If there is a town with kitsch as the central design premise, it is Myrtle Beach.

As a kid, I’d always wanted to go there. All my friends went there during the summer, and for us southwest Virginians, it was at least a seven-hour journey. It was not a place where one merely spent the weekend.

I finally went to Myrtle Beach this weekend for a middle school conference. It was everything I expected.

All decor seemed to have a heavy-handed marine theme, especially for the restaurants

and the stores. My companions and I wondered about the warmth of being invited into a shark’s mouth for a little shopping

Given the fact that all such shops are peddling to tourist, it seems somehow perfectly appropriate.

The kitsch extended all the way to the oceanfront, with hotels painted colors that only rarely occur in nature.

And then there were the mini-golf courses. We counted at least twelve on the main road, each with a different theme applied to the same goal: knock a golf ball through some obstacle.

“Who knew that the market could support this number of courses,” I muttered as we passed by yet another.

But we weren’t there for entertainment but for education, and we all received enough information to make us wish we could turn back the calendar to the beginning of the year and start again. In that sense — as well as the collection of mini-golf shots — it was a greatly successful weekend.