There seems to be an unwritten rule -- every trip has to have a day that sucks. In fact, maybe it's more like "1 out of every 5 days on a trip will be annoying, and there is a guaranteed 1 day minimum on any trip of 3 days or longer". Day 5 was definitely it.
I was getting pretty bored of driving, and extremely tired of staying in hotels and not having anything nice to eat. I scanned around on the maps and couldn't convince myself there was anything I really cared to see, so I took off on 6W with the intention of going home. To this point I still hadn't bought any chains for the car. On day 3 in Idaho I probably could have used them for about an hour or so, but the road was deserted and I was able to get by without them. But now I'm looking at clouds in the sky and the very real possibility of ending up on a highway with other traffic, driving with chains on.
Any curiousity I had about driving with chains was completely quenched by the absolute certainty that driving with them in traffic would suck more miserably than I could even imagine.
Made pretty good progress on 6. It was a long way to go and boring, but traffic was very light. Kept hitting fog on the windward sides of the mountains I was crossing, but it was certainly passable. Passed a few points I remembered Mike and Ling and I stopping at a couple years prior. I zipped past the turn off for Rachel -- I was hardly curious enough to take a long detour to see the Little Al'e Inn or to hunt down Art Bell in his hidden desert compound.
Sometime in mid to late morning I made it to Tonopah, also known as the "Home of the Stealth Bomber". Why is that you ask? Because the town decided it was. Nellis AFB is somewhere south of Tonopah and in all likelihood the Stealth flew over Tonopah on multiple occassions. That, in a nutshell, sums up Tonopah.
From there headed west on 6 and then picked up 95N which ends up in Fallon, another dump of a desert town. Another 5 miles of 25mph speed limits, assholes in hopped up trucks that are all the kings of their miniscule domains, and ignorant cops looking to harass outsiders. After what seemed like forever, made it out of there and onto 80W. Things were moving along quite nicely for a while until I hit the big blinking sign: "SNOWING OVER DONNER PASS. CARRY CHAINS."
I was already tired and irritable and just grinding out the miles trying to get home, and suddenly things took a very definite turn for the very definite worse. I debated about stopping to buy chains, but figured "Fuck it, maybe I'll get lucky." -- assuming I could always buy chains at some horrible markup if and when I truly needed them.
For a while it was just rainy and visibility was shitty. There was the usual quota of assholes who wouldn't turn their lights on because it was still daytime -- limited visibility and the fact that everybody else had their lights on be damned. They provided something to worry about, when I wasn't worrying about the assholes who were keeping a stern eye on the speed limit sign -- "It says 65mph -- that means I can go 65mph, so watch out, I'm coming the hell through!" Apparently the laws of physics don't apply to them -- either that or they have perfect foresight and know exactly where and when they'll have to use their brakes.
Made it to Auburn, a town 20 miles east of Sacramento and got off the highway. I parked in a grocery store parking lot and read more of "52 Pickup", an Elmore Leonard novel. It was raining pretty hard and continually, so I was in no rush to get back on 80W. A few exits before Auburn I saw that 80E had been funnelled down to 1 lane and the cops were forcing people off at a particular exit. I don't know if that means they had closed 80E or were just having everybody put chains on or what. In any case I'm probably very lucky that I didn't hit the Donner Pass an hour later than I did.
Grabbed a sandwich at Togo's and finished off my book, then got back on 80W at about 6:30pm. Shortly thereafter made it to Sacramento and the I-5 junction. Somebody should take the engineer who designed the interchange and beat him to death with a "lane ends, merge left" sign. 80W goes from 3 lanes down to 2 with little warning, and then 3 lanes come in from I-5 on the left. The highway is now 5 lanes across, which should be okay. Except the right lane is an exit-only lane, and of course some traffic from the 5 needs to take that exit and has to cross all lanes of traffic to get there. And then the road necks down from 4 lanes to 3 lanes. I hit the start of the backup at 7:15pm. I was finally past it at 7:45pm. Fortunately the rain has abated somewhat, so it wasn't as bad as it could be.
Get clear of Sacramento and the traffic starts to spread out some. There's still the usual minority of assholes driving like it's Saturday afternoon at Daytona, but things are going okay. Outside Vallejo I change lanes to pass somebody and have just shifted into my new lane when I realize that a Taurus wagon has just whipped around the car that I'm now in front of, and for no apparent reason, is changing into my lane and intends to occupy the same space as me. I whip the wheel and shift over a lane and I'm incoherent with rage. Get my wits about me and I'm hitting the horn, flashing my brights, etc. As far as I can tell, the asshole who almost hit me had absolutely no idea that anything even happened. Absolutely infuriating. It's nice that I can come back from a trip and be reminded almost instantly of things that I hate about the bay area.
I guess the rest of the drive passed without incident. I was almost involved in a 70mph collision in moderate to heavy traffic, and I narrowly avoided having to cross the Donner Pass in heavy snow, or even worse having 80 get closed before I got across. Altogether a really shitty day, but it could have been a lot worse.
Actually, in Tonopah I debated about trying to get home without taking 80. There are some other roads across the Sierras, and I find just about anything preferrable to driving on freeways in the Bay Area. But the map was showing 11,000 foot summits along with roads, and I figured, probably correctly, that it was guaranteed I'd have trouble with snow, road closures, etc. and it would make for a very long last day.
Posted by Matthew Eldridge at November 24, 2003 01:16 AM | TrackBack