Merry New Year! (an in-between posting)

I'm now in California. I drove into the San Diego area from Arizona Christmas Day and then up highway 15 (the main inland route) to Fallbrook, where Ann and Cam have their new house:

184 Pamela Dr.
Fallbrook CA 92028-9872
(760) 731-1043

This afternoon, Ann and I drove from Fallbrook to her condo by LAX airport, where I'll be living for the immediate future:

6645 W. 86th Place, #401
Los Angeles CA 90045-6725

Lots of address changes for everyone. Ann and Cam closed on their new house on Cam's birthday August 31, and they plan to be there for quite a few years to come. I, on the other hand, am now a nomad, grazing my sheep in whatever pastures are greenest at the moment. At the moment, southern California is greenest! ;-)

I left Urbana a day later than planned on Tuesday, December 21. I was supposed to leave Monday morning, but Sunday's farewell parties took up so much time that I didn't have time to finish packing up the apartment! After working at it till 2:00 am Sunday night, I decided it would be more sensible to get some sleep and finish up the next morning. By Tuesday at 9:00 pm, a day and a half later, I was finally done, boxes were in storage, and the car packed for the trek out to California. Since it was so late by then, I didn't really get very far - Springfield, Illinois - but I wanted to get out of town just for the psychological relief of being gone and to avoid the huge snow storms predicted just to the south (I avoided my usual route through southern Illinois to St. Louis, where it was already snowing) and later that night in Urbana. I had hoped to stop by Uncle Jack Walvoord's in Iowa the first night but had to call back Monday noon to cancel.

The next day was clear sailing to Topeka, where I had prearranged to stay with a cousin of Dad's, Dean Samuelson, whose grandfather Frank Carlson had emigrated from Sweden to Ellis Island on the same ship as Dad's mother Selma Carlson in 1907. His family had also visited us when we lived in the Hague in 1981. He was a medical missionary in Zaire for many years.

My main travel goal from the beginning was to avoid snow and ice wherever possible, and I succeeded quite well the first two days: nary a flake till the third day (Dec. 23) when I got west of Wichita, Kansas. Then, it started: a light, dry snow blowing across the road, changing to compacted snow banks on the sides of the road as it got darker and further west, until, after dark, I rolled very gingerly into Liberal in far western Kansas. The snow and ice on the streets there were so bad and so many cars had already pulled into motels that I began to have second thoughts about continuing on - except that I had already made a prepaid reservation at a Motel 6 in Santa Rosa, New Mexico and really HAD to get as far as New Mexico if I was to arrive in Phoenix in time for Christmas Eve with Hazel and Bill Graham (an old Aramco couple who had hosted me during my parents' vacation back in the late '60s and were like a second set of parents to me). So, I quickly came up with a plan to venture out just a few miles beyond the Liberal city limits to test the roads; if they continued as bad as they had been in town, I'd turn back and stay the night. (No sense being senseless in a winter storm.) To my relief, the road beyond town turned out to be dry and clear (with blowing snow); in fact, I began to suspect that Liberal had opened their fire hydrants to clog their roads with ice and snow artificially to scare motorists into staying the night!

I made it through the Oklahoma Panhandle OK and into the Texas Panhandle, but the winter weather seemed to worsen, making the side lines on the road invisible and occasionally the center line, and Stratford, Texas seemed like the worst-off town I'd seen yet. So, instead of continuing SW on 54, I decided to head straight south to Amarillo and, hopefully, better weather along Interstate 40. And it seemed safer, too, to be on a divided highway that night; 54 was just one-lane in either direction with trucks and the occasional SUV in a hurry, passing when no sane person should be passing. The town before Amarillo, Dumas, I stopped for a quick bite at a snow-bound Macdonalds and got to chatting with a trucker who'd just come north from Amarillo (we were all instant comrades in this weather). He said the southbound lanes had been slowed to a crawl due to thick ice and a jackknifed truck just north of Amarillo. Time for Plan C.

I was still determined to get to 40 but to avoid the heavier traffic and ice north of Amarillo, I took off west then south on an isolated country road, hoping to bypass trouble. But as I got closer and closer to 40 (and hadn't passed another car for 10 miles at least), I encountered some very shiny road (ice?!) and a couple of big-rigs parked off to the side. I was beginning to think being stranded on the heavily trafficked road north of Amarillo might just be preferable to being stuck in a snow bank on a nearly deserted secondary road in the Texas Panhandle. I slowed to an agonizing crawl for the next 30-odd miles, praying I didn't slide gracefully (and anonymously) into a ditch on the side of the road till someone found my frozen body the next morning. Finally, to my huge relief, I got on Interstate 40 for another hour and a half of weary speed-up-to-55, slow-down-to-30-mph driving to New Mexico while the saner ones of us pulled over at the rest stops to spend the night. I pulled into Motel 6 at about 11:30 that night after 14 hours on the road.

The morning of December 24, the winter storm front (that had dumped snow as far south as San Padre Island, Texas) was past and the sun was out. I could drive at normal speeds (a bit over the speed limit) all the way from New Mexico to Phoenix, where I had dinner at Appleby's that evening with Bill Graham (Hazel hardly eats anything, so didn't go out) then a beautiful Christmas Eve service at their United Church of Christ at 9:30. They complained of the cold (it was in the low 50s), but after putting up with -5 degree wind chills and snow drifts earlier in my trip, I couldn't muster much sympathy!

Christmas Day, I had breakfast at IHOP with the Graham's and an old baby-sitter from Arabia days who had driven up from Tucson to bring the Graham's some homemade cookies, then I started on the final leg of the journey to Fallbrook, California along Interstate 8 through Yuma and El Centro within sight of the Mexican border at times. It was in the 60s and the best weather I'd felt in over a month! I finally pulled into the driveway of Ann and Cam's new house just off highway 15 at about 5:30 that evening, hugely glad to be done with driving - and safe and sound. We had a quiet supper, just the three of us, gorging on the leftovers from their Christmas Eve party up in LA the previous evening: turkey, ham and tri-tip beef. News of the horrific 9.0 earthquake and tsunami in southern Asia, where it was already Sunday, hadn't come in to spoil our holiday spirits as yet.