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Normally I don’t have much to say about the final drive home on one of our trips, but this one was a little more eventful than most.

We woke up really early deciding to not even make coffee, but to just hit the road and pick some up on our way through Bakersfield, less than an hour away. Well, that plan didn’t work. We were about halfway to Bakersfield on Highway 178, when we were stopped with a road closure due to a fire in the canyon between us and Bakersfield.

We asked the nice gentleman blocking our progress how we should get to Bakersfield then, and he told us we had to go all the way back to Lake Isabella and take Highway 155 up its western shore and then White River Road. A quick check on Google Maps showed us that our 15 minute drive to Bakersfield had now turned into a 2 hour one along roads which looked like an xray of someone’s intestines.

What choice did we have? We have learned since our move to California that a road being out can often mean miles and miles of extra driving, unlike New Jersey where you just go around a problem, because there’s always another road nearby.

I have to say though that the drive certainly was scenic and we saw places that we would never have seen otherwise. Up close Lake Isabella is a really beautiful lake and the drive along the road down from Glenville to Bakersfield was alongside an amazing series of beautiful rolling hills.

Finally we made it back to I5 and everything was pretty much straightforward from there. Since we hadn’t seen a fruit or vegetable in a few days, we decided to stop for lunch at Pea Soup Andersen’s in Santa Nella. You can’t miss the windmill beckoning from the highway. A bowl of delicous pea soup and a salad put our digestive tract and expectations back on track.

From there it was a smooth 3 more hours home.