The Road Trip - Part 6(California) - Sacramento and Los Angeles  

Reached Sacramento on Sunday night. After dinner at a friend's house in Sacramento, N had this fabulous idea, a very 'road-tripsy' one, that we should drive full eight hours to LA that night itself. The thought, that during this road trip, we hadnot driven a lot at a stretch, might have held N back from calling this a real road trip, but not me. The idea of driving high on caffeine, through comparatively less crowded highways at night was something that had evaded us till now. Then why wait, I agreed to N's suggestion.

Four hours later,after I had slept thru' the caffeine, most part of I-5 between Sacramento and LA and a better part of the night, I woke myself to what seemed to be a phantasma of a 'driven' man at the wheel, driving at 85 miles an hour, just short of downtown LA by little less than hundred miles. We reached LA around 4-4.30AM. After a year and a half of leading a detached- from- the- rest- of- the- world Arctic life, LA was an eye opener. Ok, Seattle traffic was bad, but at 0400am in LA everyone was at everyone else's necks racing on to reach their work places. At this hour in the morning, I usually had full 4 hours of sleep ahead and lot more sweet dreams in line. Luckily, two people in the car meant that we had a slight advantage over most of the other drivers, we could use the car pool lane, that was moving faster. Everybody was doing 75-80 mph over a 55 mph speed zone, car poolers were touching 85 mph, not bad for a Monday morning.

We reached our destination at Irvine at 0630am. The rest of the day passed in a sleepy haze punctuated by intermittent brunch and snacks offered by our gracious hosts. By evening we were up and ready to go, this time towards San Diego. The southern most (big)city on the West Coast on USA, San Diego is almost next door to Mexico. One of the funny warning signs on the higway towards San Diego is the highway warning signs which depicts a few fleeing human forms, just like somewhere else where it'd be a person riding horse which alerts you to look out for horse riders, this sign alerts you to look out for illegal immigrants fleeing across the border and stumbling(?) blind across highways. There is a check post near San Diego on I-5, where they are supposed to check vehicles for illegal immigrants, some of whom are smuggled across squeezed inside the dashboard of cars or sewn into the seats, I wonder how they ever find out which car to check for?

We did a lightning visit to one of our friends' house in San Diego and returned the same night to Irvine, LA. We decided to extend our stay in LA by one more day, which meant we had a full day tomorrow in LA. See you then.


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