Over the rivers

I’m in (finally) sunny Palm Springs for the holiday. It was quite the adventure getting here.

I’d thought about flying, but there are no non-stop flights from San José airport to Palm Springs (Alaska Air would have required me to fly up to Seattle and then down to the Springs, which I thought was just salt on old wounds), so I’d have had to fly out of SFO. When I calculated the time it would take to drive to the airport, park, shuttle, get through security, hope the flight left on time (as if) and then drive from the airport to my sister's place, it came to about six hours.

It’s an eight-hour drive.

Plus, no danger of getting felt up by THS. And I could bring a couple of bottles of sparkling wine with me without worrying about it exploding in the checked luggage.

So, there was a plan. But then The Storm came.

Southern California has been hit with several days and many inches of rain, and yesterday was pretty bad. (Not by, say, monsoon standards, but for SoCal, it was bad.)

It didn’t get dodgy until the Tejon Pass through the Tehachapais, when making out cars in front of you became problematic. And it was like that in spurts all the way down to San Bernardino County.

(This isn’t the worst rain I’ve driven through; that honor goes to a stretch of I-10 between Houston and Lafayette, La., when you couldn’t see the front of your car’s hood, much less the vehicle ahead of you. But at least then people didn’t continue driving at speed.)

The situation wasn’t helped by my sat-nav system telling me to go via the 71, 60 and I-215 freeways instead of out the 210.

But I eventually got here, much relieved to be out of the weather and the traffic. There’s no place in SoCal that’s not completely chockers with cars, semis and RVs.

The weather cleared up overnight and today it was warm enough for me to hop around town in short sleeves. (Although a considerable portion of this area was subject to flooding over the past day or so and today many roads are still closed. Those that aren’t have swathes of silt & rocks that mark where mobile lakes were yesterday.)

I’m really glad for the break and looking forward to the activities my sister and I have planned. If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to visit my BFF, as well. That would be worth any drive.