A Job Offer

Some time in late November of 1969 my mom spotted an ad for a job with a small publishing outfit in Albuquerque, NM. and after a few phone conversations she set up a meeting with the owner during his next business trip to L.A.

Karina and I went along for the interview - there was no way mom was going to meet a strange man at a hotel in L.A. without "backup" :-) But the main reason I remember the trip is that riding with mom in L.A. was always a trip.
Aside: I was the navigator... Maps had always fascinated me. Starting at the age of 8 or 9 when we went on road trips dad would give me a map so I could follow along. By the time I was 10 I was fully qualified to navigate - and I knew how to fold a map properly. Honestly - it's not that hard. But now that everyone uses GPS I guess map folding is a lost art :-)

As I've mentioned before, any time mom drove in or near L.A. she was in total panic mode. She sometimes stopped on the on-ramps - she always seemed to be in the wrong lane and couldn't get over (unless she wasn't supposed to). And no matter where we were trying to go she always managed to end up on the Ventura Freeway. Then we'd have to take the next exit and try and figure out how to head back the other direction. It was both tragic and comical :-) To top it off, this particular trip was at dusk and it was raining hard. Given how rarely it rained in SoCal we rarely changed the wiper blades and could barely see where we were going. I also recall that the convertible top on the 65 Mustang was dripping from where it met the windshield. But we did finally make it to the interview - a bit late - but in one piece. Once mom was sure the guy was legit she sent Karina and I down to hang out in the hotel restaurant and - long story short - mom agreed to start work in Albuquerque shortly before Christmas.

Now - all we really knew about Albuquerque is that's where Bugs Bunny should have taken that left turn... (I wonder if future generations will know what that means??? I'm sure it'll be on the internet.) But that didn't bother mom... We prepared for the move in the usual way. We sold a bunch of things we still owed money on (including the furniture) and managed to reduce our worldly possessions to what would fit into the trunk of the Mustang and a 4x6 U-Haul trailer.

We left Escondido around the 8th of December. That was well before school let out for the holidays and we didn't tell anyone we were leaving. We were behind on the rent (as usual) and we didn't want to alert the manager to our imminent departure so we picked up the trailer right before the rental place closed (at 11PM) and loaded it up (as quietly as possible) around midnight. We slept on some blankets on the floor that night and hit the road about 4:30AM.

We had considered heading north up to Interstate 40 but mom was worried about bad weather in northern Arizona and New Mexico (plus she didn't like going anywhere near L.A.) so we headed down Interstate 15 to connect with Interstate 8 in San Diego instead.
The main thing I remember about that morning was the fog. I've never seen it thicker. There were times we couldn't see the lines on the road. Luckily there was almost no other traffic and we made it through without incident...

And thus started one of the strangest journeys of my life...