Last week, I bought a six-pack of A&W diet root beer. As soon as I placed it in my shopping cart, a flood of memories battered my mind.

A&W root beer, at least to me, equates to trips to the beach. To be more precise, A&W root beer equates to trips from the beach to home, with home being Pensacola, Fla.

Whenever my father, an aviator in the Marine Corps, was stationed at Naval Air Station Pensacola, the family made many trips to Pensacola Beach. It became almost a ritual that after a day at the beach, the family would stop at the A&W root beer stand for root beer floats and other treats on the way to our house on Montclair Street.

Before the root beer floats came the beach.

Ahhh! Pensacola Beach. If you’ve never been there and seen its sugar-white sands, my words to describe it won’t do it justice. For those of you who have been there, you know what I am talking about.

People talk about the beaches of Southern California. My father was stationed at Camp Pendleton, next to Oceanside, Calif., which is about half way between Los Angeles and San Diego, in the early 1960s. The beaches of Southern California don’t come close to matching the allure of Florida’s panhandle beaches like Destin and Panama City Beach, or the Carolina beaches for that matter.

As a towheaded young’un, going to Pensacola Beach was a major excursion. You always made sure to take three things to the beach with you: flip-flops, a beach towel and suntan lotion. We had suntan lotion — Coppertone to be exact. It wasn’t called sunscreen in those days. Flip-flops were a must because the sun’s rays were reflected as heat off that white sand that was dry. Flip-flops could come off one’s feet once said feet hit the wet, white sand. As for the Coppertone, I still believe we used that brand because one of my younger sisters, Angie, looked very much like the Coppertone girl. She also looked very much like the towheaded girl pictured on loaves of Sunbeam bread.

As much as we were overjoyed at going to the beach, we were just as overjoyed at leaving the beach. Leaving the beach, in most cases, meant stopping at the A&W stand as we made our way home. Going to the A&W stand meant going out of our way because it was not on the direct route home.

My beverage of choice was a “black cow,” or a root beer float. In those days, a scoop of vanilla ice cream in a frosted mug of root beer (that’s the only way to make a black cow, in a frosted mug) was the perfect beverage to quaff after a day of being pounded by waves, burned by the sun and eluding that lurking undertow (known to me as the Undertoad, an amphibious creature that carried boys and girls under the water to be seen no more, according to parents).

OK, to this day I love black cows, but made with diet root beer and no-sugar-added, fat-free vanilla ice cream, if no-sugar-added, fat-free vanilla ice cream can truly be called ice cream. Truth be told, I prefer the black cows of my youth (better taste), but these days the “healthful” version is acceptable.

With the black cows of my youth, came corn dogs. Once I hit age 10, those corn dogs became foot-long corn dogs.

Hey, a growing boy needs something more filling than just a regular corn dog.

I know why my mother always wanted to stop at the A&W stand on the way back from the beach — food for strength. After all, she would be the one to remove all that white sand we left behind in the tub after taking our obligatory baths after returning from each beach trip.

We always left behind enough of that white sand in the tub to create our own beach next to our Slip ’N Slide.

Mike Voss covers the city of Washington for the Washington Daily News. He contends the best way to eat a corn dog is to dip it into a glass jar containing French’s mustard. Alas, such glass jars are rare these days, if any have survived the move to plastic, squeezable containers.