A trip of a lifetime, followed by a totaled car, three broken bones, and months of limited mobility. But I can live with that.

The cross-country trip had been in the back of our minds for years, something we would do when the kids were old enough (but not too old). There were so many things we wanted to see. My husband, Troy wanted to surf in San Diego, and I wanted to sip wine in Sonoma. It was a someday kind of thing, contingent upon getting time off work and finding the money. In short, it was one of those things we thought we’d talk about a lot, and probably never do.

But the stars aligned last spring. Troy’s grandmother, Nen, left us a small nest egg. The kids aged (but not too much), and we were restless, bored. It was time to leave my job with a local newspaper (that shall remain nameless), and Troy needed a new perspective, so when he managed to get one month off from work, I started planning.

We crammed the minivan from top to bottom with camping gear and a bunch of other stuff we didn’t need, and like many adventurers before us, we set our sites west.

Unlike early pioneers, however, we had Google maps, cell phones, reservations and air conditioning. It was a fact, not lost on our children as we crossed the Mojave Desert with the car thermometer, reading 114 degrees.

“I’m glad I’m not in a horse and wagon,” my youngest, Katie said.

But every day brought something new. We explored underground caves at Luray Caverns in Virginia. We hiked and swam in waterfall pools in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and we strolled among Blue Grass fiddlers on Main Street in Floyd. We rocked it out in Memphis to Elvis and blues bands on Beale Street, and we kicked up our heels in Texas. We marveled at nature’s towering red rock sculptures in Monument Valley, climbed ladders into ancient cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde and gaped into the Grand Canyon. And all that was in the first week.

When we set up camp in San Onofre for our first night in California, we were in a fog of road fatigue, but we couldn’t stop smiling. The next week was a Southern California dream of sunning, swimming, surfing, and cold drinks by the campfire, punctuated with visits to San Diego and LA. At night, the Pacific Ocean sang us to sleep with a familiar lullaby.

Next, we headed north to hug giant sequoia trees in fairytale forests. In Yosemite, we took chilly dips in mountain springs and had several too-close-for-comfort bear encounters, before arriving in San Francisco, ready for a break from roughing it. My dad’s cousin Jerry played host on a four-day culture and culinary tour of that amazing town.

Every day, we looked at each other in awe that it was really happening. And we tried to ignore the ominous feeling that somewhere down the road there would be a karmic price to pay. How could we possibly be so lucky?

And then it happened—exactly what I feared, and when we least expected it. In San Francisco’s Mission District, I aimed my camera at Mission Dolores, took one step forward over the curb and crumbled in the gutter with my right foot throbbing.

Jerry encouraged me to see a doctor, but I had better things to do. Instead, I wrapped the foot, took ibuprofen and headed to Sonoma for wine-tasting, cane in hand. It was just sprained, I told myself, it will get better. And it did. Sort of. At least it didn’t hold us back.

I limped along the Oregon trail and at Sutters Mill where the Gold Rush began. I viewed bison at a Wyoming ranch and marveled at miles and miles of corn in Nebraska. I posed with Abe Lincoln in Springfield and toured Tom Sawyer’s home in Hannibal.

And it wasn’t until we had crossed the North Wildwood bridge that I admitted to myself that maybe I did need to see a doctor. Within a week, I was recovering from foot surgery— a fractured metatarsal.

And that’s not all.

Four days later, while on the way to lunch we were broadsided in Wildwood Crest by another car. Our van was totaled, and I was damaged–unable to crutch and stuck in a wheelchair for two months. Four days later, my son Emmett broke his arm. Three weeks later, my daughter Anna broke her finger, and several times during the ordeal, my loving husband almost lost his mind.

“Stop saying it could be worse,” my friend, Suzanne warned.

But it really could have been. We might not have made it home. We might not have gone at all.

My theory on the disastrous finale to our dreamy trip is you have to take the good with the bad, and the very good with the very bad. Another theory is that we mistakenly brought home a Tiki, and like Bobby Brady in Hawaii, we are doomed until it’s returned.

For now, however, the curse seems to have subsided. We are all mostly back to normal, though I admit, I am still looking for that Tiki, and if I find it…and if we can get the time off work and the money…I would be glad to return it to wherever it belongs.

Time is money, especially at Buck’s Electric where employees who are late for work are expected to pay a fee of ten cents per minute. At the end of the year, however, the company turns the naughty behavior into something nice by doubling or tripling the collected amount and going on a massive shopping spree to restock the United Way of Cape May County’s food pantry.

“We look forward to the delivery from Buck’s every year,” United Way Executive Director Suzanne Nardi said. “In addition to their tremendous generosity, they always ask exactly what items we need. As a result, we are able to provide our clients with the items they need most.”

Last month, Buck’s owner, Ralph Shaffer, and employee volunteers delivered a truckload of goods to United Way headquarters. The canned goods, personal care items and other necessities will help sustain the pantry and its clients through the winter. Shaffer said the late fees help to make employees more punctual, but secretly the folks at the United Way believe that being a few minutes late might not be so bad after all.

Fresh and saltwater fish, caught by the school’s students, swim in dozens of tanks atop lab tables. Eels twirl along the floor of an indoor pond. Sand sharks dance on the surface of a five-foot pool like dolphins begging treats at Sea World.

But the real treats, students say, come when they harvest the fish. They pull Tilapia and sea bass, crabs, oysters and clams from the waters of the micro-commercial fisheries that they operate just outside the classroom walls. Then, with the help of the school’s culinary department, they whip up a seafood feast and enjoy the fruits of their labor.

“They eat pretty well around here,” Toft said, but its food for thought, as well. Toft says that once students make the connection to the ocean’s bounty, there is little to stop the burgeoning naturalists from trying to find out more.

Sophomores catch and dissect critters in the wetlands beyond the school to learn more about the food web – essentially who eats whom. In the woods outside their classroom, juniors built hideouts to spy mammals on the prowl for their next meal. Seniors row self-made canoes into the bay to harvest crops of shellfish from traps and oyster beds that line the water.

On a sunny October day, the students, acted as expert tour guides of the schools wildlife campus for the Herald’s video camera. (See them in action at www.capemaycountyherald.com.) Some wore snakes around their arms and shoulders, (classroom pets), as they talked about their hands-on approach to learning. They explained what it’s like to pull nets, heavy with tilapia from a huge breeding pool. Tilapia are “filthy” compared to other breeds of fish, they say.

On a walk along the wetlands, they snatch fiddler crabs out of the mucky sea grass and quickly determined their sex. The males have a single super-sized claw, according to one student guide.

And from the perch of a wooden deck overlooking the wetlands, they point out the osprey nests and nesting boxes for kestrel hawks that they build and monitor. They can also name the birds that alight on the horizon.

“When it gets cold, we see eagles up here,” Matt Hamer said. “We also saw red tails breeding, doing their courtship dance.”
“You can’t learn this kind of stuff out of a book,” student Jade Seltzer said.

Toft describes it as inquiry-based education, where kids work within real life situations, and they are charged with caring for creatures and using science and research to help them thrive. In some cases, they learn to sink or swim the hard way, like during the collaborative project where they carved Indian canoes out of logs with an American history class.

“They do float,” Toft says…if you have the balance of a surfer.

The lessons about conservation and working with the environment are crucial, and marketable, Toft says. “First-off, it connects them to the environment. Then they learn that a clean ocean supports people, feeds people and employs people,” he said.

Most of the seniors say they‘ve applied to college and are mulling over their options, but they have many, Toft says. He can recite a laundry list. Wildlife biologists, marine biologists, oceanographers, wastewater managers, environmental tour guides, sport and commercial fishers, surveyors or geographical information and Global Positioning Systems (GPS) technicians are all job opportunities that exist for individuals with the preliminary skills his students learn. The world is their oyster…literally.

This story first appeared in The Cape May County Herald

Three miles to go. Two days down. One step at a time.

By Sunday at 3 p.m., my friend Korri and I had walked some 57 miles as participants in the Philadelphia Susan G. Komen 3-Day Breast Cancer Walk. The pain in my toes and on the balls of my feet sometimes burned, sometimes throbbed, sometimes both. When I stopped to stretch, I could feel the heat of the sidewalk through my sneakers. Blisters formed and popped, but we walked on.

Occasionally, mercifully, the feet went numb long enough that I could feel a new ache forming in my calf, my thigh, or my lower back. But after a brief lull, my toes would let out another holler. “Are we there yet?” they begged.

“Almost,” was my mantra: almost to the next landmark, to the next rest stop, to the next medical tent where I could once again ice and wrap my torn feet. We had trained for this, but perhaps not hard enough. “No training prepares you for this,” a fellow walker said.

With an unseasonably hot October sun beating down on us, we trudged up another seemingly insurmountable hill in some neat Main Line suburb — one of many which now are a blur.

“What do you think about all this?” Korri asked.
“Ouch!” my brain said silently. “Why am I doing this?”
To Korri I answered tentatively. “I’m not sure…I think my opinion will evolve as the pain goes away.”

In fact, my feelings on the walk had been evolving all along. Korri had suggested it one March evening over a glass (or three) of wine. “Walk now, wine later,” became our team’s name (one we didn’t necessarily honor as well as we could). We were fortunate to have lives untouched by breast cancer – an illness I now know afflicts one in eight women and their families.

At the time, the walk seemed an adventure we could take together — a way to bond, to focus on ourselves by helping others and to get in shape. We would stop making excuses for not taking care of ourselves.

But as our bodies endured the brutal journey, I mulled over the irony that at every medical tent along our path, walkers were lined up seeking relief from all kinds of injuries – blisters, lost toenails, dehydration, strained joints and worse.

“Maybe 20 miles a day is too much,” a nurse/volunteer proposed in a whisper as she custom-cut bandages and moleskin to my wounded foot. She had seen legions of sweaty and battered toes like mine, as she and a handful of other volunteers worked tirelessly, mending and nurturing the wounded — 16 hours a day, three days in a row — all the while smiling kindly as she padded and coaxed them back to life.

“I want to kiss those nurses back there,” a fellow walker said, as we trudged away from a pit stop in South Philadelphia. “She gave me new feet.”

Meanwhile an all-volunteer crew – dubbed “the brains and the brawn” of the operation – worked endlessly to make the ordeal possible…and bearable. They woke before the sun and went to bed long after the lights went out. They hauled bags, set up the tent city where we crashed at night, prepared meals, picked up trash, stocked port-a-potties, managed shower trucks, and guided us across treacherous roads.

And as they did all that, they still found time and energy to applaud and cheer as more than 2300 of us met each milestone along the way. They made us laugh with their ridiculous outfits and smile like children, when they awarded us treats like necklaces, stickers and candy.

“You’re almost there,” they told us, and even when they fibbed, it pushed us to take another step, to ignore another pain, or to climb another hill. And eventually we made it.

Among us were breast cancer survivors and those still fighting that battle; people who had lost loved ones and those who feared losing them; and people who wanted to make a difference by spending three days walking in a world that so often rushes by. Together, they retaught me things I knew as a child but so frequently forget — lessons in courage and generosity and kindness.

And now, that the pain has subsided (mostly), I continue to think about the people who paved my way — those who made donations toward my efforts (the walk raised $6.3 million toward breast cancer research) and those I met along the path.

I picture the children in pink shirts, who stood in the heat in front of their houses holding up signs of encouragement. I remember the cool exhilaration of the sprinklers local fireman set up for our comfort. I recall the strangers who offered cakes and pizza, soft pretzels and drinks, hugs and perfectly-timed popsicles. Like children on a playground, we became friends for a fleeting instant, bound by the simple joy of sharing a burden.

But mostly, I will remember smiling through tears at the cancer survivors, who honked and stopped traffic as they shouted encouragement from their cars, or those, who stood on the side of the road to greet us, saying over and over again, “You’re almost there!” and “Thank You.”

And now that we made it past the finish line and patted ourselves on the back, what words can we use to explain what it meant. None will do, save the ones we learned along the way – “We’re almost there…and Thank You.”

Scully said she decided to pursue her degree in culinary arts when her youngest daughter began attending school full time. Scully went back to school as well, enrolling in Atlantic Cape Community College’s Culinary Arts Program. She received Gold Medal Culinary Arts Degree from the Academy last spring, she said, but cooking has always been her passion.

“I’ve been baking since I was 19,” Scully said. “It’s something that always came very natural to me.”

And to see her in a chef’s jacket amid the apple green display cases and tools of the trade, it’s easy to see that’s true.

The newly-renovated storefront is decorated with Fifties memorabilia and vintage baking tools and supplies. Black and white photos of Lucy and Ethel from the classic I Love Lucy television show adorn the walls. And behind the counter is a wall of vintage photos of Scully’s family, including her Grandmother Louise and her great-grandmother Lucy for whom the shop is named.

“My grandmother was an excellent baker,” Scully said. And she coached Scully through culinary school by critiquing her pies and sharing advice on how to improve a recipe.

Scully received a gold medal at graduation for the apple pie she perfected under her grandmother’s tutelage, but Grandmom Louise passed away eight weeks before the ceremony, Scully said.

“I wanted her to see the gold medal…to honor her,” Scully said, but since her grandmother couldn’t be there, she named the shop after her instead.

Scully is passing down recipes and a love of baking to a new generation, as well. Her daughters, Morgan, 12, and Mackenzie, 9, are important contributors to her new venture. When the shop opened earlier this month, a small section of the one baking case was dedicated to a custom cupcake display. From that case, customers pick from of a selection of cupcakes and then chose which frosting and topping will tickle their taste buds.

The build-your-own cupcake display began with a choice of chocolate or vanilla, but it has taken on a life of its own and grown to include varieties like chocolate marshmallow and coconut. There are nearly 20 flavor available now, Scully said and the display occupies a full seven foot case.

“It keeps growing,” Scully said, mainly because of the creative influences of her daughters. Morgan “more or less runs the front of the store,” Scully said, and considers the cupcake exhibit to be “her baby.”

“I let her do it,” Scully said. “She knows more than me what people would like.”

The proof of that is the way the cupcake bar has caught on.

“It’s very, very popular,” she said, drawing families from offshore who come in search of sweets.

One local mom who tried out the cupcake bar with her t-ball team said it was a great alterative to a trip to the ice cream parlor.
“It’s something different,” she said.

And for those who crave more sophisticated sweets, Scully is eager to please. She makes and ever-changing selection of pies that includes a traditional ricotta pie, a key lime pie and a variety of fruit pies, including her award winning apple. Mini-pies are also available for those who can’t decide.

“Someone can come in and say, ‘I want cherry. I want apple. Oh just give me one of everything,’” Scully said. Customers can also phone-in orders to make sure the pie they want is available.

For the month of June, the shop will be open from Thursday through Monday, and Scully expects that after that, they will be open seven days a week throughout the summer. It’s been a lot of hard work for Scully and her husband Paul and their daughters, but it’s worth it, she said.

“I’m having a ball,” she said.