We planned a glamorous two-day holiday on the coast of Victoria for my birthday, but instead of feeling like a holiday, it felt more like a trip to a comic Twilight Zone. Admittedly, our challenges were first world problems, but it was startling to realize what novices my husband and I are at pursuing leisure activities. Cleary, we have not practiced enough.
My only birthday wish was to wake-up on the actual day somewhere new. I got my wish, but it did not turn out exactly as we expected. It was off-season in this coastal holiday area and this meant that many restaurants and shops were closed and others had limited hours.
The off-season schedules appeared to be arbitrary and influenced by things like the variable temperature outside and whether the ocean is blue-green or gray-blue and whether the waters were choppy.
In pursuit of an elegant dinner for my birthday, we learned that many restaurants were closed until the middle of September. There was the Sardinian restaurant with a charming note on the front that read, “Our staff are all in Sardinia collecting new recipes for your pleasure and we will be open again the first week of September.” Well, they must have been hijacked because it was the first week of September and there was not a Sardinian in sight.
We eventually found another Italian restaurant on the foreshore of Sorrento where we were served by a lovely, young Italian waitress who was learning English. She enthusiastically ordered a Margareta pizza for us before the main course but what we actually had asked for was a Margareta cocktail. We cleared up the confusion but the comic possibilities for this trip seemed endless.
While many of the businesses were closed or had part-time schedules, the Opportunity ‘Op’ shops* dotted around the foreshore were all open nine to five. If you wanted secondhand water bottles, plastic dinosaurs or linen, these shops are your destination of choice. They were the only small businesses that seemed genuinely eager for business in the off-season along with several small fish and chip shops. (There is some irony in the Op shops’ locations: you only have to drive fifteen minutes down the road to Portsea where residents are living in homes with an estimated cost of 2.5 million dollars and above.)
As we drove home, I was thinking about the rigid Covid restrictions and how many of these boutique businesses must have struggled during the pandemic. It was a signal of recovery that they were feeling confident enough to take holidays, and whether it was inconvenient or not for visitors, many of the businesses were feeling no sense of urgency to communicate about whether they would be open for business. This was some consolation.
(* An “Op” shop sells secondhand goods to support charities.)
