The Two Lane Roads to the Beach

There was a time when a trip the beach was more of a journey than a drive. In the mid-fifties in North Carolina a combination of Route 70 and Route 64 got you to the northern beaches where we went most summers. Those were two lane roads so the trip was long and twisting.
Mother would pack us in her early fifties Ford much like the one in “Lessons in Chemistry,” but without the very cool paint job. Mom’s car was a dark blue Ford with three on the tree. In order to make a long trip to the beach, mother had to pack the car like a covered wagon.
We were always accompanied by two or more female teenaged cousins. They were independent country girls and two of them were school bus drivers in their high school years. There were no fast food restaurant chains on the route and a single mother with a car filled with children did not stop at strange restaurants.
The solution was to cook and have a picnic along the way. Mother loved to cook and would focus on foods that did not need refrigeration like fried chicken and country ham biscuits. If we had enough room in the cooler with the real cokes in glass bottles, there might be a few pimento cheese sandwiches with the crusts cut off. There would also be groceries including homegrown tomatoes but not much else. Mother would save money so we could have three or four dinners out while eating those tomato sandwiches or some newly made pimento cheese. We might eat breakfast out a couple of times after the ham biscuits ran out. Then there was scrambled eggs and toast.

A word about biscuits is appropriate. My mother started baking biscuits for her family when she was nine. Her mother died in the flu pandemic in 1918. She was too small to lift the heavy cast iron biscuit pan so one of her older brothers had to do it. She must have used up all her biscuit magic in those years because I never saw her make a biscuit that didn’t come from a can. She loved to make wonderful rolls. My wife and I are both expert biscuit makers and would have a hard time serving a biscuit out of a can.
Our trips to the beach in the fifties were magical. Television had not grabbed our souls so a trip to the beach was a way to see another world and meet different people. We never even thought a minute about the house where we stayed. That it was a few blocks from the beach was never a problem. We went to the beach in the morning and came back just before dinner. Often lunch was a pack of Lance nabs or a hot dog from a nearby food stand.

There was nothing quite like coming back from a day at the beach and waiting your turn to get a real shower. Bathroom time was at a premium because the girls had to get ready for the evening. Somehow we all got to dinner and filled ourselves with fried seafood.
Then there was often a walk on the dark beach and maybe a visit to arcade or the dance floor and all the shops that used to flourish by the beaches.
The only thing bad about the beach was leaving the beach. Mother often took a two-week vacation so we were pretty acclimated and tanned by the time we headed west towards the Piedmont foothills.
It was all part of a wonderful childhood in the Piedmont before we got those eight and ten lane roads. Two of our favorite beaches were Emerald Isle and Nags Head.