We had a plan. It seemed at first the gods of traffic were arrayed against us.
We flew into Sacramento to attend a reunion, a convention, and start the next part of our vacation, which entailed renting a car and heading for the redwood forests along the northern California coast. We’d missed these on our previous trip to the area (2001) and vowed to come back one day to fill in the gap.
Everything went smoothly until we began to encounter the Other Season in California. (There are two seasons, we were told—winter and road construction.) We intend to take I5 to 101 and head north to Eureka. Well, right before the airport, traffic had come to a halt on 5. We were close enough, so we doglegged up 99. At Yuba, we turned west onto highway 20, which should have taken us by Clear Lake, around the lower tip of the mountains, and into 101.
Just before Clear Lake, traffic had come to halt. People had shut off their engines.
It’s possible had we waited another ten minutes, we might have gotten through. But we didn’t want to sit there, in increasing heat, staring at the back ends of semis and SUVs. Where we were stuck was one of the least picturesque points along that stretch of highway.
So we turned around, went back to I5 and headed north for Red Bluff.
But the drive along 20—pleasantly winding and meandering—afforded opportunity for some interesting photography.
