Sunday

We arrive in Atlantic City at 7am on the dot. A quick 3 hour jaunt up from DC – anyone of you could do it in your sleep (as I did).

When the 4am decision comes to go to AC or not – I usually map out what I would do in those 3 hours if I didn’t go. Usually AC sounds a lot more fun.

Anyway, we get there. Tired as all get-out but we are there. The sun has risen over a beautiful day. The ocean waves are crashing into the Jersey Shore, the boardwalk is slowly coming to life. Seagulls and dead-beats circling and dive-bombing the half-eaten snacks of Saturday-night’s winners.

We park the car and seek-out the first of our two objectives.

Corn-dogs – there is something about hand-battered, freshly fried AC corn-dogs. They are the holy-grail of late-night impromtu road-trips. And at 7am there is only one place that you can get them. It’s that 24 hour boardwalk place just passed the Wild West Casino. I’d write their name here, but we only know it as the place I dowsed myself in water while singing “Ave Maria” at 5am the last-time we went to AC.

Anyway – we get our corn-dogs and then we decide to get a room and sleep til the afternoon. A couple hours of z’s to recup and then we’ll paint the town red.

One snag to this plan – and one to be heeded by all of you who may plan an impromtu trip to AC in the future – Atlantic City tends to be completely booked on weekends in July.

That’s right, we drove all that way and could not get a room. Anywhere. We walked from motel to hotel to casino and no one had free rooms. We even called a special AC room hot-line and they couldn’t get us a room. We even considered hiring a whore just to sleep in her room, but we couldn’t even find one at 7:30am.

Ultimately we wound up watching seriously fucked-up AC degenerates as we walked around looking for a room and then we had a soda in the Trump Plaza bar. At which point we all began to hallucinate from sleep deprivation and decided to call it a night.

We got in the car and drove to my brother’s place in S. Jersey and crashed for a couple hours. After which we had a good-old S. Jersey cheese-steak and drove back to DC.

In all, not the crazy/wild AC trip we intended but it was still pretty damn fun to cruise down the coast with my boys and goof around on just a few hours sleep.

I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

Originally published on July 26, 2005.