"Well, that was weird.” And at possibly the worst moment in our traveling careers we saw a bear that we secretly wished was a baby Big Foot. We needed a good story or anything to make this voyage from hell worth it. Funnily enough, we were actually in Big Foot’s country. Ahh, Northern California, the epic land of beautiful natural wonders and wild mythical creatures.
The rest of the trip continued to be horrible. We kept sliding all over the road and I kept whimpering and cringing. Once we decreased in elevation by a few thousand feet, the snow turned back into rain. Never in my life had I been happier to see glorious rain! We pulled into the parking lot of our apartment complex around 1:45 am. It had taken us 11 hours to accomplish a trip that normally took five and a half hours. Exhausted, we threw the frozen food in the freezer and then threw ourselves into bed. It had been a real ordeal. That night we had weird and wonderful dreams about rugged mountaintops, deeps snows and Big Foot’s baby.
The storm continued to rage the next day. In the end, we lost power for three days (so much for the frozen food!) and all the major roads near us were flooded. That New Year’s Eve we sat in our candle-lit living room listening to our hand-crank radio while drinking room temperature beer and eating trail mix and beef jerky. According to the one local radio station able to broadcast during that epic storm, 299 had closed at midnight the night before due to severe ice and snow. Apparently we had been one of the last cars to get through.
Up until this trip from hell we had taken for granted the ease in which one can travel across beautiful California. We learned the hard way that just because a road goes somewhere doesn’t mean that place is easy to get to. Northern California is a rugged and majestic place where nature now and again has her way with man. It is precisely this wild and untamed quality that makes Northern California great. Highways 101 and 299 are amazing roads that take you through all sort of beautiful and magical places, but perhaps, from time to time when the weather is foul, these roads should remain less traveled.
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Image on this page courtesy of Jessica Painter