Thursday morning we packed up the family and took the drive from Sacramento to San Diego . I woke up in the middle of the night dreading the drive. As it turns out, my dread was well deserved.

10am. An hour late Valerie, Ella, Richard and I get on the road. This causes me no end of stress, because by my count unless I can stay at 85mph we will hit LA/OC/San Diego traffic later in the day. We decide to take the 99, since the 5 drives us both nutty. As we drive onto the freeway I see a flag painted on some neighborhood house and mention to Valerie that it would be interesting if we count American flags flying on the way down. She agrees.

10:45. Stockton . I’ve already got my Irish up at the truckers who – with only two lanes on the freeway – decide to slowly pass each other and block traffic. I just don’t understand why one truck going 55mph needs to pass another truck going 54.9mph. Each passage takes approximately one day longer that it took to build the Great Wall of China .

11:30. Merced . Ella, who is 3, is singing ‘Old McDonald Has a Farm’ which is fine except that she pauses for me to fill in the animal and I am long since out of farmesque animals so I have moved on to less traditional barnyard fare, such as crabs, spiders, snakes, lions and such. I’m back in a pretty good mood since we have not gone under 80mph since Sacramento .

11:40. Disaster. Ella throws up in her car seat. I would estimate the liquid volume at about 14 gallons. This requires us to pull off onto The Most Dangerous Road In History, where truckers and farmers blindfold themselves and drive at 100mph willy nilly mere inches from where Valerie and I work feverishly to clean up the mess.

12:30. Fresno . There are very few American flags visible in Fresno from the freeway. Particularly northern Fresno .

1:30. I had my first fast food hamburger since the notorious ‘hairy Jack in the Box burger’ of my last trip. This was a McDonald’s. They have re-done their chicken nuggets, btw, and they are much better minus veins and eyelids. Ella has been fine since the incident.

2:40. Bakersfield . We decided that the boundary between northern and southern California, for the purpose of our flag survey, would be the small town of Gorman … home of my triumphant 100 shrimp eating challenge. There were 115 American flags that we saw between Sacramento and Gorman. We both decided that this was pretty hard for the more urban Southern California to beat.

 

4:00. Sherman Oaks. We have obviously decided to take the 405 rather than risk the increasingly ‘Mad Max’ like atmosphere along 30 miles of the 5 from downtown to Orange . No traffic yet. I’m starting to feel like we just might miss gridlock. There were no visible flags in the San Fernando Valley until Sherman Oaks. At the top of the hill within cannon shot of the Getty Center the traffic stops.

 

 

 

 

4:45. Culver City . Ella is sick again. But she handles it fairly well, requesting a ‘bucket’ for the much smaller quantity of returning matter. Afterwards she is fine for the remainder of the journey  (and was fine this morning gobbling stick after stick of bacon). I’ve commented on this before, but gang graffiti is back in force in LA County, after a long period of absence. It’s very annoying and indicative of a breakdown of law and order.

6:00 Irvine . We are back to 85mph, except for several miles behind a slackjaw in the carpool lane who literally drove 40mph. Under those circumstances, some degree of road rage should be expected. Better, the penalty on the individual in question should be six months of hard labor.

6:30 Sweet San Diego County . Whizzed past the border checkpoint at 90mph.

7:15 Home. 151 American Flags in Southern California . Who would have guessed?

This entry was posted on Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.