It all started with a bunch of fanciful resort motels built for the middle-class American "road trip" vacationer of the 1950s & 60s.

 An increasingly mobile (in more ways than one) middle-class was free to imagine itself in far-away lands and a far-out future (all reachable by car, of course). It might have all been a fantasy, but it was the freedom to fantasize, nonetheless. Is there really a better place to be than that?

 Most of these motels had survived all the way into the 1990s and early 2000s, giving multiple generations of families from New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Washington DC, along with an increasing crop of national and even international heritage-tourists, artists, designers, and curiosity-seekers a most idiosyncratic experience of no-frills fun, fantasy, and frivolity by the beach - and the opportunity to gaze back at a weirdly wonderful, sometimes terrifically tacky past where the future was always a little bit brighter. Imagine what it'd be like if we (all) got to go there again?

 Has there ever been a better time to escape to the "better future" that still exists in your mind? After all, the future is always brighter when you're free to imagine it...