I hadn't planned to do a Day 6 post because Day 6 was just supposed to be the drive home from Monterey. The trip should have taken us about 6 hours, including a lunch stop, and instead took 8 1/2. The first 1,200 miles of this trip went pretty much without incident, but the last 95 were a son-of-a gun and took nearly 4 hours to complete. Why? Here's a clue:
That's a shot from my cellphone camera of smoke billowing across the I-5 just north of Castaic. A brush fire had broken out just a few minutes before we got there and because it was burning on both sides of the freeway, they shut the freeway down. Here's what it looked like a little later:
This was about an hour after we stopped dead in 95 degree heat with fire pretty much all around us. the hillside next to the freeway where we were stopped wasn't burned, but it was burning up on top and the fire department was making repeated helicopter water drops up there. All in all we sat there watching the air show for 70 minutes. By the time we finally moved ahead we were all eyeing our McDonald's cups and trying to figure out a graceful way to use them for certain "necessities".As we finally moved ahead the guard rail posts on both sides of the freeway were still burning, but most of the big part of the fire had moved up and over the hill. The freeway itself stayed closed for several hours after they let all us trapped folks escape.
That wasn't the end of it. Fires were breaking out all over L.A., and another fire on our route home kept us in heavy traffic for nearly 20 miles as we crept from Pasadena to Glendora. Some fun.
However, we finally made it home, and I don't think we'll be taking any car trips anytime soon.
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