Breakfast out today. Disappointing. We’ve been here every time we come to San Diego but they have changed their meno and their cook. The menu change is no big deal. We didn’t need that many omlet choices anyway. But the cook - hmmm. We ordered the bacon, asparagras, spinach omlete which was OK. The country potatoes were thin, mealy, glued together and had the taste of wet cardboard. They had been sitting around too long before they were served to us. The biscuit was not light and fluffy but had the consistency of a baseball. Oh, well, we don’t need to come here again.
We traveled on the 2nd an 3rd and are now anticipating a few days of aministrative work ahead. 5 days of greater than 60% chances of rain - no time better to sit inside.
On Monday we saw the radar on the local TV station. Our campground is where the ’N’ in ‘San’ is. And, believe you me, it was no light rainstorm, it was a gully washer.
So, who’s heard of El Nino? Everyone? Yep, we’ve all heard of it but for Gary and me living in Iowa, it was all so far away. It was academic to us - not real. We knew about it but we didn’t really KNOW about it. This year, we are in the middle of it and we’ve already felt it, though not too badly. This week, our first in San Diego this year, it rained just about every day: sometimes it was a light mist, sometimes a steady rain, and then there were the several hours of a heavydownpour. So heavy that I could hardly see across the street to the other row of RV’s. So heavy that I had to turn our music off since we couldn’t hear it any way with the rain on our fiberglass roof. So heavy that the camp ducks were floating by. Nah, I exaggerated about the ducks - they weren’t floating by - the rain drained off pretty well here - right into the bay at the end of the street. But the rest was all true.
On the other hand, there was flooding in several places in San Diego. This is a town of canyons and the water flowed right down to the bottom of the canyons. And, if the drains hadn’t been cleaned, the water filled the streets at the bottom of the canyons. Macy’s is at the bottom of a canyon and, sure enough, they had water flowing in the front door, right through the cosmetic section into the clothing. In other areas, some dikes burst and lots of homes had water in them. Ugly, dirty, muddy water. Ruined everything.
People whose cars were in the underground garages returned to find them covered in water. You’d think that the Lamborghini owner would have learned the last time his car was flooded. But, no, he parked in the same spot and got flooded out again. It was all over the news. This picture is from Channel 5 in San Diego.
Then there was the Lamborghini guy who had never heard: Don’t drown, turn around’ and he plowed through a flooded intersection. This picture is from Channel 10 in San Diego.
But the car made it through.
Then there is the fun side: in the mountains, all this rain piled up as snow. And, EVERYONE and their FAMILY wanted to see the snow on the mountains. Finally the Highway Patrol closed the highway because it was ‘full to capacity.’ ‘Full to capacity?’ I can understand a bucket being ‘full to capacity’ and a room being ‘full to capacity’ but, how does a highway get ‘full to capacity?’ Yep, the cars were bumper to bumper all the way up the highway and there was no room for any more cars. No more cars could get on the highway. And, the Highway Patrol closed it. Families were stuck in their cars in bumper-to-bumper traffic all the way up a 2-lane road for miles.
When cars came to a standstill, which they did often, kids jumped out of cars to play in the snow, then got back in when the cars started moving. At certain times you could walk faster than the cars were moving. People stopped everywhere along the highway to play, sliding down on those round metal discs - sliding down even 5’ high snow plow drifts they were so entranced by the snow. Ah, poor, deprived San Diegans.
‘A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.’
John Steinbeck
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