We're here! .. did the glasses make the trip?

Albany, CA

2393 miles into the trip, 38 hours total travel time (Trip 1 is complete)


The view from my new home.

I made it!!! Wow is California boring!

At least, I-5 is. I-5 exists, I believe, to allow snooty rich people from LA to drive, without much hassle, straight to Sacramento, really really fast, probably to argue about how much tax they don’t have to pay. Barstow to Bakersfield was an off-the-beaten path road, strange considering how the interstate system pretty much can get you anywhere. In order to get from Barstow to Bakersfield by interstate highways, you’d have to drive to Los Angeles. So you can understand why I wouldn’t do that.

Driving through the Mojave Desert, very near Death Valley. Having made the gradual transition across America, it’s hard to say that the desert looked much like a desert, as it was fairly green. Probably had something to do with time of year. I started seeing tumble weeds in Oklahoma, so they weren’t new. I started seeing cacti in Texas, in the ‘grasslands’, so they weren’t new either. The sun sure as hell wasn’t new. I hadn’t seen a cloud in the sky since the MO-OK border.

Coming over the next ridge of the Sierra Nevada, it was beautiful and green. And then… it stretched out as long as the eye could see. Fog. I was over it, and began driving down the side of the mountain into the gray crap.

I should mention here that California doesn't have mile marker/post signs along the interstates. So not only is it long and boring, but you can't even placate yourself with 'it's only 80 more miles... 79... 78...'

All I could see from that point on was within a half mile visibility, and all that existed within a half mile of the road were farms. Farms of every type. Mostly orange and lemons, but sometimes almonds and cherries, olives, dates, lettuce, strawberries, all sorts of produce. And, funny enough, the largest stockyard was along I-5 and not in Texas. I saw more cows crowded in this one pen area than in all of the free range areas I saw the rest of the way combined. And that, like I said, was within 1/2 mile of the road.

I called Brian during the trip to talk fantasy football, and it looks like we both are going to lose. Not a surprise, we’ve been losing all year. I finally managed to find football games on the radio, and listened to that the rest of the way. Boring, because the teams stunk. But it was better than figuring out how many state names are or are based from Indian tribes (20), how many feet over ground level the peak of the mountain I saw on Saturday was (about 7,500), and counting down the miles until I was 3 hours, 2 hours, and 1 hour away.

Once I made in to Oakland, the trip was much quicker than I expected. It might have to do something with the fact that a truck, with as much mass as the one I was driving, can as a result hold a lot of momentum (momentum = mass times velocity) and so it didn’t take much energy to keep it at about 70 the rest of the way. Jenny had a nice parking spot on the street waiting for me, I pulled in with no hassle and cooled down, turned on the boob tube and vegged until dinner.

I wanted to go to a restaurant that we really liked called the Black Diamond. It wasn’t far from where we used to live in Walnut Creek, and was about 20 minutes away by car. We made the trip, only to find out they were closed. For good. I was heartbroken, and I’m sure Jenny was too. It was a local microbrewery, and they had really good food. The sign said they had moved somewhere up the road, but I was too tired to find it. We settled on a barbeque place, and drove home.

This morning I started bringing up stuff from the truck, only to find the security staff watching the elevators. See, they have a policy about using the elevators to move in or something, and we were going to cheat and try to avoid as much of that hassle as possible. But it looks like we’ll have to wait until after Jenny gets home to start unloading in earnest. At least I had my priorities right and hooked up the surround sound, the Xbox, and Christmas tree. I need to bring up more stuff…