I didn’t write yesterday … there was really no time (as you’ll read later). But we made it home safely.

We rose at 5:30, hoping to get out of the area in time to avoid flooding. Packed and in the car and checking out at 6:20, we were then on the road. It was just barely sprinkling when we began. We were grateful.

But then rain did get heavier. Not killer “we can’t drive in this” heavy, but still, we knew it meant watching out for flooding on the road. Getting to the top of the spot between Death Valley and Panamint Valley there were rock slides. No boulders to speak of, but very large rocks that Dan had to avoid, driving in whichever lane was clearest.

As we headed down to Panimint Valley we could see water at the edges of the road that were headed down. Near the bottom, we saw the start of that flow and it was clear that it would land at the bottom and pool. I hadn’t really understood just how roads got so quickly flooded. Now I do.

Videos don’t really do it justice, but I’ll still post a few …

Dan then had to be careful for the drive for quite some time. Reaching parts of the road that were flooded (shallow, mind you … not something he couldn’t get through), Dan would slow and carefully drive through. As he mentioned later, you don’t know what’s under the water as you can’t see that.

Driving through Trona a whole lot of the road was flooded. That was a bit of a surprise … they must just accept the flooding and not work on guiding water elsewhere.

For this trip we went through Ridgecrest so we could get breakfast. That city, too, was quite flooded already. But we made our way to Starbucks (have I mentioned that these kinds of trips are the only time we enter Starbucks? And never in Europe. Nope. Isn’t gonna happen!)

Next up was getting to Tehachapi, where we’d fill the tank.

Except.

The freeway — if it’s called a freeway up there? — we were to take to there was closed! In our day of phones with maps and guidance systems we could fortunately find another route somewhat easily. Waze and Google maps gave the same directions while Apple maps gave different ones. It was two to one — Waze and Google won. It wasn’t a direct route … we had to go a distance and eventually ended up on the Grapevine. But we made it.

The Grapevine was slow moving, but at least it was moving. (I later read that the day before it was a total mess due to accidents.)

From there it was “easy” (as in Dan knows what to do) and eventually rain diminished. We did take a Buttonwillow bathroom break. And there we saw something … um … words can’t desscribe, really. (Excuse the blur.)

Finally, we even saw blue sky and the green was lovely to see … what I think of as “Spring green” was right there in December!

And we saw a rainbow.

So the rest of the drive was pretty uneventful, but what a LONG day. We arrived home at 4:00, and had a Christmas Eve dinner reservation at 5:00, so we had just enough time to unpack the car and get changed.

And dinner was lovely.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!