Home Again, Home Again, Jiggidy-Jig
Since all good things always seem better, or at least more appreciated, if they are hard-won, I suppose leaving the last day of our cross-country trip as a long and painful one is probably for the best. We had traveling companions who all wanted to get home on Sunday night because some task or travel was awaiting them Monday morning. Everyone who knows the route said to do various alternatives from breaking the 640 miles into two days to departing in the middle of the night so as to be off-cycle with the worst of the traffic. But night driving has its own challenges, especially of the wildlife variety and no one had an appetite for anything but a long, grueling day. The other car had two drivers to share the load and in my car there was me (somewhat by courtesy to Kim, but also by my preference). There are many things at my age that I will demure on, but long distance driving isn’t one of them. I’m tough and I can take it.
The fastest and “cleanest” way from Teasdale, Utah to San Diego involves dancing with the devil that is Interstate 15, which runs diagonally from the Canadian border over Montana to Tijuana, Mexico. If driving is a narcotic, then Rt.15 is mainlining. It’s fast and furious and has every mode of transport upon it from Wide Loads to triple tandem trucks (Thank you Fed Ex and Amazon Prime). The speed limits vary from 80 down to 55 depending mostly on degree of habitation of the surroundings. It’s a good road to make time on, but you are never alone in that thought and even the truckers average 10 mph over the limit. Even if you want to be prudent and stay, say, within 5 mph of the posted limit, there are so many scattered trucks and cars at that speed that you almost have to speed up once in a while to stay sane.
The problem with this “clean” beeline is that some of the best sights in Southern Utah and therefore the nation are in that Southwest corner of the state that you need to pass through and the temptations are many for side trips. The primary distraction is Zion National Park, which many people like myself consider the best National Park in the country and a place so holy as to be considered the cathedral of our souls. Going through Zion is less “ooh and ahhh” and more about being dumbstruck with grandeur and spirituality. Nothing makes you feel appropriate small in this world like bursting into the Zion Cathedral from the Mt. Carmel Tunnel from the East. I speak of this special spot often in my writing because it is so very wondrous. Our passenger, Candice looked it up and learned that Mount Carmel is a biblical name that means “Vineyard of God”. There are plenty of other distractions like the Burr Trail, the Escalante Staircase, Bryce Canyon National Park and Cedar Breaks National Monument, all worthy of seeing, but none as necessary as a side trip through Zion. The trick, as with most things in life, is timing, specifically the timing of getting to that East entrance of the Mt. Carmel Tunnel, where you can wait for long hours on Rt. 9 with nowhere to go and nothing to do but grow weary of the Checkerboard Mesa around you.
So we left the Lodge at 6:30 by mutual agreement and arrived at the tunnel entrance at 10am, well before the crowds. We went right through with no wait at all and even almost ran into a mob of four Bighorn Sheep crossing the road like nobody’s business. After the appropriate prayers to the canyon Gods that we might return again soon for a longer visit, we hurried on out through Springdale and Hurricane to that mainline of mainliners, Rt. 15. Traffic was normal through St. George and the twisties of the Virgin Valley Gorge, where native Arizonan, Candice, was surprised to learn that we were cutting through the Northwest corner of her state. Mesquite and Las Vegas were their usual hot summer selves over 100 degrees, but even though we got to Primm by noon or so, we ran smack-dab into the dreaded Sunday slowdown for the mileage from the Nevada/California border to Baker. It got to 122 degrees in Baker and the rest stop was a madhouse of people trying to get what they needed to survive and still get back on the road ASAP. During the worst of the bumper-to-bumper traffic we encountered a young family broken down by the side of the desolate highway. We were going slow enough to notice that they had a small child with them in the car and the roasting heat. We asked if they needed water and threw them a bottle to make sure they stayed hydrated until help arrived. Life is cruel and we all need help at times. Our caravanning companions naturally praised Kim for her kindness to the stranded family. I guess I do not seem the kind sort, even though giving them water was my idea. All I can say is that I’m sure I’m a kinder person by virtue of being married to Kim, so maybe it was all her doing.
We had one more nasty stretch of traffic coming down from Cajon Summit, where the San Gabriel’s meet the San Bernardino Mountains. It is an important spot that was created by the San Andreas Fault and it links the Mojave to the Los Angeles Basin, thereby connecting LA and Vegas for everyone’s pleasure except those of us in cars on a Sunday afternoon. It is surrounded by Angeles Crest, Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear and you can see the sweeping arc of the divided Highway for a good five or more miles. While this can be majestic, when traffic is heavy, it is all very depressing as you see the tedium before you. Then suddenly things speed up almost too much as the vast array of lanes give you rapid-Fire choices of the 15 or the 215, or the 10 or the 91 or the 60. Your GPS with traffic data is having a hard tine assessing and continuously reassessing the good, the bad and the ugly road choices, trying it’s best to get you down to Murrieta with the least amount of pain snd suffering. I now know to just stick to the 215 from the 15 to reconnect back to the 15, but it took me a few prior swerves to make this command choice and stay the course regardless of late-breaking traffic bulletins.
We arrived home in 13 hours and 30 minutes, which means we averaged 47 mph, compared to the normal 70 mph average on other days of our journey. Those 23 mph may not seem like much, but it’s the difference of four and a half hours on a better day or with a better strategy. I reckon one and a quarter hours were attributable to Zion (well worth it) leaving three hours and a quarter due to the sins and vices of weekend gamblers of L.A. who need the Vegas fix rather than the local Indian Casino. As they say, it was what it was. We were home by 7pm with a Chinese Grub Hub dinner awaiting us on the door step. Home again, home again, jiggidy-jig.