Home again…

Aaaand I’m back…

What a trip. Jae and I left at 7am Friday morning and I dropped him off at his new H.Q. at about 11pm. I was back here by 10pm last night (Saturday)…

Zoom…

We stopped at the Turntable Restaurant in Minturn at about 9am for a couple of Boo’s Breakfast Burritos covered in some of the best green chili in Colorado. Our next stop was at 3pm at the Beaver Inn in Beaver Utah – they serve some astounding food and are just past the I-70/I-15 interchange – we stop there every time one of us makes the Denver/L.A. drive…

The trip out was highly uneventful up to the last bit of I-15 in California, where they decided to close an entire stretch of road and create a 14-mile parking lot on the highway… With a phone call to Jae’s troops there in California we got the low-down on some side roads and were on our way. It still added an hour or so to the trip, but there are probably still folks in that traffic jam today.

We unloaded Jae’s worldly possessions and no goodbyes were said as it wasn’t – Jae and I will talk in WoW on a nightly basis as we started the guild we and about a hundred other folks are in… Basically Jae’s room just moved across the country. 🙂

I was on my way back at about midnight and got a hotel room in L.A. I was on the road at 7am and that’s where the fun began…

Coming into California there was a really impressive electrical storm going on, which usually heralds bad weather and the reason I stopped so it could ‘blow over’.

It didn’t…

Saturday morning I left the hotel and turned the windshield wipers on – I didn’t turn them off till I hit C-470 just down the road from the house here…

As I left California the rain became torrential and I-15 became an official waterway with visibility as far as the taillights on the car in front of you.

For those of you who have driven the I-15 between L.A. and Vegas, you’re familiar with the ‘big ass hill’ one has to traverse to get from one state to the other… Now imagine that as a 12-mile long waterfall…

Vegas has once again been visited by the Venture Capital fairy and South Vegas extends to about 10 minutes from the Nevada border with at least ten new casinos being built right now. With all of this expansion they have decided that I-15 needs to be wider, so most of the drive from the Nevada border is now done via service road…

Once I got to Vegas the storm had really wreaked havoc on the place… The huge monitors the casinos have along the highway were either dark or exhibiting some really odd behaviors as they had all been struck by lightning. There were places along the highway where the water was at least a foot deep and the majority of the town seemed to be dark – very post-holocaust…

By carefully avoiding the wrecked cars everywhere on the highway I was able to make it to the north end of Vegas and buy gas, then pressed on.

The entire way to the Arizona border was fraught with peril: Golf ball sized hail, lighting blasting the high tension towers along the road, sections of the highway under water… That whole area is a desert and it was interesting, in the short pauses of storm, that the desert had become an inland sea with islands of sagebrush.

The strip of Arizona one goes through on I-15 winds through the Virgin River Canyon, which while I was there was having a serious wind issue. There were overturned semis to thread around and the associated traffic problems from having blinking lights on the road.

Once out of the canyon and into Utah it was more of the same, but with the wind, the rain, and the fact that it was Utah the highway became a mudflow and the rain was brownish red.

In Utah I was starting to fade – four hours of sleep in the last 24+ hours isn’t safe for driving – so I picked up a ‘Rockstar’ energy drink and some crackers during a fill up… I have to say the drink works well – once the shakes pass, and I’m really surprised they are allowed to sell that stuff to minors. No wonder there is such rampant ADD these days if they’re all drinking that stuff!

It tasted like the south end of a northbound skunk with a hint of nasty cough syrup – but I was awake till midnight last night.

Anyways…

Once I got into Colorado the mud abated and reverted back to heavy rain. The drive through Glenwood canyon was an adventure as the water was fender deep in places. I knew I was in for it as the outside temperature in Glenwood was 43 degrees… Over the passes it would be below freezing.

The torrential rains continued up to about the halfway point on Vail Pass where it turned into blizzard conditions.

In the distant past C-DoT would have the passes sanded if it even ‘looked’ like it was going to snow – yesterday I led the sand truck up the pass at 20MPH and there were no lanes, jut a field of white between a concrete wall and a cliff.

Going down was even more entertaining: no sand, no mag-chloride… just 28 degrees and a lot of snow and ice. So I turned on my flashers, put the Cruiser into 2nd gear, and did a controlled slide down to Copper Mountain.

As always there were the Alpha-Apes in their big four wheelers who would come up behind me at completely unsafe speeds, go around me, and end up in the ditches on either side of the road – one hit the wall on the final bridge heading into Copper pretty hard, but there was no way for me to stop and expect to get going again…

We were on ‘mountain rules’ last night – expect that they’ll get help and just worry about getting yourself off the mountain.

The next pass, Loveland Pass, wasn’t much better though the jack knifed semi in the middle of the highway that blocked off all but one lane clued in the Apes that it wasn’t safe… Of course this clue only lasted till the got to the other side of the Eisenhower where they once again took off and ended up lining the highway.

I once again ran the flashers and commenced a controlled slide down to Georgetown.

See, I grew up and learned to drive in those mountains so while it’s a pain in the arse, if they haven’t closed the road I’m good.

Too bad most other folks aren’t.

The blizzard returned to downpour all the way to Floyd hill where once I had gotten onto C-470 the rain ceased as if someone had turned off a valve…

Ten minutes later I was in my garage and very happy to be home.

And that is my weekend adventure…