Welcome to the Sunny Days Ice Cream home page! We are the Ruiz family, and we have been scooping on the boardwalk every summer since Memorial Day weekend, 1987. That's thirteen summers, if you're counting, and Nina is, because she got a calculator for school and now she counts everything.

Our son Danny built this page on the family computer this summer (he says to tell you it's a Celeron and he wants a Pentium III for Christmas, which, we'll see). We figured if the arcade could have a web page, so could we. If you're reading this from home, come on down. If you're reading this from the library, come on down after. If you are reading this from somewhere far away, well, now you know where to come next summer!

Twenty-four tubs in the case, always. When one runs out, we put in the next one. A star means it's one of Abuela Carmen's own recipes. (Grandma to you.)

Fall flavor: Every October we swap Peach out for Pumpkin Pie. It starts October 1st. Ask for extra whipped cream, it's free on Pumpkin Pie.

Cash only. There is a bank machine in the arcade next door, but honestly, it's ice cream, bring a couple of dollars.

Here's the deal. Eight scoops (your choice of flavors), three whole bananas, hot fudge, butterscotch, strawberry AND pineapple topping, wet walnuts, whipped cream, sprinkles, and eight cherries, served in a boat that Dad bought from a restaurant supply place in 1991 and which is technically meant for a whole table.

The rules:

1. One person. No helpers, no "just holding it for a friend."
2. Twenty minutes on the kitchen timer, which Mom starts when the boat hits the counter.
3. Eat it all. Bananas included. Cherries included. You may leave the melty puddle at the bottom, we're not monsters.
4. No leaving the counter. The restroom is not part of the challenge.

If you finish: it's FREE, we take your picture with the instant camera and it goes up on the Wall of Champions by the napkin dispenser, and you get a Sunny Days T-shirt. If you don't: it's $12.00 and you get our sympathy and a cup of water.

Since 1991: 316 attempts, 41 champions. The record is 9 minutes 40 seconds, set in August 1997 by a fellow who said he was "in training." The youngest champion was 13. The oldest was 68 and did not tell his wife until he got home.

No brain-freeze refunds. You have been warned.

Now that school is back in, we're on our fall schedule from Labor Day through Sunday, October 31st:

If it's pouring rain on a weekday, call it a coin flip whether we're open. If the sun's out, we're out.

Halloween is our last day! This is a boardwalk tradition and here's how it goes: from noon on, come in costume and sprinkles are free. At 6:00 p.m. we start selling off whatever is left in the case for a dollar a scoop, any size, until the tubs are empty. Whoever gets the very last scoop of the season gets their picture on the wall next to the Buster champions, and their name goes on the sign in the window all winter. Last year it was a little girl named Madison who got the last scoop of Rainbow Sherbet at 8:52 p.m. and cried because she was so happy. (Okay, we cried too.)

Then we scrub everything down, put the shutters up, and Dad goes fishing for five months. We reopen the Saturday before Easter, 2000. And yes, the freezer is a 1987 freezer with a dial on it, so no, we are not worried about Y2K.

Manny and Rosa (that's Mom and Dad) opened the stand on Memorial Day weekend of 1987 with twelve flavors, a used dipping cabinet, and a hand-painted sign that Rosa made on the kitchen floor. Manny had worked at a dairy plant and Rosa's mother, Abuela Carmen, had a coconut ice cream recipe from back home that she'd been making in a bucket with rock salt for years. That's flavor number 16, and it hasn't changed.

The first summer we were so slow that Dad would give free cones to the lifeguards just to have somebody to talk to. The second summer the lifeguards told everybody. By 1989 we'd gone to 18 flavors, by 1993 we were at 24, and in 1991 the Boardwalk Buster was born because a guy at the counter bet Dad he couldn't build a banana split he couldn't finish. Dad won the bet. The guy came back and won it in 1994.

Today it's all of us: Manny and Rosa, Danny (17, keeper of this web page and the milkshake machine), Christina (15, waffle cones and the Wall of Champions photos), Nina (11, sprinkles and counting things), and Abuela Carmen, who sits in the shade in the good chair and tells everybody whether their scoop is big enough. It usually is.

Thank you for thirteen summers. Here's to a whole lot more.

- The Ruiz Family