The Wildwoods

I granted myself a getaway, the kind I conjure in daydreams, with expanses of time and base-level accountability. Planes of existence left in younger years.

With allotments of freedom like this, I tend to ramp up a tally of to-dos over the course of the week prior, striking a fever pitch the day-of, in the middle of the great escape. Round and round I chase my tail with the possibility of it all, checking the phone for answers, checking the phone to drown the incessant tick-tock tick-tock of freedom’s dwindle as the to-dos peer in the windows. Ready yet, dummy?

This time I found myself spinning with trademark absurdity in a Wildwood motel room. I’d checked in after a sublime eight hours of birding in Cape May, eager to downshift in Jersey’s wackiest shore town.

Competing to-dos included:

Write. You say you want to write. You took a whole class. Go sit on the beach and write, genius.

Read. There are 27 pounds of literature pulling at the seams of your backpack. What a journey, toting them all around, untouched.

You’re in a beach-front motel. As in, the ocean. Go to the ocean. The o-c-e-a-n.

Exercise. There’s a pink Schwinn laying wait in the trunk of your Outback, a pair of sun-kissed, scratched-up legs below you. This town is hella flat, super airy, big flow. Get gone.

Food. You don’t know where, when, how. You haven’t checked in with your salivary glands, your gut, your recent history. This isn’t going to solve itself.

Orientation. North, South, East, West. Topography and landscape. See it, feel it, breathe it, know it.

Those doo-wop motels.

As luck would have it, a few of the to-dos were solvable in one fell swoop. Run off the mounting anxiety, figure out whereabouts, and check out these famed mid-century motels, the living doo-wop or “googie” relics peppered like piñata candy throughout The Wildwoods.

Holy shit.

These motels had stolen the show in my early google searches of Wildwood, the cheaper (and only) option for accommodations for this last-minute sojourn. Reality did them justice. Their Space-Age, populuxe architecture was built to draw in, then house, holiday beach-goers of the 1950s and 1960s, and it’s fabulous. My own motel, the Villa Nova, booked on a whim, was a classic: low-riding, two story motel, shaped like an “L” hugging a swimming pool, an angled lobby section and globe lights like soldiers along the balconies. My bathroom was pepto-pink- tiled and the rooms’ windows ran floor-to-ceiling.

Without further adieu, and because no one likes the story preceding the recipe — my photographic souvenirs of Wildwoods’ Doo-Wop: