Recalculation” sang the friendly female voice that evil programmers once locked into the navigation system. In addition, the screen map of New Jersey rotated like a compass gone mad. After a few minutes she sang “Recalculation” again. And again. We didn’t want to have the journey recalculated at all. We just had to keep stopping and taking photos. The Wildwoods, as we already knew from our first stop, a sailboat inexplicably stranded in a Zen-like raked gravel parking lot, was right up our alley.
And it went on, on and on. The Wildwoods, as the three towns of North Wildwood, Wildwood City and Wildwood Crest are simply called, are long, very long. The narrow barrier island in southern New Jersey measures nine kilometers, which is enough for a hundred street blocks full of wondrous things. A ten-foot-tall concrete beach bucket was parked in front of a corner store, the shovel at an angle. On the roof of a motel, a dangerously forward-leaning pirate with a sword not only threatens the surrounding area, but also threatens to tip over at any moment.
The Wildwoods beaches are nine kilometers long.
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Image: Christoph Moeskes
Here we were right. We got more and more correct. Another block and then we had reached our hotel and could finally stuff the sat nav genie back into the bottle. Luckily the room didn’t face inwards to the pool, where now at lunchtime a bunch of guys were practicing ass bombs to the accompaniment of smashing 90’s music. Were we really in the United States here? Or had the woman from the navigation system secretly guided us to Mallorca?
No, it was unmistakably the USA. The hand gripped the balcony railing, the body stretched, and there it lay, the Atlantic, immeasurably wide and blue, a carpet of ocean, bordered by a huge beach. On it dots and colons, groups of dots with folding chairs and bath towels. Propeller planes flapped overhead, trailing banners advertising beer and a local radio station.
Doo Wop – like the music that played here in the 60’s.
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Image: Christoph Moeskes
We immediately wanted to pack our bathing suits and become part of this all-American beach panorama. But wait, our own little travel navigation system says, you can swim later. You miss Wildwood’s famous “Doo Wop Motels” standing empty in the midday light, the “Viking”, the “Gondolier”, the “Aztec”, the cooled neon lights and the turgid railings, the outside steps and the plastic palm trees. It’s quite possible that the pirate on the roof of the “Jolly Roger Motel” just fell over.
“Doo Wop” was warbled here and immediately a music style of its own
Over 130 of these motels from the late 1950’s and early 1960’s survive in the Wildwoods. They are gorgeous remnants of mid-century tourism, not posh and elegant like in Palm Springs, California, but raised quickly and cheaply for the growing middle class. It was now pushing more and more to the 200-kilometer Jersey Shore, but above all to the Wildwoods with its three-kilometer-long boardwalk, the candy shops and dance halls, where background singers warbled nonsense syllables like “Doo Wop” and created an independent musical style .