Day 5 :: 25 January 2007 :: Castro Valley to Santa Clarita
aka "Hello, little fishies! I am your king!"
Once out of the Bay area, we quickly made our way to Interstate 5 and the Grapevine, and continued south. It kind of sucked to lose the beauty of the ocean to my right, but we were ready to be getting toward our final destination, so it was okay. Jenn was originally planning on only going as far as Bakersfield, but we got there pretty quickly, so she decided to push on and go over the Grapevine after all and just stay in Santa Clarita.
I must say that it was a lot prettier than I'd expected. Now, I'd expected the sunshine and brightness, but I really hadn't been prepared for just how pretty it was going thru the Grapevine. We passed by a lot of orchards and orange groves. Hell, we even passed a couple of trucks with huge loads of oranges in them, and even got to see people picking in one of the orange groves. It was quite kewl.
The aquaduct was intriguing to me. I've never dealt with anything like that for water, coming from the northern Midwest and now being in Washington state.
Santa Clarita was interesting. Jenn took me over by Castaic Lake, where I got to see a Great Blue Heron. She didn't believe me at first, until she finally saw it, too. It was fun. He bitched me out for trying to get a wee bit closer to take pics. *hee*
We drove around Santa Clarita, and Jenn showed me a lot of her old haunts from when she grew up there. It was very neat to finally be able to match some of the stories to the place itself. We also stopped into a handwash carwash and gave poor Dace 2.0 [aka the Tribeca] a bath. She was FILTHY after all that dust and grime on our way down from Seattle. It was a bit expensive, but she certainly did gleam all pretty like afterward.
We went out to dinner with Jenn's gramma at Red Lobster. We had fabulous food, and I got myself a Bahama Mama…and instantly began quoting Bill Engvall. "Hello, little fishies! I am your king!" It was quite amusing. We ended up staying across the street from Magic Mountain, where Jenn used to work. It was rather surreal. *hee*