And the Next...

I really don't remember much from day 5 of our road trip in September of 1972, so some of this is going to be "dry narrative"... My apologies :-)

We slept kind of late that morning and headed south from Grants Pass down through Medford and across Siskiyou Summit into California... I remember coming down the hill and seeing Mount Shasta for the first time. (We pulled over at the viewpoint for a better look.). I also remember Lake Shasta (we kept crossing it - seemed like it went on forever) and Redding. (It was a nice town but we didn't stay long.)
And because of our late start it was dusk by the time we reached Sacramento. (That's where I-5 ended at the time.) We didn't stop - just continued down Highway 99 through Stockton and Fresno, eventually stopping for the night in Visalia. (I recall that there were lots of interesting and unfamiliar aromas as we passed down through the central valley...)

The next morning we headed down past Bakersfield to where I-5 continued and managed to make it through the Los Angeles area without incident. When we reached Carlsbad (where mom used to work) we got off I-5 and onto Highway 101 so we could drive along the coast through La Jolla and Mission Beach and see the places we used to live...

Aside: We were just south of Carlsbad when we saw the "Ponto Beach" sign... That was the name Karina and I had accused mom of making up when we were playing "places starting with the letter 'P'" on the road from California to Texas back in December of 1969. We had teased her mercilessly about it, so the sign came as quite a shock... (We apologized the next time we talked to her...)

Then for some reason Karina decided she wanted to see Tijuana... Yeah - I was not OK with that. The "grilling" I had endured at the Canadian border was still fresh in my memory and I figured coming back from Mexico would be significantly worse... But luckily, she changed her mind as soon as the border crossing was in sight, so we turned around and headed back up I-5 and then onto 395 to Escondido.

Quick refresher: Escondido was the last place we had lived before leaving California... Karina had never really liked it there but in the interim she apparently decided it wasn't so bad after all...

We got a couple of rooms at the TravelLodge  and spent the next day checking out the job / rental situation and by late afternoon Bernie had lined up a job as a hospital orderly and we had put down a deposit on a really nice rental house next to an orange grove in the hills south of downtown. (It was owned by a church - probably left to them in someone's will.) And the cool part was that the house was vacant so we could start moving in the next day...
And since we had decided to stay I got in touch with my old band members (Gary, Bill and Mike) and we got together and hung out for a while before I called it a night.

Aside: It is now 40 years later and I still remember that "Crimson and Clover" by Tommy James and the Shondells was playing on the P.A. system at the gas station where I met up with Mike and Gary... Strange what sticks in the memory...

So in 7 days we had traveled close to 4000 miles - from Dallas - to Seattle - to Canada - to the Mexican border - and we had finally found a place to settle down... (Or so I thought...)