Home Sweet Home

It seems like a day on the road never turns out like you think it will.  Maybe it's just me, or it could have something to do with driving over 33 hours in the last week.  I'm a three-hour a day gal.  If it's more than three hours, I stop somewhere along the way to spend the night.

In the OLDEN days when I was much younger, driving eight hours in a day was nothing.  Let's face it ... I'm old.  Those days are long gone.  It was bad enough I drove five hours from Indio to Bakersfield, but I really thought there was plenty of rest time in the Orange Grove RV Park before the final sprint to home.  I was wrong ... AGAIN!

As I came down the hill and around town, there were fields of water from all the rain.  Being a farmer, my first thought was rice ... it's always flooded at the beginning of the year ... but that's not usually until the end of April.   Everywhere I went there were huge expanses of the wet stuff and big puddles alongside the road.

In case you were wondering where Halos come from ... it's here, in beautiful downtown Delano.  This place is humungous, which is really cool.  I bet they employ hundreds of people!!

There's really nothing to see when driving from Bakersfield to Central California, which is a good thing, because if you don't keep your eye on the road, you'll break your teeth when you hit that 799th pothole.  Everything was going along swell until I saw the flashing Highway Patrol lights at the San Joaquin River bridge just North of Fresno.  Hmmmm, must be an accident.

Down to 5 mph, most of which was spent stopped, I contemplated the back of this truck for 30 minutes.  I'm not sure how far we traveled, but my phone said it was going to take 63 minutes to go 4 miles.  I went into ZEN mode ... it's okay, I don't have to be home at any specific time.  

These two guys riding their rice rockets didn't see the brake lights ahead and slow down.  The black bike on the left, left a long trail on the pavement into the grass before sliding to a stop.  There's another red one crashed just behind my rear view mirror.  No sign of the second rider.  The guy in  black by the train tracks is talking on the phone while looking at his helmet about 50 feet away.  YIKES!!

Pretty soon, traffic was lined up as far as you could see in both directions.  At long last we came to a sign on the freeway that said Road Work 8 miles ahead.  Are you kidding me???

Nope ... leave it to Cal Trans to decide to repair a bridge on the busiest morning of the week.  They were actually putting something into the holes in the road.  Wow ... that's unique and something you don't see any more ... repairing the potholes.  

My three hour tour turned into a Gilligan's Island marathon of 4-1/2 hours, making Nancy a VERY tired cranky girl, so when she got to the fuel station North of her destination, she had to bite her tongue.  Truck drivers are a stubborn lot ... when they pull into a station, they figure they can stay parked as long as they want at the pump while they peruse the aisles of the AM-PM.

At long last I made it home, parked perfectly on the first try (thank you for rear view cameras) and collapsed on the couch.  That didn't last long however, as I required sustenance ... another grilled cheese sandwich ... before the unloading began.  In spite of thinking I would do that "tomorrow", I constantly needed stuff, requiring more and more trips. 

The embroidery machine was a back breaker, but I succeeded in getting it out without dropping it on the concrete.  Eight more loads had me back on the couch until this morning, when I remembered my computer was still outside.

Amazingly, my yard is in pretty good shape, although everything outside smells really moldy.  As soon as I step on the patio I can't breathe, not that it's any better INSIDE!  It's the "old house" smell.  Time to bake something delicious like apple pie!!