Ah, sweet freedom. After 57 days of being locked inside my 1,200-square-foot prison, my daughter and I went for a joyride on Tuesday, strictly for research purposes.

“Locked inside my prison” might be overstating my plight slightly. It’s the sort of prison a drug lord or mafia kingpin might expect: TV, internet, stocked fridge and bar, smartphone, dogs. I’ve stayed in worse places.

And I’ve even had a few short jaunts outside here in the law-abidin’ East Long Beach, where every two people are more or less alike. There are times I think I couldn’t pick myself out of a line-up.

I haven’t witnessed any health regulation violations out here: People walk, masked, in pairs or at a distance from one another. They bike or jog by the house, or push a baby stroller or pull a kid in a wagon.

Parents take a break from their newfound jobs as elementary school teachers and let their kids decorate the sidewalks with chalk or toss a ball around. I usually work at work and am not at home during the weekdays, so maybe it’s always like this here. I suspect it is, there are few mob scenes around these parts unless the Municipal Band is playing.

But I wondered how the more alluring spots in town are faring: places like Belmont Shore and the Peninsula, with their irresistibly tempting beaches on a gorgeous spring day. Are people going to go all Huntington Beach on us and damn the restrictions in favor of frolicking in the Southern California sunshine?

Well, they weren’t on Tuesday. Granted, the beaches were still closed, but a cardboard “closed” sign and a bit of yellow tape hasn’t always been an insurmountable deterrent for people who find reasons to discredit the stay-home restrictions we’ve been living under since mid-March. And it’s a wild array of faulty rationalizations that have been employed: They’re healthy and certainly won’t die from COVID, a disease that only kills old people in nursing homes; the entire COVID hoax is a ploy to discredit Trump; sunshine is the best cure; we’ve got to get the economy back on track; COVID statistics are artificially inflated so hospitals can get more money; freedom; the bat quarter!

Granted, all solid reasons to bolt outside, as long as spreading a little coronavirus doesn’t stop you from enjoying yourself, and I was curious how many Long Beachers availed themselves of the beach at the Bay on Tuesday, so I loaded Hannah up in the car and drove farther from home than I’ve been in almost two months—maybe four or five miles. Good thing gas is cheap. And, to be honest, I wasn’t merely curious. I wanted to get a change of scenery. You can only look out your living room window for so many consecutive days.

Tuesday was a tourist brochure day. Warm, but not hot, a nice breeze, and a long stretch of vacant sand from Second Street, around Horny Corner and slingshotting past the Leeway Sailing Center and on down to nearly 55th Place. And not a soul in sight on the strand. That alone was a temptation for me to set up a beach chair and settle in with my Kindle for a few quiet hours of healing sunshine and disturbing reading (I’m gonna need a good private-eye novel to cleanse my palate after “The Sixth Extinction” and “Notes from the Apocalypse.” Why do I torture myself?), but what kind of example would that be for my daughter, who’s even stricter about the COVID restrictions than I am?

There were just a few people, all behaving properly, on or in the water: A couple of paddle-boarders gliding beneath the Second Street Bridge on their way to Ghetto Naples, a father and son splashing  just offshore, another woman freestyling at a good pace across the Bay near the Portofino. And that was it.

That is, until Hannah and I headed back to the car. We saw a young woman—or maybe an old girl; I didn’t card her—in a bikini, step over the wall on Bay Shore Avenue near Division Street, fling out a towel and spread out on the sand to sunbathe.

I wasn’t mad at her (though Hannah wasn’t pleased). Maybe a tad jealous. She had the whole beach to herself on a perfect day.

But just being there by herself made her pretty conspicuous, and I was confident that soon a lifeguard or patrol officer would come by and tell her to go home, where it’s safe.