Oh That Wildwood Day

My husband and I passed a milestone this weekend. We celebrated our 45th wedding anniversary. Where does the time go?

Last February, when I was elbow deep in executrix work, my husband saw an ad for a two-week cruise of the Norwegian fjords. During our three years in Germany, we spent a week in Oslo, but we were schlepping an eight-month-old baby with us and didn't want to take the time to travel across the country. We'd save it for another trip.

And here we were, a mere thirty-nine years later, considering the possibility. We made reservations for a cruise in September. We assumed that by then we'd be finished with all the estate duties (we almost are) and would be due for a great get-away (we still are). It would be our anniversary celebration.

It was another example of our innate, spectacularly awful sense of timing. We signed up exactly two days before news of the corona virus hit. We dithered for a few days, making excuses. How bad could it be? And we weren't going for months.

We cancelled our reservations.

As our anniversary approached, we wanted to do something, but travel was still out. I have great memories of vacations at the Jersey shore when I was young and thought a visit to the Boardwalk in Wildwood would be a fun trip down memory lane.

One big surprise was that the ocean seemed to be further away. It's been a long time, but I'm pretty sure we didn't have to walk that far to get to the water. There was now some parking on the beach and there were dune buggy "taxis" you could take from the edge of the street out to the water. Either we're a lot lazier than we used to be, or the beach had been enlarged.

A pleasant surprise was that at 11:00 AM an announcement was made asking everyone to stand for the national anthem. I was happy to see that everyone stopped what they were doing and stood. This was followed, very appropriately, by Bobby Rydell's "Wildwood Days."

The Boardwalk still had pizza and fudge and salt water taffy, but no boardwalk fries. That was always a staple. The amusement piers featured some new, even scarier rides. I think people are crazier than they used to be. Would you get in a plastic sphere that was raised up 300 feet and then bounced up and down by two cables? I kept picturing the disaster movie scenario where one of the cables broke and the sphere went flying into the people on the roller coaster.

It is possible to revisit your youth. But be warned--it's not the same place, and you're not the same person, surprise, surprise!