Dichroic Reflections

the full story

We left work early Thursday afternoon. I picked the Antkeeper (she's a grad student studying social insects like ants and bees) up on my way home, feeling all proud that I'd remembered to drive the pickup that morning (since the Mozzie car would not have fit both her and her bags). We grabbed some sandwiches for the road and went to my house where Rudder had the Hummer almost fully loaded. The Antkeeper and Rudder had loaded the boats on tpop the day before. We were on the road out of town by 2:30, turning around only once - before we got out of our subdivision - when I realized I'd forgotten an extra ball of yarn. This turned out to be a good decision.

We talked and listened to music on the drive from Phoenix to and through LA, stopping as usual in Frasier Park, just on the north end of the Grapevine. The three of us shared a room that night - piling people into hotel rooms is par for the course on a rowing trip. Rudder and I didn't sleep especially well, probably because of the small bed, but we were up and on the road again by 8.
A couple of hours into the drive, my cell phone rang. It was She-Hulk, calling with bad news. The CSUS Aquatic Center, organizer of the regatta, had called to say the race had been canceled: floods had swept away the race course. I plunged into a flurry of phone calls, to CSUS, to our answering machine, to the race organizer contact, interspersed with fervent thanks for the invention of cell phones and was able to confirm the cancelation report.

We pulled into a gas station to confer. Since Sacramento was by now only about four or five hours away, and since the Antkeeper had a friend and Rudder has grandparents in town, we decided to continue on. We debated on whether to return a day early. Rudder and I decided to stay until Sunday, while after a few more calls, the Antkeeper decided to hang out with her friend that night and return home the next day Coach DI, who had driven the boat trailer up and had arrived before the decision was made to cancel.

Apparently, water had been released from the dam and the course had been washed out only the night before, which is why the race had been canceled with such short notice. Some rowers were already on a plane by then, some decided to go anyway since their tickets were paid for, and some decided to stay home. She-Hulk was among those deciding to stay home; fortunately we were able to cancel her hotel room (which Rudder had booked, and which she and the Antkeeper were going to share) for both nights. The Antkeeper stayed with Coach DI and another woman, since she'd be riding out with them.

That afternoon when we got to Sacramento, we unloaded the boats so as not to have to drive around with them, then headed out to the west side of town where both the Antkeeper's friend and Rudder's grandparents live. We spent an hour with the grandparents, got the Antkeeper hooked up with her friend, and headed back to the east side of town to meet another rower and his family for dinner. It turns out that a two-year-old is of great amusement value when you have a long wait at a restaurant. We enjoyed hanging out with both him and his parents; he's a fairly placid kid, a little shy with strangers, and easy to amuse. Toward the end of dinner, he and I were dancing (me sitting down, him standing on the bench on the other side of the table) and he was just having a ball. His parents have tried to bring him up to be easy to travel with and self-sufficient as two-year-olds go, but I also think he's just naturally a happy little kid.

It turned out that the hotel did have internet access, with some finagling (they had a kit to split from the the TV cable) and Rudder had brought my old laptop for the purpose of downloading race data from the boat computer, so I was able to get online to tell another diarist (who usually doesn't post about what city she lives in, so I won't name her) not to come out to the regatta, as she'd been thinking of doing. Unfortunately, that wasn't until night and she didn't check email so had to find out the hard way. Too bad, because I'd looked forward to meeting her.

On Saturday Rudder and I and his grandparents toured Fort Sutter and then went to the McLelland Field aviation "museum" - actually an outdoor display of static planes but quite a few were open, with volunteers to explain them. We fortuitously ended up having lunch at a restaurant the grandparents used to frequent years ago when they lived in that part of town. I would have liked to see the Governor's Mansion, but we'll be back in July to celebrate the grandparents' 65th anniversary with all of Rudder's aunts and uncles and cousins, so maybe then.

After that, we loaded the boats back on, then had dinner at a brewpub where we'd eaten after last year's regatta (after a lot of discussion about which exit it was on). The people who had chosen that place the previous year had done so because there was room to park with boats on top, so we knew that would be OK.

And yesterday we drove home, all 12 hours of it, with only one small spat to mar the trip (my not-so-faithful navigator was sleeping when he should have been guiding me though the tangles of LA, then wouldn't admit he'd been asleep). Other than that, it was a good trip, though not entirely the one we'd meant to take.

Posted by dichroic at May 23, 2005 03:59 PM