Road Trip

“Honey, we’re here!” I called, driving into the midst of Atlantic City, speeding past the sign stating where we were. Max looked up from his old school Superman comic, staring at the huge 1000 story buildings getting bigger and bigger as we approached them. The sunlight bounced off the shiny windows, and sparkled off everything else. The city seemed busy, raving and very very attractive Atlantic City looked like heaven on earth considering where we just came from.

We drove into the streets, the wind blowing through our hair abruptly stopping as the tall buildings sheltered us and plunged us into a stretch of chilly shadow. I sniffed, salt catching my nose by surprise.

“Max, I can smell sea air,” I said, sniffing again. Max tore his eyes from the surroundings as they whizzed past as sniffed up, the smell of sand, sun cream and sweat now becoming apparent.

“Me too,” Max said, rubbing his nose. “I didn’t even know Atlantic City had a beach,”

“Me neither,” I laughed, seeing a sign saying ‘Central Pier’. “Stupid, really. Everyone knows the Central pier in Atlantic City, but it just never clicked in my mind that it was on the coast,” I mused, following the signs to the Pier and Boardwalk.

As we got onto the main road, tracing the edge of the coast and the beach, I gawped at how beautiful it all looked when the burning sun beamed down on us. The golden sand stretched as far as I could see, the Ferris wheel on the pier gleaming in all it’s glory. The sky was as blue as it should be every day, not a cloud in sight. People walked around in their brightly coloured swimwear, traces of sun cream that hadn’t quite soaked into the skin still apparent on their pristine brown skin. The sound of crashing waves rolling onto the beach, excited sun leeches chatting happily, the sound of children’s ice cream splatting onto the floor filled my ears. Gorgeous, shiny convertibles overran the roads, rap music blasting out from their stereos. This was the definition of summer.

I felt the sun rays send a ray of sunshine down onto my skin, as I began to feel it burn. Our car felt slightly out of place amongst all the other amazing, bling-riddled cars. But I didn’t care. This was how Max and I rolled.

I slowed down into a parking space, right by one of the entrances to the beach. I knew I was lucky to grab this spot, so I intended to keep it all day.

“Right, so now what do you wanna do?” I asked Max, who was rummaging in the back seat, his legs flailing in the air as he fell further into the back seat. I giggled as I heard a muffled ’Oww’ and pulled his legs so he could breathe again. I grinned, as he held up 2 big black digital cameras, 2 random pocket maps, and a bottle of sun cream.

“Yeah, boy!” I called, high fiving him. Now, you probably won’t understand this, but the plan is to pretend to be total tourists, ask people where things are when actually, we know. And to do this, we needed to look like tourists. With useless pocket maps that weren’t even accurate and massive cameras, taking pictures of absolutely everything. These cameras didn’t even work, they were Max’s uncle’s broken cast off’s he’d asked if he could have, but we needed them strapped around our necks. And the sun cream was both a safety thing, and to do with the tourist’s uniform, because tourist’s always insist on putting too much sun cream on. Yes, we were going to look like a total pair of goofballs today, but that was the point.

I took my half of the tourist’s uniform, and took the sun cream, squirting a huge white worm of cream all the way down my arm. Max cackled with laughter at me and did the same, as I lathered the cream into my burning hot skin. I did the same for the rest of my body, and drew war paint lines on my cheeks in sun cream, causing Max to laugh and do the same.

“I’m keeping my face like this,” I said, as if almost challenging him, pointing one of my cheeks while I slung the camera around my neck. I jerked, this camera was a heavy one...

“Me too,” Max said, slotting the useless map in the back pocket of his shorts. “Let’s go get an ice cream though, first. So we can spill some on out t-shirts,”

“Eh? I’m not spilling anything on this t-shirt,” I said, pointing to my white t-shirt. I really liked this t-shirt, and I intended on wearing it tonight.

“Dude, I have it worse my t-shirt is black,” Max said, grabbing his wallet.

“Well you’ll just have to find some black ice cream then, won’t you,” I giggled, locking the car and pulling the battered hood over it. You never know who could steal it, this is a busy city.

And with that, we began our tourist outing. Firstly, we ran over to an ice cream stall on the beach first, demanding we had fudge sticks in our vanilla and chocolate ice cream to complete our outing to Atlantic City. The guy at the stall just looked at us weird and handed us our fudge sticks. We walked away giggling, just before I gratuitously, and skilfully splattered a blob of my white ice cream on Max’s black sleeve, leaving me cackling and immediately pelting across the beach running away from Max and his deadly ice cream. We’d pelted it all the way to the Central pier, where he gave up and gobbled his ice cream before it melted onto his beloved Rolling stones flip flops.

We’d done all the classic touristy things, such as get some random locals to take a picture of us pointing excitedly at the pier. It took a while to find the locals I must say, we weren’t the only tourists in the city, but he got it done. The 2 locals we found, with a strong New Jersey accent which we could have spotted a mile off, looked confused as they took Max’s camera from him, seeing it wasn’t turning on.

“I don’t think this is working,” The woman holding the camera said, frowning at the cracked screen.

“It’s a disposable camera, if you just press the button it will work!” I encouraged, making Max giggle under his breath as he pointed his hand toward the pier above us and pasting his best cheesy smile across his face while the woman obediently pressed the button on his camera for us. As soon as she was done, we bound up to her.

“Thank you so much!” I said, snatching the camera and pretending to look at the outcome photo. As soon as the locals had walked away out of earshot, Max collapsed onto the sand laughing, as I dropped the camera in the sand holding my stomach.

We’d done various other things too, such as go on the big Ferris wheel, screaming all the way of course, even though it was going at the pace of a snail. We’d stood in the middle of the road staring at a useless map, scratching out heads, and asking for directions to a place that didn’t exist, and for directions to places right in front of our eyes. Funnily enough, people gave us directions to the places that didn’t exist, but not to the places that did.

After all the screaming, laughing, and bounding about excitedly, we were pretty tired. The sun was still beating down even a few hours later, just not as strong, as Max and I had flopped onto the dry, loose sand that drifted across the beach, and taken our t-shirts off to sunbathe.

“What time is it?” I asked Max, staring up at a lone wispy cloud that lay blasphemous and conspicuous across the defiant blue sky.

“5,” He stated, taking a sip of his beer we’d obtained from the car.

“Do you wanna go somewhere to nap, then we can go bar hopping?” I asked, sitting up leaning onto my elbows.

“I’ve already started drinking,” Max grinned, holding up his beer. I nodded.

“But for us to last the night, my friend, we need to get re-energised,”