View Summer ’09 Part IIa in a larger map
Previously: Kent to Ashland, the Oregon Vortex and House of Mystery, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
The next couple days weren’t the most exciting, but in order to go from point A to point B, you’ve gotta get there somehow, so we settled in for a long two days of driving. When planning the trip out on Google Maps we’d decided that the 12+ hour day of going directly from Ashland to Carlsbad (where Prairie’s grandpa lives, just north of San Diego) didn’t sound terribly fun. We couldn’t see anything off of I-5 around the midpoint of the drive that looked like a good overnight spot, so we chose what looked to be the next-best option: a detour on Hwy 99 to overnight in Fresno.
Well, that turned out to be a very un-fun option. I’ve known for a long time that the stretch of 99 that goes through the Seattle metro area is just not a pretty road, and that certainly continued to be the case for most of these two days. Mile after mile of highway alternating between empty stretches of farmland and warehouses, all of it ugly, all of it jam-packed with semis using 99 as their main shipping corridor, and a few big slowdowns, especially through Modesto.
We finally made it to the Fresno exit, started following the directions to our hotel, and realized that we might as well still be on 99, as everything around us was just as pretty as the seedy areas of Aurora in North Seattle, or 99 in South Seattle. Things were not looking promising at all, but we eventually made it to the hotel. Thankfully, that was a Best Western, and while the world outside the hotel wasn’t very pretty, the world inside the hotel was just fine (hooray for chain hotels), especially when enhanced with a quick jaunt across the street to get a big ol’ bag of greasy comfort food from Carl’s Jr.
Not terribly anxious to spend any more time in Fresno than we had to, we were up and out the door pretty early the next morning. Once again, another long day of driving, much of it through the wasteland of 99. Surprisingly, we did find a stretch of 99 a ways south of Fresno that wasn’t too bad, going through orchards instead of warehouse districts or bare, open farmland. Since we’d left early in the morning, aside from some slowdowns getting through L.A., traffic was bearable, and we ended up heading into Carlsbad and pulling into Prairie’s grandpa’s house about 2:30 in the afternoon.
We took a couple hours to rest (Prairie reading, me napping), had dinner with Prairie’s grandpa (complete with visit by a wild bunny that stops by his backyard from time to time), and then were about to head out to find a beach for the sunset when her uncle Carl arrived on his nightly stop by his dad’s place during his walk. By the time we were done visiting with him and made it down to the beach the sun had set, so we came back to the house, took a short walk around the neighborhood, and went to bed.
Next: the San Diego Zoo!