Wild Times

I went down to Wildwood, a beach town at the bottom of the New Jersey shore, with Andrew this weekend. I will probably go back to Wildwood again because I like the beach there, but some things about the town failed to impress me. For starters, the town is lily-white. Over the entire weekend I saw only two other Asian people, a small group of Indian people, no Hispanic people, and at most two or three black families. Also, I'm not one to cry racist, but I got the distinct feeling that I was not welcome at many of the hotels where I inquired about accommodations. What went down was: I would enter the hotel "office" where a peroxide blonde senior citizen, encrusted with fifteen rings on her wrinkled and nicotine-stained fingers, garishly painted with makeup, and often stroking a large cat, would give me the once-over and then tell me in an extremely unfriendly manner that there was either no vacancies even though the neon sign clearly blinked VACANCY, or the only thing available was a large apartment meant to hold a family that would not be rented to a couple, or that the cost of one night's stay was $200 and there was a minimum of a three-night stay. The first time this happened I felt a little put-out, but by the fifth time it happened I was pretty sure we were being victimized. At one place where the sign read VACANCY but we were told there was none, Andrew volunteered to change the sign to read NO VACANCY but was curtly told to leave the sign alone. Definitely shady.

Of course, in the end it all worked out, because we refused to be deterred and eventually found the sweetest little place. We drove around the town until I spotted a painted sign that read "Mt. Vernon Hotel" about four blocks away from the beach. The Mt. Vernon Hotel is a really old colonial building that has been around since the 1800's and was originally a boarding house and is now being run as a hotel. Anyway, it was really cute and old-fashioned and most importantly, the people who ran it were super nice. They didn't have any regular rooms available, but they did have an empty "seasonal room" (a room usually rented out for the entire summer season to lifeguards or whoever) which they very nicely made available to us for the tidy sum of $60 a night. Of course there was no TV and no air-conditioning, but it was okay because we were there to enjoy the sun and sea and sand, not to watch TV, and the nights were so cool (55 degrees!) and so much breeze came in through the windows that we needed blankets, not air-conditioning.

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We went parasailing while we were down in Wildwood. If you don't know what parasailing is, basically what happens is you strap yourself to a parachute, which is connected by a line to the back of a boat. The boat takes off and the parachute catches the wind and carries you up into the air. So there you are, 350 feet in the air, dangling from a giant yellow parachute with a happy face painted on it, connected to a boat which tows you up and down the coast for about ten, fifteen minutes. It's REALLY SCARY at first but once you relax it's really beautiful. Afterwards Andrew and I got into a debate over whether you would die if you fell from a height of 350 feet into the water. Andrew says you could survive if you dove feetfirst. I'm pretty sure you would die no matter what. Especially me. I would definitely die, if not from the impact, from a heart attack in mid-air.

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It doesn't really matter who's right about the dying, because that's a hypothetical. What matters is reality. And the reality is, I beat Andrew in a wiffleball game by a score of 30 to 18. Okay, I may have had slight... advantages. For instance, I was allowed three outs while Andrew was allowed only one. Also, my home plate was closer by half to the home run wall. But STILL. According to the rules, I won, fair and square. RAOW!