A long day's drive to home

Day 36 – Friday, August 28th

Dick was up at 5am and started driving. He drove until 8 when Patti got up and drove while he got a few more hours of well-deserved sleep. The morning brought us back into California and we were reminded what a long state we live in. The first mile post read 796 miles. We knew that was to the Mexican border just a short distance from our home. As the sun rose we were able to see Mt. Shasta begin to emerge from the darkness. It is a beautiful volcanic mountain that stands by itself in northern California.

We drove and talked, using the time to begin reflecting on the trip. Some stats: we will have driven about 9,400 miles in 36 days, gone to 9 National Parks, 24 museums, 3 formal gardens, 8 park visitor’s centers, and 4 animal conservation centers. We saw cars from 37 states and 7 provinces and 2 territories.

We stopped for lunch, Patti took another nap, and we kept driving. We would drive over 850 miles in the day so we had to keep moving. As we drove we were struck at both how very, very dry and brown it is in CA, and how many cars there are. We had even a stronger view of the latter when we reached Los Angeles just in time for rush hour, being right by downtown LA at 5:50. There are a LOT of cars there. From LA, it is just 100 miles more to home. Some of that was very slow miles, though. It took us an hour to drive only 20 miles.

Once free of the Los Angeles county traffic we sailed along much more smoothly. The sun was setting and it was getting dark. We did have a glorious final day’s sunset to place another “beautiful” stamp on our trip. We could tell we had driven quite far south, it was getting dark by 8:00 rather than by 11:00.

At 8:30, we arrived at home. It was good to pull the car into the driveway of our home and find everything safe and sound there. Safe ourselves, tired, a little scruffy and ready for a night’s sleep (or more) in our very own comfortable bed, we unloaded the essentials for the night. We knew there was time in the morning to fully unload and clean up the car. One final step was to check the final milege total for our trip that we had been tracking on one of the car's trip odometers.

We did it! We drove to Alaska and back on the Alaskan Highway and lived to tell the tale. We still like each other, much to the surprise of many people we met who shuddered and said they would not attempt such a trip together. We are glad to be home. Hmmmm, where do we go next?