Ocean City, Maryland or Myrtle Beach?

Both resorts exist for the beach, but Myrtle Beach has more of it and longer to enjoy it. The Grand Strand runs for about 100km, against Ocean City's single 16km band. The water is warmer and the surf is gentler, and the shore changes from the towers and piers in the centre to the dune-backed state park beaches around Surfside and Garden City.

Ocean City's sand is soft and wide, with public access at the end of nearly every street and lifeguard stands along its whole length. The sea is cooler and has more surf, which is better for bodyboarding. For empty beach, the undeveloped shore of Assateague is only a short drive away.

Neither place is somewhere you travel for food, and they are about level, but the seafood has a different regional accent. In Myrtle Beach the best meals are outside town, at the waterfront restaurants of Murrells Inlet and in the lightly battered Calabash style over the North Carolina line, with Lowcountry shrimp and grits and she-crab soup on many menus. On the strip itself the eating is mostly buffets and pancake houses.

Ocean City's meal to have is a mound of steamed blue crabs with Old Bay, eaten with mallets. On the boardwalk there are vinegar fries, caramel popcorn, taffy and frozen custard, much of it from long-running family businesses.

Culture is thin in both, but Myrtle Beach has the better day out. Brookgreen Gardens sets American figurative sculpture among live oaks on a former rice plantation, with exhibits on the people enslaved there. Next door is Atalaya, the Moorish-style winter house in Huntington Beach State Park.

In Ocean City the boardwalk itself is the main heritage, along with the Life-Saving Station Museum and the hand-carved carousel at the inlet. You will have seen all of it in an afternoon.

The two are broadly level and both go quiet out of season, but the evenings feel different. Myrtle Beach's late nights centre on the big entertainment complexes, with themed bars and dance clubs. It also has something Ocean City lacks: the shag, the Carolina beach dance, still danced in long-standing clubs on Main Street in North Myrtle Beach.

In Ocean City the signature is the sprawling open-air bars on the bayside, with sand floors, rum drinks and sunset crowds. After dark the crowd moves to the line of dance bars and sports bars along the Coastal Highway.

Both are flat coastlines with no hills or real hiking, and there is not much between them. The difference is in what you see. Ocean City has Assateague, where wild ponies graze among dunes and pine woods, there is kayaking in the back bays, and it is a serious base for offshore marlin fishing.

Around Myrtle Beach the wildlife is more southern. There are alligators and herons on the marsh boardwalks of Huntington Beach State Park and cypress swamps for paddling on the Waccamaw River. The dozens of golf courses along the Strand are a draw no Maryland resort can match.

Myrtle Beach has the stronger trip out of town in Charleston, about two hours south, with its antebellum streets and harbour forts. Closer to home, Georgetown's old rice port and Wilmington's riverfront add variety.

Ocean City's surroundings are a string of small towns: Berlin's historic main street, the pony village of Chincoteague, and Lewes, from where the ferry crosses to Victorian Cape May. They are pleasant places, but there is no city of Charleston's weight within easy reach.

Both are classic American family resorts and very evenly matched, but the style differs. Myrtle Beach leans on its resort hotels, with lazy rivers and kiddie pools, plus a large aquarium, a wooden roller coaster and the observation wheel on the boardwalk.

Ocean City feels more old-fashioned. It has two amusement parks on the boardwalk with arcades and a historic carousel, and a lifeguarded beach close to every condo. One timing note for each: avoid spring break weeks in Myrtle Beach and early June, when graduating teenagers arrive, in Ocean City.

Ocean City is much easier to manage. It is a narrow island strip with the beach a few minutes' walk from almost anywhere, a town bus running the length of the highway in summer and a tram along the boardwalk. If you stay near the sea, the car can stay parked for days.

Myrtle Beach spreads along roughly 100km of multi-lane highway with few pavements, and buses are of little use to visitors. Apart from strolls around the boardwalk blocks or along the sand itself, you will drive to nearly everything, often in slow summer traffic.

Myrtle Beach offers far more shopping. It has outlet centres at both ends of the city, waterfront complexes that combine shops with attractions, the Market Common on the old air base, and sweetgrass baskets sold by the road to the south.

Ocean City's shopping is mostly a seaside sideline: T-shirt and surf shops, fudge and taffy makers on the boardwalk, and a single outlet centre across the bridge on the mainland.

Myrtle Beach is the cheaper of the two, mainly because it has so many rooms. Outside July and long weekends, oceanfront condos with kitchens can be remarkably cheap.

Ocean City charges more on summer weekends, and a crab feast adds up quickly. The savings come from older motels a few blocks back, condos shared with a group, and coming in late May or September. In both places you will be paying American prices for meals and a car.

Myrtle Beach has more to fill an evening. Several large theatres put on country, gospel and Christmas revues, there are dinner shows with knights or pirates, and touring acts play the main entertainment complex. None of it is serious drama, but it is polished.

Ocean City has less: touring comedians and tribute bands at the convention centre theatre, plus free summer concerts at the boardwalk bandstand.

Neither has a spa or bathing tradition, though Myrtle Beach gives a little more chance of real rest. Its golf resorts and oceanfront hotels have treatment rooms, and the quiet beach village of Pawleys Island to the south slows things right down.

In Ocean City, rest means the condo stretches at the northern end and an early walk on an empty beach in the shoulder months.