Walt Disney saved my bacon yesterday.
Yesterday, my lovely bride and I were racing home from the southern border near San Diego, CA. We live on the beautiful central coast of California, near a beautiful seaside community called Pismo Beach. All in all, it’s around 340 grueling miles from our home to the border. Our meeting there lasted through the morning and we got into our vehicle at about 2:15 p.m., we turned our front bumper to the north and punched the throttle and sped off toward our beloved home.
All the while I’m driving north I’m channeling Dionne Warwick. I’m repeating, like a mantra, a line from the song: Do You Know the Way to San Jose? The bridge of the lyrics makes this short but poignantly loaded observation: LA is a great big freeway. . . .
She released the song back in 1968. Actually Burt Bacharach penned the words a few years earlier, in 1966. Anyway, if that was his observation fifty years ago, I wonder how he would have worded the song today? Because the freeway system in Los Angeles and in southern California in general has expanded dramatically since then. Looking at an AAA map of LA will not give you a sense of size and proportion of the complex maze of freeways, highways, state roads and thoroughfares that make up the area.
That is, until you actually try personally navigating your way through it. Such was our fate on Monday.
At the outset, I will say this positively for the system; there are an almost endless combination of roadways to get you from point A to point B. And, when you are not competing with the other millions of Angelenos who are also trying to get from point A to point B, you will find the system quite ingeniously handy. This, however, was not one of those times.
We’d made this trip before. The last time we made the journey we drove into downtown Los Angeles at the height of the going-home rush hour. When we veered onto the 101, near downtown LA, (Let the Reader know - this is how you speak about the road systems in California; you always place a ‘the’ in front of any highway, whether it is a county, state or federal stretch of road. So, when you describe your trip, you’ll say something like, “Yes, I took the 805 to the 210. Then I got on the 118, then skipped over to the 126, to the 101.”), we spent the next 90 minutes cruising at a blistering 15 miles per hour.
I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be driving than parking. Rush hour traffic is like taking a cheese grater to my last nerve. But we decided to make the most of it. After all, most of the time we absolutely zoomed through the city, either not paying attention, or unable to pay attention to all the touristy features and landmarks that make Hollywood the attraction that it is. In addition to the famous landmark, the Hollywood sign, we saw dozens of buildings, parks, cultural centers, as ethnic communities as we slloowwwly made our way north. It was almost like going on a tour, just us and our 10,000 friends in the cars and lanes next to us and around us.
We finally got home about 2 hours later than we should have. Right then and there, we vowed, never again! We would never get caught like that again. But we also knew that, no matter how strong our resolve to not get stuck in LA rush hour traffic, it was easier said than done. It would take both planning and luck.
We knew we had 3 weeks until the next trip to San Diego. So we researched and asked friends and consulted Google. Then, on early Sunday afternoon, we embarked on the journey south. This time we were feeling confident and hopeful that we would beat the system and avoid the agonizingly unpleasant delays. So we took the 101 to the 126(Ventura). We found a state road that allowed us to shortcut to the 118(Moorpark). From the 118 we got right on to the 210(San Fernando) and overnighted with our friends, Gail and David, in Rancho Cucamonga. There we rested, slept, took a deep breath and finished the drive, jumping back on the 210 until we found the 15. We took the 15 south all the way until it merged with the 805(San Diego). Once on the 805 we cruised to our appointment with lots of time to spare. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy! Our average speed was around 60 miles per hour.
We spent the next 5 hours doing what we went there to do. All the while, looming in the back of our minds, was Dionne Warwick and the drive home.
No comments:
Post a Comment