We spent last week in lovely Wildwood Crest, NJ, the place where old motels go to retire. There are what seem to be hundreds upon hundreds of relics from the 50s and 60s, complete with retro-looking signs and designs. Several have been declared national historical monuments (!) so that they won’t be demolished in the newest wave of construction that is swallowing up the Jersey shore. There are no fussy rules at these motels about not hanging your beach towels over the exterior railings to dry – the towels just add color to what are already garishly hued buildings. The names evoke another time. The StarLite uses a font straight out of the Jetson’s and has turquoise and white striped plastic umbrellas by their pool, and the Satellite is “the original doo-wop motel”. There are places for the military minded (The Crusader, The Armada), and for those who want to be reminded that they are at the beach (SunKist, Sea-N-Sun, Sea Gull [why you would want to be reminded of these rats-of-the-beach is beyond me – they’re big as dogs and scary and are shameless scavengers]), and those that will take you away to another location entirely if the Wildwoods aren’t sufficiently exotic (Isle of Palms, Royal Hawaiian, Casa Bahama, Tangiers – which is UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT, a coup of no small proportion). There is the Florentine Family Motel “Where families take time to love, Laugh & Relax in Affordable, Quality Accommodations, Convenience & Comfort” – one can only hope that the walls are not paper thin. And finally there is the motel named after what sound like one of DuPont’s early failures – The Trylon.

In one of the many driving segments of this vacation, I was about to get onto the Commodore Barry Bridge, which links Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and spotted a flashing sign that informed me “NO WIDE LOADES TO NJ”. At first I thought it read “Lourdes” and wondered why they were insulting Madonna’s daughter or that place in France. Although I’d like to be able to blame NJ (my birthplace) for this, the sign, which apparently did not have a built-in spell checker, was in PA.