Ah, the 1990s.
It seems like it was so close, yet so long ago.
It’s weird to me that people who were born in the late 90s are approaching their mid-twenties. Was not 1998 only like 10 years ago?
The 1990s was such a decade of transition and was such a rapid escalation of technology and cultural changes that I suppose anyone who was born in that decade ( or later) can be forgiven (maybe) for not realizing just how different the earlier part of the 1990s was from the latter part –the era before cell phones, before internet and the World Wide Web. When fashion trends still looked more 80s and yes, still looked awful and cringe-y.
I’m sure anyone younger than twenty would be wondering how we survived when it came to road trips or travel , when there was no Google maps, the ability to ask Siri for directions, or where the nearest rest stop was, and without a cell phone, how did you call or text someone who was road-tripping with you to stay in contact? Well, I will tell you what my family came up with as a solution, so that we didn’t all die of dysentery like we were on a real-life Oregon Trail ( Note: slight exaggeration). It was called………….. a “walkie-talkie”. Yes. Also known as a two-way radio.
The ones we had looked sort of similar to the ones above, but less fancy. And they had to be charged on a base that plugged in, like a cordless phone. Which presented another problem if you were going on a road trip because you couldn’t just plug them into your car to charge them up.
Why, do you ask, would you need to stay in contact with someone while on a road trip? What was the need for this 90s sorcery?, you might wonder. Long story short, my family used to take road trips down to Florida, where my mother and step-father had a timeshare condo in Cocoa Beach, Florida, which they had purchased around 1989-1990. Because we lived in Wisconsin, the drive was quite long– about 21 hours or so if you drove straight through without stopping, except to get gas. You might be wondering why, at this point, we didn’t just fly down there and my only answer is that we were frugal Midwesterners who didn’t want to spend tons of cash on plane tickets and car rentals, so we would drive because gas back then was relatively cheap yet. Also, since my siblings and I were technically adults ( and some of us were in college by the early 90s) none of us were particularly flush with cash at that age, and I grew up in an era when parents didn’t financially support their children until they were in their forties. This was a relatively inexpensive way to have a week’s vacay in Florida without breaking the bank.
Because it was a timeshare, “our” week was always the same time every year–the end of May. The timeshare had three bedrooms, and easily slept 6-8, so usually there was a group of us that went down together, depending on who was available. Sometimes it was just my family, sometimes one of us brought a friend, or someone we were dating. If all of us kids were busy, some years my mom and step-father invited their own friends to go with them, or invited some of my aunts and uncles, but they liked it best when it was a family trip. Check-in time for our week was always 11 o’clock on a Friday, so we would start our road trip on Thursday afternoon. If there was a large group of us going, which there usually was, we would have to take several cars to fit everyone and their luggage. We had no cell phones and no Google maps, so we had to look up directions the “old-fashioned” way…. by looking at an actual road map.
My step-father was in charge of mapping out the drive and he would always take the lead with the rest of us following behind, caravan-style. Normally there would be several people to each vehicle, so we could take turns driving. The problem then became, how do we signal to each other that someone needs to stop for gas, or to pee, or to switch drivers? We solved that by using the walkie-talkies. We selected a channel, and then, to conserve the batteries, left them turned off until we saw one of the other cars signal to us to turn them on, which was by flashing their lights. The other cars would see the signal, turn on the walkie talkie and then relay whatever info we needed. Genius. And it was sort of fun, I admit. Like an adventure. But in cars instead of riding through the Sahara Desert on camels or whatever.
A note about Cocoa Beach; it was a fun place and we always found lots of things to do when we went there and always had a good time. Our timeshare was in the Discovery Beach Resort, so named because you could see Cape Canaveral, where they launch the space shuttle from, from the balconies of the resort that were oceanside. In fact, there was a launch once while we were there and we watched it from the balcony. It’s also only an hour drive to Orlando from Cocoa Beach, so we used to sometimes take 1 or 2 days of our week to spend a day at Walt Disney World and Universal Studios.
Fun fact about Cocoa Beach; the wildly popular sitcom series “I Dream of Jeannie” ( which ran from 1965 to 1970 and then years afterwards in syndication) was set in Cocoa Beach, Florida and nearby Cape Kennedy, home of the Kennedy Space Center ( because one of the main characters, Captain Tony Nelson, is an astronaut who lives in Cocoa Beach and works at the space center). If you are too young to remember this iconic sitcom, you can read about it here.
Because of this, there is actually a street named for the show in Cocoa Beach. It’s actually not far from the pier.
My last trip to the timeshare was in 2006. My mom sold it not long after that. By 2006 we didn’t drive down anymore; now we flew. It was certainly easier, but to be honest, maybe not quite as charming. Sometimes there’s more fun in the getting there than the destination.