Sparky's Favorite Place To Shop

One of the areas in my territory I cover is Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It is a very eclectic area with dotted with everything from t-shirt shops to Vegas style dinner shows. If you are into water slide parks and miniature golf, then Myrtle Beach is your kind of place. If full size golf is more your style, you have your pick of 76 different courses.

But what is a tourist town without a few hundred souvenir shops. It can be so confusing to the casual visitor as to where exactly to go to get the best deal on a snow glob or fudge. That’s why our favorite place to shop of course is – Sparky’s!

Sparky’s is actually located in Marion, SC on US 501 about 45 miles outside of Myrtle Beach. The best part is you pass right by if you are coming off Interstate 95. You can get your shopping done before you blow your budget in Myrtle Beach or grab that last minute trinket before heading home.

So if you are looking for boots or beads, moccasins or magnets, shark’s teeth or sand castles – then Sparky's is for you. If you don’t want a car load of kids on a sugar high for that long trip home, don’t forget the sugar free/low carb fudge.

Just be careful as you walk around inside, the floors are not real even.

How Sweet It Is!

We often hear the term "The Sweet Spot” when it comes to sports. When Arod connects on the sweet spot of the bat can send a baseball over the Green Monster in Fenway Park. You can hear when Tiger hits the sweet spot of his driver, sending that little white orb down the middle of finely manicured fairway at Pebble Beach.

After driving Sparky now for 3 months, he too has a sweet spot when it comes to saving fuel. Most of my driving is on the highway and it looks like 65-67 miles per hour is the sweet spot for getting the most out of a gallon of gasoline. Creep up close to 70 and beyond and the fuel savings begin to drop. The picture above was taken with the cruise control set driving on a level stretch of road and is typical of what I see all the time. Who would have ever imagined you could get 25 MPG from a large luxury SUV that seats eight.

So want does that extra 5 mph mean? For a 165 mile trip from Charlotte to Raleigh, it’s an extra 20 minutes. To go from Charlotte to visit Daytona Beach will take less than a full tank of gas and will add less than extra hour to your trip.

What’s the rush? Enjoy the scenery.

Anybody Here Seen a Hybrid?

For decades the area from Charlotte, NC to Greenville, SC thrived with many mills spinning cotton into everything from towels to underwear. Because of competition from abroad these companies one by one closed and shifted production overseas, taking those jobs with them. As you travel down interstate 85 just outside Spartanburg, SC you can see a sprawling manufacturing facility owned by BMW. They are celebrating their 15th year in this facility, and it has brought needed jobs to the area hard hit when the clothing industry closed shop.

BMW manufactures the Z4 sports car as well as the X5 and X6 sport utility vehicles at this facility. I was visiting our Cadillac dealers in the area this week and thought I’d stop by to take a look at the BMW X5 Hybrid, after all BMW and other European manufacturers are known for building state of the art vehicles using the latest technology.

Guess what, BMW doesn’t offer a Hybrid!

The BMW X5 is offered with a 6 Cylinder, a V8 and a diesel. I went to the BMW website to collect some information about these vehicles. The X5 48i power plant is a 4.8L V8 that puts out 350 hp. They point out on the website the vehicles gets 19 mpg on the highway. To get the rest of the story, you have to go to the EPA website. According to the www.fueleconomy.com website and what BMW doesn’t tell you on their website is that the X5 requires premium fuel. The Escalade Hybrid requires regular unleaded.

The BMW X5’s combined fuel economy rating is only 16 while the Hybrid 2WD is 20 mpg. Scroll down to another post and you will see I achieved 21.9 mpg with mixed city/highway driving. A new feature of the fuelecononmy.gov website is they list the cost to drive 25 miles. For the X5 48i it will cost you $4.41. To take that same 25 mile trip in the Escalade Hybrid would cost you $3.32.


Sorry BMW, the best car wins - Cadillac Escalade Hybrid.