-route. You can click on the embiggen square to get fullscreen.

Looking at other Streetview images, I can say that the cable car infrastructure was torn down sometime between January and July of 2019.

This was the Fatz location in Camden. As of 10 September 2023, there is still muzak playing on the patio (as was the case for the Florence location. This building is on a nice parcel very convenient to I-20, so I suspect something will move in before long.

Here's another former Fatz, this one on US-501 in Conway on the main drag towards the beach.

Google reviews suggest this was re-purposed as an Asian buffet sometime around 2019.

The Florence Fatz Cafe still has a billboard on I-95, and the music in the foyer is still playing, but like all the rest, this location is now history.

Apparently the Southern 500 had just been run, and I had a heck of a time getting out of here and back onto I-95!

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