Ocean City, NJ: Our Happy Place

Our story began in Ocean City, New Jersey, in the summer of 2003. Nicole and I began dating that summer, which was after our junior year in high school at Holy Cross in Delran, New Jersey.

After discovering that our family’s shore houses were just a few blocks from each other one day in Senor Urtasun’s Spanish class, we began hanging out the final week of June once each of us was done working for the day.

Our First Date

Our official first date was on July 3, 2003. We hit the boardwalk for pizza at Primo’s, which is no longer there, hit up my place of employment (Walker’s South Beach Grille) for ice cream, and spent hours talking in the lifeguard stand pictured above.

We have spent two decades building memories and our life together, most of which are centered around Ocean City. It has been unavoidable even before we officially met way back in September 2000 at Freshman Orientation at holy Cross.

My family has owned a home in Ocean City on 52nd and Simpson since the 1960s. The home was built by my maternal grandparents and unfortunately burnt down in March of 2017. It has since been rebuilt and is still part of the Vassallo-Cavacini family today.

Nicole’s family has owned a home in Ocean City since she was a little girl. Granted, her family has moved over the years but has owned their current home on 49th and Asbury since the early 2000s.

The funniest part of our story is that it almost never came to fruition. On the night of our first date I rang the doorbell, waited, and no one answered. It’s a good thing I decided to knock. Who knew that the doorbell hadn’t worked in years!

Building Our Happy Place as a Family in Ocean City

It is crazy to think that years of spending entire summers in Ocean City as a child would eventually lead to my children doing the same. However, it seems to be a pattern in my family.

Since my grandparents had the house built in the 1960s, it allowed my mom and uncle to spend their summers living in Ocean City. They both worked every summer in the teen years and early 20s on the boardwalk and in shops throughout the town.

Now, decades later, our boys are able to do the same thing. They have built friendships with other children who spend their summers in OC. They attend art camps, the junior firefighter camp hosted by the Ocean City Fire Department, ride bikes, scour Corson’s Inlet for shells and spend countless hours on the beach between mid June and late August.

A lot of our boys’ first milestones occurred in OC, including potty training. The first time either of the boys went swimming happened in Ocean City. Enzo even celebrated his first birthday in Ocean City and has celebrated every birthday since then in our happy place.

We have experienced a lot of ups and downs in Ocean City. Rides in ambulances to the hospital. Tears of joy watching the Phillies beat the Milwaukee Brewers in the divisional round back in 2008. Seeing the boys grow each day hitting new milestones and making friends along the way.

Ocean City, America’s Greatest Family Resort, has become a second home to our family. It always was when Nicole and I were growing up, but now we have made it our family’s second home. There really is no other place we would rather be when we need a day to unwind, destress, and refocus ourselves.

I cannot wait to see what the future holds for our family in OC. Do you have a happy place that you trust can turn your day around in an instant? Let’s talk about it in the comments section.