Coffee Carts

Touring around New Zealand in a motorhome, we stopped overnight next to a boat shed on the peninsula that juts out from Dunedin. We awoke to find a small coffee cart sharing our little parking bay and cars lined up back out onto the road, all there to pick up a shot as they headed into Dunedin.

Perfect! I could pick up a coffee while the family woke and breakfasted.

“G’day”.

“An Aussiee, uxculent”.

Hearing my accent was all he needed to kick off a monologue he only interrupted when acknowledging each regular as they picked up their coffee. The monologue was wildly amusing, all of the jokes at my expense, but also informative as he opened up to me about his life, as strangers often do. He’d been where I was, in the grind, but without my obligations he’d chosen to step away from it all and make coffee in the morning and surf the wild windswept coast in the afternoon.

I could do what he’s doing, I thought to myself; and there the matter rested.

Until I was sitting through another interminable meeting at work, about nothing, going nowhere, and that memory of the coffee cart drifted back in. And then would reappear at 3am in the morning, woken by thoughts of the days of meetings that lay in front. For dreams to become reality, they need to be followed up with action at 6am in the morning, but that never happened.

All this came back to me on a recent Sunday morning ride, as we made our way past another closed café with a coffee cart stationed out the front and people lined up, masks on, metres apart, waiting for their shot.

The sun is shining on low contact businesses during this extended lockdown, and coffee carts are one such example. I suspect you couldn’t buy one now for love nor money, but when you can, it will be a sure sign that we’ve learnt to live with Covid.