Courtesy Wildwoods Tourism
Kid yourself
Wildwood offers many ways to have fun during and after meetings.
“When people come to Wildwood for any reason, they turn into kids again,” Rose said. “They want to ride the rides and the go-carts, walk the boardwalk, play in the arcades. Coming here gives them license to do that.”
Morey’s Piers will cater picnics for groups of 100 or more on its private beachfront pavilion or arrange dinners for smaller groups on the rooftop deck at Joe’s Fish Co.
Morey’s staff, which mushrooms from 160 to 1,700 in the summer, will set up and manage volleyball, horseshoes, sand building and other beach activities.
Team building on the beach
“We can make the beach a meeting site,” said Anne O’Boyle, Morey’s corporate partners manager.
“One of our clients uses the beach for team building for 4,000 people,” O’Boyle said. “We set up registration on the pier and bleachers on the beach for spectators. Then we run the events.”
For golfers, there’s everything from miniature golf to par 3 and 18-hole courses nearby. And a 10-mile bike trail circles the island.
For history buffs, North Wildwood has the East Coast’s only Victorian lighthouse by Paul Pelz, who designed the first Library of Congress building. Group tours are available.
And there are more than 180 tournaments and festivals, from an Irish Fall Festival and hot rod and motorcycle rallies to a Curley Fry Festival and the Battle at the Beach Grappling tournament. Most of them are free, as is the nearby and charming Cape May County Zoo.
100 years of tradition
This year, Wildwood celebrates its 100th anniversary. A small museum run by the Wildwood Historical Society traces how the town grew from a backwater of weeds, wild cattle and trees, hence its name, to the family vacation resort it is today.
One of the museum’s treasures is a program from the 51st Baby Parade that took place on the boardwalk Aug. 3, 1961. The parade has been an annual event there since 1909.. Remarkably adept at preserving such traditions, Wildwood will parade babies again this year on Aug. 1 for the 103rd time.
