Dreams, Moments, Travels
Construction across Phoenix stretching to Tempe snarls traffic, hurts business, and no one really knows if light rail really has a chance here in Arizona. But the track goes in, the street gets torn up and we all wait to see if people will wait under a 110-degree sun to get on a train going to one of the most boring downtown areas in all of America.
Everywhere we go we are seeing rainbows, what’s going on here? We are on our way home and just like last week, we spot a rainbow; not just any rainbow, it’s another double rainbow. With this kind of luck, we figure this must be a sign to follow the rainbow to find the leprechaun and claim our pot of gold, but you know how that ends. This concludes our Labor Day jaunt to Santa Barbara which is awfully light on details.
Family weekends in Santa Barbara are not much for sightseeing. The extent of choices ranges from booth or table, Costco or Vons, walking the dog in the park, or taking a nap. Usually, this also is the opportunity to cook for family; this weekend, I made a huge pot of chicken corn chowder for my uncle Woody. At some point, my aunt Ann makes a phone call to Buffalo, New York, and we all chat with my aunt Lillian. We gossip – a lot. Caroline has a glass of wine with Aunt Ann, her drinking buddy, and then we’re off for another bite to eat. Would you folks like a booth or table?
Aaarrrrgh, there be pirates on that thar beach. This visit to Santa Barbara is for spending time with family, leaving no time for frolicking in the surf. Speeding by, looking out the window is the closest we would come to the Pacific on this trip to California. It’s a good thing we enjoy the company of my great aunt Ann and uncle Woody, along with my cousin Nancy, her two children Theresa and Daniel, and my great aunt Jean, who is also Nancy’s mom. We talk, eat, talk some more, barbecue, reminisce, sleep, and start it all over again the next day.
We know the sites along the freeway by heart now. Interstate 10, the road that starts at mile marker zero in Key West, Florida, seems like a short extension of the highway leading from Phoenix to a strip mall just slightly farther away than where we shop in town. We drove to Southern California yet again. We could not be more familiar with the 10 by now; as I have stated before, we may have driven this freeway more than 70 times. About thirty miles from the 10’s terminus in Santa Monica, we veer north on the 101, passing through downtown Los Angeles to points further north en route to our destination in Santa Barbara. It is Labor Day weekend in America and the last three-day weekend of summer, which typically makes for crowded roads. Not this weekend, though. Although getting out of Phoenix was time-consuming, the rest of the drive was a piece of cake. Maybe everyone else is weighed down with high mortgage payments and high gasoline, electricity, and food prices, so they can’t afford any leisure travel. For whatever reason, we made near-record time of only 8.5 hours to drive the 507 miles from our house to Santa Barbara, with two stops for gas and one for dinner in Los Angeles.
Driving down the road I spot a strange sight, its a mini monsoon featuring a tiny dust storm to the right, which must be kicked up by high winds, and then behind that the rain is falling. The strange thing about this mini monsoon is that it is happening from a small set of clouds against a blue sky. If only I had been able to capture a bolt of lightning with it, my mini monsoon picture would have been perfect.