Sunday Drive
The best description of a Sunday drive that I have heard is: it is a drive in a car that is taken for pleasure or leisure and typically there is no destination or rush.
Most of that narrative applies to our annual ditch day drive except that we DO have a destination and it isn’t on a Sunday.
So for the sake of argument, it will still be added to our “Sunday Drives” section because it still meets all of the other points. Plus, even though we do have a destination, once we get there it, we just go where the car takes us.
As it turned out, this day of hooky was on the same week day as last year and the weather was just as perfect.
Our previous Wednesday excursion began at Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles County as we made our way back down the coast to finally finish 17 miles away in San Pedro. This year we decided to make San Pedro our starting point and head south from there.
San Pedro ended up being a good portion of the day as we got lost so often we actually traveled over one large bridge four times and another three times. There was no such thing as a simple U-turn. If you missed your off-ramp, it was back over the bridge again. We didn’t mind though as San Pedro was a very intriguing place.
Why would someone get so lost you are probably wondering? Keep in mind that San Pedro is one of the largest shipping ports in the world. Ships, containers, trucks are everywhere, thousands of them!
There is no reference point and there are numbered berths everywhere. There are huge cranes as far as you can see that are working vigorously to load or off-load ships. Each set of cranes has a different color which could have been helpful as a point of reference but we didn’t take notice until later.
We were mesmerized as we watched an enormous ship getting loaded with shipping containers that were stacked many stories high. Fascinated by the crane operation, I was surprised on how quickly they hoist the shipping crates onto the ship. The mechanical arm continually moves back and forth picking up the metal boxes as if they were feathers.
A close up of the enormous ship with containers stacked high
Staycations California 