California, 2007

Well we’re finally in Fairfield, smack dab in the middle of the Capitol Corridor, exactly 42 miles from both San Francisco and Sacramento.

Which means both cities are an hour’s drive away. And there’s the whole getting to learn a new transit system thingy. I’m still digesting the Amtrak, CalTrain and BART brochures.

So.

The trip was pretty fun. Woke up at 5 AM Sunday morning, and spent the rest of the morning madly cleaning everything in the apartment (in the vain hope that we don’t lose too much of our deposit). Sunday morning, and the first thing I do is spend most of it elbows-deep in the toilet.

Cooked up a batch of pasta for the trip, plus a few snacks and eight-packs of Coke and Gatorade. Like I mentioned, I’m a last-minute packer, and we had to chuck quite a bit of junk to fit everything in the car.

Bags, mattresses, icebox… making sure we could still see out the rear view window.

As usual, I’m the navigator, with road maps on my lap, feeding
directions to my brother. "Right, err I mean left, no, the other
left…"

We swing onto the 405, which merges into the 5 north of Los Angeles, around Lancaster.

And onto two hundred miles of farmlands of Central California. Really hot 100-degree weather, too.

We stop for lunch at a rest area past Bakersfield. Unfortunately, there isn’t a gas station at the rest area, so we have to look for the next exit, about thirty miles down the I-5.

Pulling out of there, we get hit by a stray pebble kicked up by a truck we’re following. It leaves a nasty-looking crack in the middle of the windshield. A few frenzied minutes spent scrabbling through the rental contract indicates that yes, we did spring for the Loss Damage Waiver add-on to the vehicle insurance, and no, we weren’t going to pay for damage. Whew.

So. Two hundred and eighty miles north of Los Angeles, and we pass a couple of signs that remind us of home.

Near Tracy, I-5 continues on to Sacramento, while we merge onto the I-580 heading northwest to Oakland.

And from the 580, we head north on the 680, past the windmill farms of Livermore.

More farms, hilly country. Still pretty hot, and we’re halfway through our second tank of gas.

We get our first view of the Bay, and the Naval Reserve Fleet.

North of the 680, and the sign "Fairfield City Limits" greets us as we attempt to get onto the I-80. We take the Green Valley  exit by mistake, and spend several minutes fiddling around looking for the onramp.

We miss the correct exit, and have to backtrack southwest on the I-80 before we finally get ourselves to the correct street.

Finally arrive, unpack, and settle in for some rest after four hundred miles and six straight hours of freeway.

Something tells me this is going to be nothing compared to the commute I’ll be facing once I start working. Ah, well. Someday we’ll all look back on this and laugh.

Or cry. It depends.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 21st, 2005 at 5:47 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.