In the spirit of it nearly being time to get ready for trips to Wildwood…

Be Prepared!

By Rob Ascough

Although the family’s annual Wildwood vacation lasted but a week, preparation began months before we departed our driveway in Morristown, New Jersey. I had no problem with this, because that week in Wildwood was preferred to the other fifty-one comprising any given year, and getting ready for the big event made it feel so much closer when the calendar on the wall insisted it was still far off in the distance.

The kid version of me spent years filling a shoe box with Wildwood memorabilia (which I still have, by the way). There were postcards procured by scouring every boardwalk gift shop and motel lobby I could find, back when people must have felt compelled to write to loved ones with boasts of what they were doing while on vacation: See that roller coaster on the front of this postcard? I rode that roller coaster! I also collected brochures, vacation guides, coupon books, paper restaurant placemats, rearview mirror motel hang tags, and miniature golf scorecards – dated, of course, in case someone in the family later attempted to falsely claim a 1987 win at Duffer’s Challenge. Later this shoe box would come close to betraying its cardboard’s humble structural limits with a plastic bag full of beach sand that I felt guilty for swiping from between the dunes. The treasure collection was necessary, though – back when the island evolved at a glacial pace, it reminded me of all the things we’d soon be experiencing.

That’s not to say it was all fun and games, because there was legitimate business to be completed. This meant deciding selecting beach toys, including a plastic vehicle for when my father and I constructed our usual oceanfront highway by mounding a bunch of sand and molding it into a spiraling overpass-underpass. For some reason, one stands out in my mind to this day – a jet black Pontiac Trans Am (no doubt styled after Kit from Knight Rider) I repainted in vivid colors with metallic model paint. Something so dour and depressing had no place on the happy sands of the beach at the end of Sweetbriar Road – my beach vehicle needed to look joyous and friendly, or at least as joyous and friendly as could be expected of a Pontiac Trans Am.

When most kids my age were spending money on baseball cards, I was busy amassing a collection of records and cassettes representing the popular music of the time. I used these to create mix tapes – not for a girlfriend, but for my family. Taking it upon myself to decide what everyone wanted to hear, I’d record three or four tapes of music for the ride down the Parkway, from Meatloaf to The Bangles, to the popular Jackson siblings of the time. If I were to hear Janet’s Rhythm Nation today, I would immediately think back to the family station wagon idling at some GSP toll plaza, back when there were always lines of cars waiting in each lane. It’s incredible to reflect on how much time E-ZPass has trimmed from a trek on the Parkway.

As I got older, money matters took precedence in the form of currency for arcade endeavors. On the floor of my father’s closet sat a large plastic container-turned-coin bank that slowly filled throughout the year with nickels, dimes, and quarters (no pennies allowed). When the family vacation was about a week away, we’d unscrew the top and spill the contents all over the living room floor, counting the coins and putting them into rolls for use on the boardwalk. Fingers dirty as only they can be from handling hard currency, we’d visualize our victories: Finding the machine with way too many nickels teetering on the edge. Dimes dropping into a poker machine and being dealt a mythical five-of-a-kind. Quarters that would make possible that elusive perfect game of Skee-Ball. While my mother, brother and I handled this task, my father would go to the bank and return with a huge wad of cash. In Wildwood, he’d peel off bills like a mobster – checking into the motel, paying the dinner bill, and renting the boat for crabbing. This was back in the day when a lot of businesses didn’t accept credit cards (and a quick glance around the place today suggests a sizable portion of Wildwood business owners still haven’t learned of this fascinating new breakthrough in payment technology).

Years later, the fun of preparing for the vacation transformed into a mundane task. Unsure of what my brother and I would want to wear, my mother left it up to us to decide our clothes and pack our suitcases. Combined with more complicated matters like Game Boys (batteries!), cell phones (chargers!), and puberty (shaving equipment!), planning was as much of a chore as motivation. Because as a teenager, there were crushes and friends to leave behind in Morristown, and as crazy as it is to admit, there were years the family vacation in Wildwood felt as though it got in the way of other priorities. How nice it would be to get back some of that time lost focusing on things comparatively inconsequential… how nice it would be to only have to worry about having proof of winning a round of golf at Duffer’s Challenge in 1987.