Traveling Home

Not long after OilMan and I were married in 1963 construction was begun on an interstate highway which would travel from the Mexican border to the Canadian border. Before it was completed, we had to take State Route 99 to get to the Los Angeles area where I grew up.It stretches only the length of the Central Valley, so It was necessary to take surface streets through places like Sunland and Tujunga to get to the Grapevine over the mountains and connect with the highway near Bakersfield. Highway 99 passes through many Central Valley towns, none of them particularly scenic.

We have traveled I-5 countless times since the portion between Sacramento and Los Angeles opened in 1966. The first time we took it to spend Christmas with my parents in Pasadena was an adventure on several levels. The Central Valley was a bowl of dense ground fog  (what we call tule fog) with visibility of just a few feet. There were only a couple of places to stop for gas in places called Buttonwillow and Lost Hills, but there was little else, unless some enterprising local person had a taco truck nearby.

That was probably the best food that was ever offered to travelers on the long straight monotonous highway. Now there are a few enclaves, collections of gas stations, and fast food places. One place, Harris Ranch, a huge cattle raising operation almost exactly half way between San Francisco and Los Angeles, has a real restaurant with fairly good food, but it has become so crowded that we rarely want to stop there as we blast toward our destination.

Today started very early with a 4am departure from Fallbrook and I posted a picture of the Pachengo Casino in Temecula which I took from my post in the back seat. We stopped for coffee at Peet's, now quite a large chain, in Santa Clarita, a place that didn't exist in my youth and looks as if it was built in its entirety in about 1996.

We made one more stop in Buttonwillow and I couldn't resist taking a picture of an unlikely construction built across the street from a line of several gas stations, a MacDonalds, a Taco Bell (or Taco Hell as one son always called it) and a few other fast food places. The  part on the right was what first caught my eye because it looked almost authentic, but the fake Western storefronts that stretched down the street were strictly 2009.

After more than 50 years, the I-5 hasn't changed much. It is strictly the fastest route from the ends of the state with little to recommend itself other than that. The 4am departure paid off as we were home by 2pm and ready for a nap.