Heading home (West Coast Van Trip – Post 13)

Time to head home! The driving part is never as much fun as the visiting part. We left at dawn to try to make it through Los Angeles before the afternoon traffic got impossible. But it was already impossible by the time we got close, so we swung east early and skirted north of LA, then dropped down to San Bernardino and out to Palm Desert for the night.

My initial vote was to stay in Ventura for the night and hit LA first thing on Sunday morning. I was imagining one more evening walk on the beach. And LA is a breeze early on Sunday mornings. But then we would have had a really long drive on Sunday, and we were getting anxious to get home. So all the way to Palm Desert it is.

I know there’s some beautiful resorts in the Palm Springs – Palm Desert area (I’ve seen pictures; I’ve not actually stayed at them). But we just picked a regular hotel on the freeway. It was a newer area, but had a vague feeling of apocalypse because the desert sand was drifting over all the new sidewalks and shop patios. I got the feeling that if everyone turned their back for a week, the whole place would disappear under a sand dune.

Plus really bizarre weather.

Look! A UFO! The next morning there was a UFO out the window.

Oh, wait, I guess that glowing white saucer is sitting on top of a building painted the same slate blue as the hills and the sky behind it.

I wouldn’t have been surprised though. Seriously, the place was odd.

We expected the rest of our drive to be uneventful. Southern California to Tucson is generally a fairly easy drive because there’s not much traffic. The traffic can pick up a bit in Phoenix, but there’s a loop route around, and it’s never been an issue for us.

I was confidently barreling along in Phoenix when all of a sudden the skies opened and visibility went to zero. Rain was sheeting across the freeway and accidents were happening right in front of us. Right-hand lanes were being closed by emergency vehicles, as water under the underpasses started ponding too deep to drive through.

We got off the freeway initially, but then got back on, thanking heaven for our extra-large tires and high clearance. I almost got off a second time, to sit out the storm in a parking lot, but instead we exited to a different freeway to head around downtown on the loop road. The new freeway headed up and out of the low area, and it looked a lot clearer – high and almost dry.

But just when I thought I was clear of the potentially deep water, and was accelerating uphill on a curving overpass, I hit deep water and started to hydroplane. How is is it possible to have so much water on an incline?

There was literally a river flowing down the overpass, in the steeply banked left-hand lanes with the freeway curving right. The leftmost lanes near the top of the crest had the highest elevation of anywhere nearby and were the absolute last place I would have expected to find deep water. But suddenly we were inundated with water everywhere. I couldn’t see anything. The anti-lock brakes triggered and I could feel the back of the van slip. It felt like the van was going to continue straight as the road curved right. I imagined us sliding sideways over the side of the overpass guardrail. It was terrifying.

An instant later the tires made contact with the road again and we were fine, but I felt so stupid afterwards. I spent the first half of my life in the Pacific Northwest, and I’m used to heavy rains and a lot of water on the freeways. I thought I knew all about how to avoid hydroplaning. I just didn’t expect the water to be so deep, so far up on a hill like that. I expected it to be pooling in the low areas. But the rain was coming down so fast that it turned even the inclines into rivers.

We made it home safely, but that was not the last of our issues with too much water in the desert.

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