Former beach bunny/girl surfer Francine “Gidget” Lawrence is an adult and married to her long-term beau Jeff “Moondoggie” Griffin. She deals with a variety of marital spats, as well as running her own travel agency, running interferences with her teenage niece, and trying to arrange a reunion of her husband’s old surfing friends. Meanwhile, Jeff works as an architect and must fend off romantic advances from his beautiful and lascivious boss. Gidget’s niece wants to learn how to surf and gets too much when she sneaks out to see a suave, self-serving beach bum behind the back of her nerdy boyfriend.

When Gidget is invited to go to Hawaii with her aunt, she ends up having romantic adventures in the tropical paradise. With jealousy, love triangles, and hula dancing, Gidget's Hawaiian vacation turns out to be quite eventful.

After spending the last two years in Europe as an exchange student, Gidget returns home to California only to discover that things have changed. The letters she had been writing to her beloved "Moondoggie" to try to make him jealous have had the wrong effect. Disillusioned with love, and after hearing a speech on television, she decides to make a real difference in the world by going to New York to become a youth worker at the United Nations. While there she has a proposal of marriage from an extremely wealthy Arabian sheik, but instead she falls for a handsome but older Australian diplomat.

Gidget is a teenage girl who goes on a summer vacation to the beach. While there, she learns to surf and falls in love with a local surfer boy. Along the way, Gidget deals with issues such as misogyny, unrequited love, and the challenges of being a tomboy in a male-dominated surfing community.

Gidget finally gets married and rebels against the social caste system in her new husband's company.

College student Gidget travels to Rome, Italy, where she gets caught up in a series of misadventures involving deception, high society, and fashion. Along the way, she falls in love, learns to surf, and discovers the true meaning of friendship.