California Trip Day 1

Yep, it's hot. It got to 109 at one point.

Ok, enough already about not updating my blog. I guess I’ll appease you all with an account of my vacation to California and Minnesota. I guess I’ll have to break it up in parts with pictures.

Friday, June 23rd.

I awoke very, very early to catch a 6:30 AM direct flight to LAX from Orlando. I went up to Kissimmee Thursday night after work and spent the night at Lora’s parents house. Her dad brought me to the airport. I got to the airport and found out my flight was delayed 3 HOURS! Man, I could have slept in more! Instead I just napped a bit at the fabulous Orlando airport. They actually have a lot of nice stores, but at 7 AM, nothing’s really open yet.

Finally took off about 9:30 AM. Pretty uneventful flight. Got to watch a movie. It was 8 Below, which was really good. I hadn’t seen it yet. It was a completely full flight (as were all my flights on this trip). (By the way, I flew United)

Landed and got my bags no problem and hopped the shuttle to Hertz. With AAA I got about 40% off so it was a much better deal than any of the usual cheaper places. Got in the door and the line was enormous. Thought I’d be there for at least an hour. Thankfully they had a lot of people to help, so the line moved pretty quickly and only took about 20 minutes.

Of course the size of car I had reserved they were out of (compact) but they always upgrade you for free, so I ended up with a Subaru Outback. Which turned out to be a very nice car to drive, especially in the mountains! Got instructions on how to get to the 405 (which was incredibly easy) got in the car, checked it all out and got going.

By this time it’s about 1:00 PDT. Traffic on the 405 was very heavy, but it moved quite well. I was expecting horrendous gridlock. Wound my way around on the 405 to the 5 and north towards San Francisco.

The car had an outside temperature gage that when I left LA read about 74, a few hours later going up the 5 it got to as high as 110, then once I was in the Bay area got down to 59! Quite a temperature range I must say!

Stopped somewhere along the freeway for some lunch and gas. Ate at Carl’s Jr. I must say their Santa Fe Chicken Sandwich is very good. It has a green chilie in it. I like most anything with green chillies! Shortly after leaving my lunch spot I got in some very slow traffic due to an accident that probably added an extra hour on to the trip. As you will read later, this was not the last time I wound up slowly creeping along on a hot, remote freeway.

The rest of the drive was pretty uneventful. Pretty. Saw a HUGE feedlot that had to have 10,000 cattle. Smelled it before I came over a hill and saw it! Also it must have been onion harvesting time ‘cause you certainly could smell onions everywhere, and I saw a lot of trucks hauling onions. There was also a pretty cool spot just before going into the Bay area that had all these windmills up on the hills. They were kind of cool, but kind of ugly at the same time.

Eventually I made it into the Bay Area to El Cerrito where I stayed at a Super 8 right off the freeway and about 2 blocks from a BART station (commuter rail station). It was a pretty nice hotel and excellent location. Since I got in much later than planned and was too tired, I just crashed.