The Coastal Drive

Shape: a drive along water with no real destination. Half a day, windows down, the route more important than the arrival.

Some of the best dates are not places but motion — and the coastal drive is the finest of them, a few hours in a car beside the water with nowhere in particular to be. The destination, if there is one, is an excuse. The drive is the date.

The car is a strangely good room for two people. Side by side, eyes on the road, talking without the pressure of a face to read — there is a reason the most honest conversations of many relationships happen in a moving car. Add a shoreline out the window, the light off the water, the road bending to follow the coast, and you have a setting that asks nothing of you but to keep going and keep talking. Build a playlist beforehand; the right song at the right curve of the road is its own small event.

Resist the urge to optimize. The coastal drive is ruined by a tight itinerary. Leave room to pull over at the overlook that was not on the map, to stop at the unpromising roadside place that turns out to be perfect, to sit for twenty minutes at a turnout watching the water do nothing in particular. The unplanned stops are where the day lives. The plan is just enough structure to get you onto the road.

Time it for the light if you can. A coastal drive that ends near sunset — the water going gold, then pink, then dark, the headlights coming on, the day folding down into the warm cabin of the car — is hard to improve upon. By then you will have run out of agenda and be simply driving, together, music low, the shoreline a dark line beside you, in no hurry at all to arrive anywhere.

Make It Yours

Any water will do — ocean, lake, river, reservoir. The route matters less than the company and the absence of a schedule. Find the nearest shoreline road and follow it until you feel like turning around.