Sunday Drives with Mike: Sometimes the Best Sunday Drive Is a Walk Around Home

<p>Sometimes the easiest place to stop exploring is home.</p> <p>Clayton is home for me.</p> <p>It’s where I raised my family. I can walk downtown from my house. I know the restaurants, the people and the rhythms of this little town pretty well.</p> <p>Now, technically, I have a Concord address.</p> <p>My friend JM is always happy to point this out.</p> <p>Exhaustively.</p> <p>I prefer not to get bogged down in technicalities.</p> <p>Clayton is my home base.</p> <p>Once football season starts, though, my Sundays tend to look the same: Ed’s Mudville Grill, my usual spot at the bar, football on the TVs and JM behind the bar.</p> <p>I’ve been perfectly happy with that routine for years.</p> <p>Then I started SFBayWeekend.</p> <p>One of the unexpected things about this new venture is that it’s changing the way I look at places, even my own backyard.</p> <p>Now I find myself wondering:</p> <p>What’s out there? What am I missing?</p> <p>Get off the couch. Get off the bar stool. Go explore.</p> <p>So on this particular NFL Sunday, I did.</p> <p>I left Ed’s in the middle of a perfectly good afternoon of football and started walking around downtown Clayton to see what I’d been missing.</p> <p>## Same Town. Different Sundays.</p> <p>I didn’t get very far before I started seeing options.</p> <p>Around the corner from Ed’s, Ñ (Enye) Latin Table serves weekend brunch from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. It’s a beautiful newer restaurant with a polished dining room, attractive bar and shaded outdoor area.</p> <p>My Sunday started with football.</p> <p>Someone else’s could easily start with brunch.</p> <p>A few minutes later, I walked into the newly reopened Clayton Club Saloon.</p> <p>Now things got interesting.</p> <p>The Clayton Club Is Back</p> <p>The Clayton Club Saloon reopened under new ownership on Saturday.</p> <p>I was there the following day, Sunday.</p> <p>It was packed.</p> <p>A live band was playing. The outdoor bar was open. Football was on inside and outside.</p> <p>More importantly, I recognized people.</p> <p>Old Clayton Club people.</p> <p>The bathrooms have been remodeled. The backyard has been cleaned up. The bar looks sharper.</p> <p>But the trees are still there.</p> <p>The boots are still hanging from the ceiling.</p> <p>And some of the old bartenders are still behind the bar.</p> <p>Longtime regular David West told me he liked what he was seeing so far. Bud, another longtime regular, had a similarly positive first impression.</p> <p>It’s far too early for me to declare whether the new owners have pulled it off.</p> <p>But two days in, my first impression was pretty simple:</p> <p>Cleaner. More polished. Still the Clayton Club.</p> <p>I’ll come back to that story another day.</p> <p>I had more walking to do.</p> <p>Wait. There’s a DJ at Vinny’s?</p> <p>At Vinny’s Taqueria, a DJ was playing music.</p> <p>A DJ wasn’t what I expected to find on my Sunday stroll, but there he was.</p> <p>Multiple TVs were going, too.</p> <p>I’d gone from football at Ed’s to a live band at the Clayton Club to a DJ at Vinny’s.</p> <p>All within a few blocks.</p> <p>Pizza, Bocce and Ice Cream</p> <p>Then there’s Skipolini’s Pizza.</p> <p>The Clayton location is the original Skipolini’s, dating back to 1974. On this Sunday, families were outside and people were playing bocce next door.</p> <p>That’s another kind of Sunday entirely.</p> <p>Grab a pizza. Play some bocce. Let the kids burn off some energy.</p> <p>Keep walking and there’s Sip ’N Sweet for ice cream or coffee.</p> <p>Nearby, I could hear plenty of activity coming from Odyssey VR Lounge.</p> <p>La Veranda Cafe was open, and Ñ gives you another option if you want something beyond brunch.</p> <p>By 4 p.m., Moresi’s Chophouse opens, so you could easily turn the afternoon into dinner.</p> <p>I was starting to see Clayton differently.</p> <p>Not as a collection of individual restaurants and bars.</p> <p>As a Sunday you could make up as you went.</p> <p>Cutting Through The Grove</p> <p>Eventually, I started making my way back toward Ed’s.</p> <p>To get there, I cut through The Grove, the park that sits right in the middle of downtown Clayton.</p> <p>Families were sitting around. Kids were on the playground and swings. The fountains were running, and kids were darting through the little water jets.</p> <p>Mount Diablo was there in the background.</p> <p>And that may have been my favorite part of the walk.</p> <p>Nothing extraordinary was happening.</p> <p>No festival. No tickets. No reservation. No big plan.</p> <p>Just people enjoying a Sunday afternoon in the middle of town.</p> <p>A few minutes later, I was back at Ed’s.</p> <p>Same bar stool. Same football games.</p> <p>But now I’d taken a lap around a place I thought I already knew.</p> <p>I’d found brunch at Ñ, a packed and newly reopened Clayton Club, live music, a DJ at Vinny’s, pizza and bocce at Skipolini’s, ice cream at Sip ’N Sweet and plenty of other reasons to wander around.</p> <p>And all I really had to do was get up and walk outside.</p> <p>Oktoberfest will be here soon, and downtown Clayton will look completely different.</p> <p>I’ll be back for that.</p> <p>But on this Sunday, I rediscovered something much closer to home.</p> <p>What exactly did I just find?</p> <p>My own backyard. Again.</p> <p>It’s out there. Let’s go find it.</p> <p>Find the Magic.</p>