Due to an accident while swimming in the sea, Francis meets the surfer Moondoggie. She's fascinated with his sport and starts to hang out with his clique. Although they make fun of her at first, they teach her to surf and soon she's accepted and given the nickname "Gidget". But it's hard work to become more than a friend to Moondoggie.

Francis is desperate: her parents want to force her to come with them on vacation to Hawaii - just during the two weeks when her beloved "Moondoggy" is home from College. When he suggests her to go for it, she's even more in panic - doesn't he care to be with her? So she sets out for Hawaii in the worst mood. On the plane she meets the sociable Abby, who gives her the advice to forget about Jeff - and regrets it shortly after, when Francis follows the advice and steals her boyfriend Eddie, a famous dancer. But then Jeff discovers he's missing Francis...

Francis, now 17, is still in love with Moondoggy. She can persuade her parents to allow them a journey to Rome, together with two of her and two of his friends. However they have to take an adult with them, so they choose Peter's eccentric aunt. In Rome they get the beautiful guide Daniela, who's fascinating the guys and making especially Gidget jealous. She starts looking elsewhere herself.

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

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.