I had a really great Christmas with my brother, Dave and his wife, Carol, who live in Las Vegas. They are experts on when the best time to travel in and out of that city are and my drive in to arrive at noon on Christmas day was perfect, I was on cruise control every bit of the way! This was the first time since I lived in Tarzana that I was even able to set the cruise control the minute I got onto the 101freeway! I guess the vast bulk of the Los Angeles to Las Vegas traffic had been the day before, so going there on Christmas day was a stroke of genius (thank you, Dave!).
The drive home two days later wasn’t so quick, but that wasn’t Dave and Carol’s fault. Odd weather patterns made no time ideal, but there were other compensations on the drive back home, which I will describe when we get there.
Their house was beautifully decorated with several strings of colored lights across the front second-story balcony and there was a huge blow-up Santa Clause by the front door. There were decorations inside the house, a beautiful Christmas tree by the fireplace in the family room, and a fun surprise, there were Christmas pillows and a Christmas bedspread on the guest bedroom bed and even Christmas sheets, and also a Christmas shower curtain in the bathroom I would use.
Champagne began to flow as soon as we all sat down…well, Carol semi-sat down, because she was also following her very detailed charted out “Christmas dinner map” wherein a huge holiday feast with all our favorite dishes was growing into form. All of that came together right at the perfect time. The turkey truly was “golden” and perfect, and all other dishes were also perfect. Of course we piled our dinner plates high, and then went back for seconds, and thirds.
After dinner was present opening time! I was warned that I would be receiving presents to open, as well, although I was told to notget presents for them. Well, I already was giving them hostess and host gifts, but those were not “Christmas” per se, so I snuck in presents they couldn’t complain about, two CDs each (although all of them were for both of them) that I mixed for them, entitled “Especially Beautiful Songs”, “Serious Moods”, and two CDs of “Touched By Jorge Calandrelli”. I would be very surprised if they did not like them. They got me a Keurig coffee maker and a box of Donut Shop coffee pods. I love this!
They gave each other several great gifts, of course, but it seems the one that gathered a lot of the attention was a “robot” vacuum cleaner that truly seemed to be a new “pet animal” in the house! Honestly, while it really was a circle, it seemed to exhibit a personality and it was so cute how it would find its way back to where it could recharge itself. One of Carol’s friends said she has to hunt around the house to see where hers is, and I could see that same potential with this one that seems to have a mind of its own. They will probably end up giving it a name.
It was so great for me to see them, it had been about a year and a half since I had seen them last. In an ever-increasing dividing culture, it is wonderful to be with people who share the same major perspectives. It was refreshing and inspiring.
The day after Christmas was “playing in Las Vegas” day. Carol had gotten a new car some time ago, a gorgeous “purple” (but the color name is more expressive than that, but I have forgotten what it was) Mustang, really really beautiful. We had hoped to go to the Strip in her car, but there was no doing that with three of us and with the Mustang rear seat being good for small children only. So we went in Dave’s car—I am glad I wasn’t driving, which we did some other time when I was showing off my new car then. Driving in Las Vegas is not my favorite then, and even Dave and Carol who live and work in Las Vegas, they sometimes have to share notes as to how to best get to wherever we were going and also find the place to park.
Our destination was the Encore and we had fun playing on the cheapest (nickel) Poker Slots. I put in only $20.00 and for hours and hours I hovered around that same spot, losing some, gaining some, but finally ended up losing by a couple of dollars and meanwhile had three delicious complimentary Whiskey Sours for which our waitress received a dollar and a half tip for each one of our drinks ($13.50 total). Such a deal, since we had lots of fun and Dave and Carol got to drive some more understanding of poker odds into their fingers and brains (they play more aggressively than I do). The only thing that made us leave was that we had reached the point where we were craving some Christmas dinner left-overs, so we headed back home.
Dave and Carol are both very hard workers and it was back to work for the next day for them. Based on historical habits, that day going back to Los Angeles from Las Vegas should have been as light as my arrival on Christmas day had been. However, the day before, the road out of Las Vegas heading toward Southern Calfornia was closeddue to heavy snow on the elevated pass beyond Primm and the California/Nevada border. We were afraid that that route would still be closed, but Carol checked the weather report and learned that the snow and ice and had been cleared and the way out was open, at least for the time being. We said our sad good-byes and I hit the road.
It was smooth sailing from their house to the freeway, but on the freeway, a little bit before the tiny town off “Jean”, the highway full of cars suddenly completely stopped. Right there is a hotel and casino called “Terrible’s”, which is a name I simply can’t seem to keep in my head, because I think it is a “terrible” name. Who wants to stay in a “terrible” place, when you are so close to Las Vegas? So to me it is a peculiar oddity, yet that night of snow that blocked getting out of Las Vegas probably found quite a lot of people thankful that Terrible’s was there! At any rate, all traffic stopped in the vicinity of that hotel
Next to this hotel was a place for jumping out of airplanes. All these years of passing that place (at 70 miles per hour) I never knew that people were sky diving there, but with the traffic at a dead stop, I could see somebody floating down out of the sky, attached to what looked like a kite, but which I presumed to be parachute. Just that alone looked so amazing, like some kind of an angel falling from the sky, but after that one touched ground, then another one came down! As the cars sat there, I saw a total of four of those people just floating down out of the sky. There was no sign of an airplane, which I imagine was way up there. This made it look like some kind of alien beings that could fly were coming down from their mother ship for a visit! It was very beautiful, but also they seemed so nakedly exposed. I had never seen a sky-diver so up close before and really, it is just a person flowing down, holding onto a small multicolored “kite”-looking parachute.
Well, they all finished dropping out of the sky and about the same time, the cars started to creep forward. That was one of the slowest places on the whole trip, so I assumed that probably everybody who had wanted to leave Las Vegas the day before, but were stuck, were then at that time attempting to leave, so presumable there were, let’s say, twice as many cars on the road as there would be on a normal “exit”, and it all seemed to begin with the emptying out of Terrible’s Hotel & Casino.
Then the traffic speed increased a little, let’s say up to 20 miles an hour, all the way to Primm. After a bottle neck at the Primm hotels, the car speeds seemed to get back to a reasonable normal, not 70 miles per hour, but more like 50. But that was a long shot better than just being stopped totally.
However, the glory of that speed was short lived, as the road climbed up the hill and soon enough got into a higher elevation section where all beyond the highway itself, the landscape was covered with beautiful snow and along that whole strip of highway (which had signs all over “for emergencies only”) there were parked cars and people, such as families with children, out there playing in the snow, taking photographs, making snowmen, throwing snowballs, and walking out into the deeper snow as if they were at a ski resort, not the edge of an Interstate Highway! I saw the appeal of it, did not join in, myself…I knew it would be an over-long trip home, and besides, this was not a place for doing that!
Having all these people turning the sidew of the highway into parking zones for family snow play really slowed down the speed of the cars. Adding to that, trucks (of which there were a LOT), are required to be over there on the right lane, which is the truck lane, but that lane was filled with cars moving at a crawl or stopped altogether, people looking for a place to park to go play in the show. That was the legitimate LANE for truckers on the Interstate! The truckers would honk and hold down on that blasting horn while being forced to a stop. Their intention was to shove the drivers out of the truck lane, but nobody was paying attention to them, so the trucks moved over into the other lanes themselves, so now everybody in a car trying to make progress on the highway was surrounded by pissed-off truckers. I thought one of them was going to rear-end me any minute as periodically the traffic would suddenly stop. And really, there was no reason for the traffic to be slow, it was slow only because of all the snowy wonderland looky-loos who are interested in only playing in the show. Well, I guess with it being only a day or two after Christmas, that must have seen like a Christmas wonderland, the timing was perfect! It was “free” access to the snow without having to put on chains or worry about driving on ice, as this road had been thoroughly cleared.
Finally we got past the snow zone as the elevation went down some and highway speeds returned to normal. But I, for one, was suddenly extremely drowsy and became afraid that I would fall asleep driving my car. I couldn’t stop yawning. So I decided to get a cup of coffee and eat some food, which I thought might perk me up and make it so that I could continue driving.
That poor town of Baker took the brunt of all these people now descending upon their tiny little town. That was the slowest part of the entire trip, it took so long to just drive down that off-highway strip that was Baker; immense hordes of people all having the same idea I did. There was even a long line for the bathroom in Denny’s where I had chosen to go. But finally I had coffee and a lunch and I felt that I could continue on my way, but no, I was back to yawning and I realized that I truly did have to get some sleep. Luckily, there was a reset stop about ten minutes away, so I pulled up in there, which was surprising empty…I guess everybody was doing in Baker whatever they would normally do at the rest stop. I reclined my seat back down to “flat” and slept a full half-hour. Then I woke up and by then it was now totally dark.
Here was something interesting to me…as I drove through Victorville, which I have done countless times in my life, but I had never driven through it at night in the dark, both sides of the highway the entire way thorough the town were lined with every kind of national chain restaurant there was, all of them there lined up one after the other. There would be Outback next to Benihana next to Sonic next to Marie Callendars next to TGIF next to Ruths Kris Steak House next to Denny’s next to McDonalds next to El Torito next to Starbucks next to Olive Garden next to Panda Express. I am not necessarily telling you the correct names and orders, just the gist of the kind of thing there was. It was remarkable. I guess that “everybody” on the way from Southern California to Las Vegas can find their favorite chain restaurant, whichever one there is in the world, they can stop and eat in it in Victorville on their way! Otherwise, I just can’t justify that smallish town having all of those well-known restaurants. And I never would have known that until seeing all their lit up signs at night. (I can imagine the board of directors of some new restaurant chain saying, “We’ve got to establish a presence in Victorville!”)
The final obstacle on the trip was Cajon Junction, which is beyond Victorville, where the highway goes up in elevation, and then down down down to the flats of the L.A. area. This was another snow zone, making me think that this pass had been closed, too, and also cleared off, like the one near Las Vegas. So that area was also very, very slow going, and due to the dark, it was hard to see the snow (illuminated by the car lights), but it had another feature that was so beautiful that I didn’t mind the slowness or the dark one bit! This section had a graceful curved descending highway, and in areas had been split into distantly separate lanes for different directions, and there were other roads crossing the area. Imagine all of the cars on these roads being solidly packed bumper to bumper, crawling along about 20 miles an hour. All the cars going in the direction I was going showed red taillights and all the cars going in the opposite direction were showing white headlights. All of these countless lights blended into their own solid color row, strung like Christmas lights across the snow-covered landscape. It was absolutely beautiful, entrancing, really so I didn’t mind the slowness and the lateness at all.
Finally the traffic got down the hill and merged into the craziness of Southern California traffic. Speeds were back to full speed ahead and ultimately I arrived home and called Dave and Carol to tell them that I had made it back home. It had taken me 9 and a ½ hours to do what could normally be a four-hour trip.
Tired from the long drive, I fully unpacked, put everything away (plugged in my Keurig coffee maker!) and went straight to bed. Now it is on to the new year of 2020!
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