Traveling Last Night In Southern California
Various readers who read our previous posts have emailed asking if we’re OK because we were travelling last night…and the past 24 hours have been disastrous in Southern California due to the La Conchita mudslides which SO FAR have claimed four deaths — with 27 more missing.
Firstly, this is the first day since this blog started a year ago when we don’t have much energy to update. It’s due to the harrowing travel last night — and not due to mudslides. I was not in the same area. My destination, Rosemead, CA, was probably at least two hours south of where the mudslides occured. But there were harrowing stories of cars in streams, a mobile home falling into the water, etc. in the general vicinity.
I went up to the L.A. area last night (after computer problems were being fixed for four hours) heading smack into this VERY bad storm.
As a result, there may may be one or FEWER posts on this site tonight — since I’m getting to bed. Here’s the story:
I’m originally from Connecticut and went to college at Colgate University and did my graduate work in journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. I lived in Spain, Bangladesh (some long trips), India and worked on a newspaper in Wichita, Kansas before I moved out here to San Diego.
There is something about a fierce rain on a Southern California highway where rain takes on a character that — for some reason — you do not see elsewhere. Water becomes like a big pane of ice…and your car can glide totally out of control.
I left San Diego around 10 last night for a trip that should have taken two hours — there is little traffic that time of night — and it took THREE. The rain was pouring. Some cars around me were gliding. At least once my car ran over a big branch that had been blown on to I-5. My car usually handles well, but I could feel instability in the water. So I had to slow it WAY down.
The L.A. area seemed like one big sponge — and, indeed, these were some of L.A.’s wettest days EVER.
I got in a little after 1 a.m. (The hotel room had a smoke alarm that needed a battery and it was beeping every few minutes so I had to move in the pouring rain to another room…all my stuf. Bedtime: about 2 a.m. Up by 6 a.m.)
And today? The sun was out in L.A. but it seemed a telltale deep green…greener than you usually see in L.A.
And in San Diego? I live in a condo and we just had a new roof put in. These storms are the test (and we’re having rain gutters checked tomorrow). One neighbor already reports leaks.
So in answer to your emails:
- I am fine.
- The trip up there was an ordeal due to the curious nature of water on the roads in California, which I have not experienced to be as hazardous in other places in the world in which I’ve driven.
- The Moderate Voice is truly the Exhausted Voice and will watch some rented DVDs tonight, get in bed early…and will put most posting on hold until tomorrow. (That means our update on the Dan Rather story will STILL be done by starting tomorrow).
- This is the first time since we’ve started this blog one year ago that we had to say: due to travel and little sleep there is no energy…just exhaustion.
