DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- I glanced down the seemingly endless swath of beige sand of Daytona Beach alongside my 15-year-old daughter, Alex. A couple in their early 20s walked arm in arm collecting seashells, an older man in a coral-colored baseball cap and windbreaker languidly combed the beach with a metal detector, and a clump of seagulls pecked for crabs.
I shook my head and chuckled at the disparity between the tranquil scene before us, and the one I had experienced 20 years before.
As a college freshman in 1983, I rolled into Daytona Beach on a chartered bus from upstate New York with 70 other sleep-deprived and junk-food-fueled coeds. We giddily crammed four to a dingy room in a beachfront dive motel. For the next four days, we parked our sunburned bodies on the beach between jeeps, pickup trucks, and other scantily clad women. Chiseled guys tossed footballs and guzzled plastic cups of Budweiser. Boy George blared from huge loudspeakers that a local radio station had perched on the boardwalk. We gathered poolside for a ''wet buns" contest that I entered unabashedly. Ah, spring break.
So, where was the current generation of raucous students?
''Spring break isn't what it used to be here anymore," lamented Ben Cheatam, who works in a retail store at the pier.
Clearly, things had changed in 20 years. In addition to cracking down on ''wet buns" and ''wet T-shirt" contests, the town prohibits thong bathing suits on the boardwalk. The prohibitions on alcohol and nudity on the beach have long been in existence, according to Sergeant Dave Byron, a spokesman for Volusia County, which manages area beaches, though enforcement seems to have taken a more serious tone.
''There has been a concerted effort in the community to corral spring break," Byron said.
''After the stories you see about college kids coming here, I was scared about what we might find," acknowledged Lisa Wells, from Fort Wayne, Ind. She and her husband, Glen, brought their children, ages 9, 7, and 4, here for a week in late February. They were relieved -- and surprised -- by what they encountered.
''Nobody's here right now," Glen Wells marveled.
Not everyone is pleased with the change.
''Since MTV left, it's gone downhill," said the twentysomething Cheatham, a native. ''They're turning it into a time-share retirement community." He shook his head in dismay. ''It's ridiculous."
Many hotels that formerly catered to the spring break crowd have shifted their marketing efforts toward a more upscale family clientele, according to Byron. Indeed, the Desert Inn Resort, which had been the center of activity when I was here in college, doesn't even mention the words ''spring break" on its website.
