Welcome back

After a busy weekend in San Francisco, it was nice to stand for a very brief time in front of the Moscone Center, then get on the Amtrak bus and be whisked over the Bay Bridge to Emeryville, sit for about a half hour of people-watching, then brave a bit of wind and rain and board the backward train to Merced. It’s funny—instead of turning the train around for the return trip, the engineer simply moves to the lounge car and sits in its driver’s cab, turns on the headlights, toots the horn, rings the bell and drives the train backward back down the middle of the state all the way to Bakersfield, its final stop.

We were hoping the rain would diminish as the train approached Merced. It did. As we drove off to Mariposa, it started to get stronger, then got foggy. Lightning lit the entire sky! It was amazing. Hail was accumulating on the pavement. We needed to get some fuel on the way home, and I had hoped the rain and hail would diminish by the time we got to the filling station that doesn’t have a canopy to keep you dry as you fill up. The rain absolutely stopped! But it started again while I was filling the tank.

Back on the highway the hail was getting deeper, then snow started to fall. We saw the snow blower truck ahead, its odd rear-facing white light illuminating the freshly-cleared road and its spinning yellow light making it difficult to keep your attention on the road itself. As we rose in elevation, the snow was coming on heavier and we were discussing whether we should simply follow the snow plow all the way to Oakhurst and find a hotel room, or take a chance on the potential rock slides on the cliffy part of the dirt road down to Bailey Flats where we live. On our way up that same road on Saturday morning, I had noticed that the gutters were filling with loose rock washed down from a previous storm. The cliffs are kind of scary since the wall on the left goes straight up and the dropoff on the right goes straight down to a potentially raging river fork. And it’s only barely more than one lane wide so meeting an oncoming car can be a problem.

We decided to take the shorter route home, and turned off of Highway 49 onto the snow-covered Indian Peak Road. We drove in the tracks left by the few cars that were going our way. Having full-time 4-wheel drive helped, as did gearing down and going slow. Before getting to the cliffy part, we saw a car and a truck that had slid off the slippery road and were stuck in the mud, hazard warning lights flashing in the mist. Now clear down to first gear, we got through the cliffy stuff problem free. The Madera County part of the road had a lot of muddy slick parts, but slow driving got through all that nicely. We got to the Red Gate and I knew we were home free, though Karla was nervously kneading a chunk of wax she had peeled off of a little round cheese snack we had shared. She had molded the wax into a cube and I suggested that to keep her mind off the road, she knead it into a dodecahedron. She stuck with the cube.

Finally, at 11 o’clock, we approached the house and its cheery porch light that I had turned on as we left Saturday morning. The cat greeted us with its bulging belly that had probably been overstuffed since it had a full two days’ ration of food which it probably ate in one sitting. Its sand box required major maintenance.

Snow surrounds us, but only up on the high hills. I dumped almost 2-1/2" (65 mm) of rain out of the gauge; more is on the way.