Mud Makes for a Long Trip
Woman in the Middle | October 17, 2015Youngest Daughter decided to make a trip to Northern California to spend a long weekend with a friend from college. After looking into various travel options, she decided since she has more time than money, she would take the Greyhound bus yesterday morning from here to Los Angeles, where she would connect to another bus that would take her to San Jose.
I don’t know if you happened to see on the news but northern Los Angeles county was hit by some crazy hard and fast rains Thursday evening. Mud was flowing everywhere, including on Interstate 5, the main north/south car and truck route connecting Southern California to Northern California. This closure pushed traffic to other, less ideal routes, clogging highways with huge amounts of traffic they are not designed to handle.
Youngest’s bus finally pulled into Fresno, their “lunch stop,” at about 10 pm last night. At that point, the bus driver was significantly over the amount of time he was legally allowed to drive. Unfortunately, a new driver couldn’t get to Fresno until about 1 am. Nothing like being stuck at the Fresno bus station for over three hours In the middle of the night! So, instead of getting where she was supposed to go at about 6 p.m., Youngest was scheduled to finally roll into San Jose about 4 a.m.
Youngest’s original trip was scheduled to take about eight hours. She told us last night that she can now say eight hours on a bus is a breeze. However, eighteen hours isn’t so great, she has found. I told her to sleep as much as she can and then she will still be ready to have fun today.
I told her she will have quite the cocktail part story to tell about her travel adventure. She said she would rather have gotten to San Jose on time. Thanks goodness she took water and snacks along and plenty of reading material!!!
Update: Altogether, it took Youngest Daughter 23 hours from the time she left our house to the time she got to San Jose at 4:20 am. Had she driven it in her car (and hadn’t had the mud slides to contend with) it would have taken her eight hours. She will never take the I-5 for granted again, I bet!
I saw the mudslides on the news and hoped y’all weren’t affected. What a lousy trip!
If we had all stayed home, there wouldn’t have been a problem!!!
That’s too bad for her. I hope her time with her friend makes up for it. Maybe she could try the train next time.
She was taking the least expensive way. Since the mudslides happened Thursday evening and she left early Friday morning, there wasn’t much we could do. Hopefully, if there is a next time, mudslides won’t close the I5 the night before!!!