Holiday Travel Adventure

What a day. I'm finally sitting in my daughter's apartment after our 7 hour drive turned into a 9 hour drive. So, how did we manage that?

Well, we lost about 20 minutes just trying to get out of Los Angeles. Even though we left at 5am there were plenty of commuters on the road, and a fair number of folks like us getting an early jump on the holiday weekend.

Our first stop is always in Buttonwillow for gas and a McDonald's breakfast on the go. You could tell this was a holiday weekend because the McD, which usually isn't that busy at 7:15am, was full of families with kids. The lobby was so crowded we got back in the car and went through the drive-up. There went another 10 minutes.

Leaving Buttonwillow 30 minutes behind schedule we were moving along at a good pace for about an hour when the highway absolutely stopped dead. As we found out many minutes later some power lines had come down on the I-5 and it was closed in both directions just north of Harris Ranch. After creeping along for awhile we were diverted off the highway and onto a 25 mile detour through the farm fields of Central California. We did finally get back on the highway past the scene of the incident, but lost another hour in the process. We pitied the poor folks stuck in a 10 mile backup on both sides of the problem. We also picked up our share of mud from the dirty farm roads we traveled.

Just north of our farmland adventure it started to rain, and rained the entire rest of the trip. The rain didn't slow us down, but traffic did. I had planned to use my new found shortcut up Hwy. 680, but just before the interchange the message sign announced a truck fire on 680 with a traffic backup. Back to the old route which takes us right through Oakland and across the Richmond Bridge into San Rafael. What a mess. The other 30 minutes we lost was given up fighting traffic at several spots we wouldn't even have passed through had my shortcut been available.

However, all is now well. We had all four of us together for lunch for the first time since August, and now we're hanging out in her dorm apartment reading and working online while the kids are playing with the XBox. Good times.