February 5, 2024 to February 6, 2024
To Paso Robles
This is a delayed report. It’s not the most interesting pair of days in our lives, and I was thinking I’d bundle them in with the following day’s drive to Santa Rosa. Now that we’re here though, Santa Rosa turned into a surprisingly interesting and eventful day, one worth spending some time on. So while we wait for it we’ll just bang out these first two days and put them behind us.
Monday
You’ll recall that we decided to hide out in Carlsbad for a few days while waiting for the first of the storm to blow over enough that it felt safe to drive. So Monday is just a layover day. It began when the rains finally made their way south to Carlsbad and San Diego, and it rained ferociously here all day long. I went out in mid-afternoon for a late lunch (Rachael’s still soft-fooding it), but otherwise we stayed indoors all day watching the rains pour down and periodically checking the weather and road reports wondering if conditions would be improved enough so that we can start heading north tomorrow.
Tuesday
We’d really like to start driving today, because it will be much easier to manage the rest of the drive to Portland if we break it into four stages instead of three. Were planning to go through the redwoods and Crescent City instead of the direct route up I-5 the whole way because I’m distrustful of trying to cross Siskiyou Summit south of Ashland - I see mixed reports on the snow level and whether it might drop low enough to whiten that pass, so we’ll take the longer but hopefully safer route by bypassing the Siskiyou along the coast. Taking that in three days is more driving than we’d like though, especially if there’s the risk of driving many miles in downpours or traffic disasters.
It looks pretty uncertain when we go to bed Monday night, and we half expect to be booking another night here. In the morning though we convince ourselves that it’s safe to travel. Folks are still being advised to stay off the roads if possible, but there are no road closures on the route we’ve planned - essentially on I-5 all the way north to the turnoff to Route 46, the road to Paso Robles.
So we start out. We haven’t booked a room for the night yet because we aren’t certain we’ll be getting through - I’m particularly uncertain about getting through the high pass at Grapevine, so we’ll wait until we’re past that before committing ourselves to a room.
We arrive in Paso Robles in midafternoon and check ourselves into the Adelaide Inn, a place we’ve stayed before. We arrive safely, so we apparently made the right decision this time. And really, the drive wasn’t that bad. It rained hard for a couple of hours, and ferociously in spots - but the Raven is a great car, easy to drive even in terrible conditions - and there were no real flooding problems to contend with. It helped I’m sure that traffic was generally light, with most folks staying off the roads. And it really helped having a copilot to manage navigation so I could concentrate fully on the road.
We arrived just as the rains were ending; and with a couple of hours left in the afternoon we went for a walk on the path alongside the Salinas River. With several dry hours predicted, Rachael has visions of a nice six or seven mile walk and I hope to pick up a few birds. But we get neither. Maybe a half hour into the walk we hurriedly turn back to the car when it unexpectedly starts raining.
Well, it’s not quite right that I didn’t have any success with the birds - just as the rains started and we turned back I came to another red-shouldered hawk, getting a much better look than the fleeting one back in Carlsbad. So that was nice; and it’s definitely nice to be here, with the worst of the weather behind us. We shouldn’t have any problems with the rest of the drive now, and have hopes of getting nice walks in when we get to Santa Rosa and Crescent City.
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