Maybe it’s time for Montauk to adopt the beachy vacation-spot practice of golf cart as primary transportation option. They’re a jaunty sight, puttering up and down the main drag, kids or fur-blown family dog along for the doorless ride. They offer more room to maneuver and park and, whether electric or gas-powered, less environmental stress, no?
We arrived in Geneva on the Lake, Ohio, just in time for the first golf carts of the season to hit the streets. The weather took a turn for the warmer on Saturday, and it was so long, links. We might’ve thought it an odd phenomenon, but we’d seen it before in Myrtle Beach, S.C., and Virginia Beach (for last year’s N.C.A.A. Division III national track and field championships, outdoor and in).
The presence of a golf cart parade makes a town feel like one big party, or show, or event, or happening. Which would surely apply to the hamlet atop the rocky promontory at the eastern end of our fair Island.
Geneva on the Lake, though, is a throwback the way Montauk once was, with biker and cowboy bars, a chockablock junk shop, a penny arcade, mini golf twice over, the kind of open-air eateries where you can rest your elbows at a serving window and suck on a chili dog without leaving the sidewalk, and one establishment in particular that shows someone at last got the restaurant naming game right — Effin Burrito.
Our daughter, in town to run at nationals at the vast, multi-sport Spire Institute, pointed out a major difference, the lack of salt air. Lake Erie, spectacular and rough as a fresh-water ocean when we arrived, is not always as visible as it should be, and a drive out of town may have you wishing more states had the kind of progressive governor Oregon did in the Teddy Roosevelt era, hellbent on public land ownership along the coast. There are all of 10 miles of undeveloped Ohio coast, according to a natural history marker at Headlands Beach State Park (much beach grass, good birdwatching, a lighthouse).
Of course, Paradise Montauk isn’t short on parkland. It simply needs an arcade, an Effin Burrito, and golf carts coursing the Plaza.