Day 4 & 5: Driving and more Driving

Day 4 started off at 4:30 AM when the alarm went off. We left at 5:45 AM, got to the ferries at 6:15 AM, took the 7 AM ferry to Vancouver, got to the border at about 9:30.

A half hour (or so) later, we were on our way. They didn't even ask to look inside our U-Haul truck, that was a massive relief. I've heard they can completely unpack a truck if they wanted to, inspect everything, and make the driver repack it.

Oh, before I forget, the April Fools Joke in Tswassen (the ferry terminal)... at the gas station, there were two nozzles at each pump. The night crew had gone and put the left nozzle in the right holder, and the right nozzle in the left holder. So I chose regular fuel from the right nozzle selection screen, and grabbed the nozzle from the right holder, and started pumping gas... but nothing was coming out! It took me about 15 seconds to figure out what the hell was going on. There were people at other pumps swearing and/or laughing about the situation too. :-)

The rest of the drive was uneventful, we stopped at Salem, Oregon.

This morning we left at 9AM but a few miles out we realized we couldn't find our cell phone. We searched the truck, went back to the hotel, searched the room, but we couldn't find it. (we still haven't found it) So that was an hour wasted.

We waited about 10 minutes at the California Agriculture checkpoint for an inspector to ask us if we had fruit or houseplants and us to say no we didn't.

We stopped for fuel at Yreka, and was going to stop but it was snowing pretty heavily and the lady in the gas station strongly recommended going to Redding and getting the heck away from the Mount Shasta area.

We're now in Redding, and I'm finally online again. Yesterday was the first day I didn't get online in as long as I can remember. At least months, maybe longer. The ONE local access number in Salem didn't work... actually, either did any of the Redding ones but then I got the idea to set my modem to v.34 instead of v.90 and it worked, but I'm on at only 24,000 bps. ARGH! I have 1,527 messages waiting. :-(

We'll leave early tomorrow so we can be in SF earlier tomorrow, to avoid rush hour and get lots of unpacking done in daylight.

It's been rain and/or snow and/or hail and/or sleet for most of the way the last 2 days. We finally saw sun about 30 minutes from Redding.

When I drove to SF and back in February we didn't see any rain the whole time! Sheesh. ;-)

Written on April 3, 2001