A Sunday Afternoon Drive
Bay Farm Island Road
The answer to feeling housebound on a beautiful Sunday in October, Nyel said, was to take a drive! So yesterday after lunch, off we went. No destination in mind – just getting out to enjoy the day.
I remember that when I was a small child “Sunday Drives” were de rigueur. That was before World War II – before rationing and the moratorium on gasoline and tires made such luxuries impossible. I think the entire ‘Sunday Drive’ phenomena must have been a holdover from the days when having an “automobile machine” as my grandmother called them, was still an indulgence of the first order.
In Surfside
On one of our Sunday Drives, I remember getting my first puppy – way out in Hayward. A full 21 miles away from Alameda where we lived. It was an all-afternoon excursion. At least it remains so in my memory. Sometimes we just drove out to Bay Farm Island – which isn’t an island at all, but I didn’t know that then. It was far distant in the country in my memory – all farms and cows and unpaved roads. In reality, it was about two-and-a-half miles from where we lived on Versailles Avenue. I remember going out there to choose a pumpkin for a Jack-o-lantern once; it must have been about this time of year.
Our drive yesterday took us first out to Surfside and up to the Great Day Café. It was open but we chose not to go in, Nyel’s stamina not being up to snuff. Then we headed south, drove by the golf course, got sorta lost in the maze of Surfside South/Ocean Park? North, and then decided to drive toward Ilwaco to check out the cranberry harvest. Our timing was definitely off – no activity on any of the farms we passed except for one, on Cranberry Road, where a lone worker was driving a big beater around a flooded bog.
Cranberry Bog
Home again after an hour or so of driving around – rubber-necking just like tourists. We didn’t come home with a puppy or even a pumpkin. And, though I hate to admit it, we passed up a couple of opportunities to buy fresh cranberries. Somehow, that meant planning – maybe for Thanksgiving Dinner – and we were more in the one-day-at-a-time mode. Actually, one afternoon at a time. One lovely Sunday Afternoon Drive!
My mother always liked to go for Sunday drives when I was growing up in the ’50s and ’60s. The oil embargo of the early ’70s and the realization that oil is finite and so is clean air put the kabash on frivolous automobile trips. My mother likes riding enough that while she was still relatively mobile, but didn’t have a car, she would ride the Pacific Transit from Ilwaco up to Ocean Park and back just to “get out and get the stink blown off.”