Fri, Aug 24, 2007
I vow that from now on, I will never try to find something in a large and unknown city without first purchasing a detailed road map for that city.
My mom had lived in a house near El Cajon between about 1975 and 1987. I decided it might be fun to find it and take a few pictures.
This house was out in the desert mountains off by itself. I called my 91-year-old mom but she couldn't remember exactly how to get there. I'd visited a few times, and remembered that it was on a dirt road off of either Dehesa Rd. or Harbison Canyon Rd.
I mapquested Dehesa before the library closed at 5 PM, but I didn't have paper and pencil with me (and I didn't want to leave the computer to go get some in the car). So I memorized the route that I'd take. Here is the mapquest map I worked with in the library (click it to be able to see the street names):
So, you can see that all that I had to do was find Main street, drive east to Jamacha (pronounced "Hamasha"), and turn left on Dehesa. Piece of cake, right? Wrong. I now know why. Take a look at what the map would have looked like had I zoomed in a little more:
You can now see that Dehesa Road doesn't intersect Jamacha. Instead it
turns into E. Washington Ave which intersects Jamacha. That is, the planners of the streets in El Cajon decided to give two names to the same street. Great idea, assholes! I've seen this in many cities. Is it really so hard for planners to realize that giving two ends of a street two different names will cause problems for hundreds of people?
So, not knowing this, I got to Jamacha, but failed to find Dehesa. I drove a mile or two, then backtracked, waiting in traffic for long traffic lights [longest traffic light of the trip, 4.5 minutes in Malibu], and dealing with NUTS (see earlier posts). Same thing in the other direction.
So I moved to the plan of last resort: asking for directions. This involves stopping at a gas station or convenience store. Note that people who are good at giving directions, and have a good mind for streets and locations generally don't work at gas stations and convenience stores. This does not stop them from sounding extremely confident.
The hit rate for finding someone who gives clear and accurate directions is about one in five. To give you an idea, at a gas station in El Cajon, the man behind the counter came out onto the street with me. He pointed to a traffic light. "You see that light? That's Bradley street. Turn right there, and go all the way to the airport. No, left." So I get back in the car, and go to that traffic light, and it is not Bradley street. Neither is the next street. Should I turn anyway or find Bradley? It didn't matter anyway because I couldn't remember whether he'd said "left" or "right."
You say to me, "Hey, Al, you're on a trip, you're retired, you'll find it eventually. What's the big deal?" But there's another aspect to this: the gate for the campground (in Santee, another town) gets closed at 9:00 PM. If I don't get back by then, I'll have to hike in, grab the tent, and find a hotel, or pack in my sleeping bag and thermarest, and leave the car on some dark, deserted road.
After asking for directions three times, I decide to buy a map, but am unable to find one. Finally, someone gives me good directions, and I find Dehesa. There are some more twists and turns that I won't bore you with, and at 6:30 I give myself a time limit. If I don't find the house by 7 PM, I'll give up and head back to the campground.
I finally locate the road on which the house was located -- now paved. But there are so many new houses, I can't find my mom's house. None of the houses looks like hers. I go to a likely prospect and take a few photos. At 6:57, on my way down that house's driveway, I see a man working in his yard. I stop and tell him what I'm looking for. "What's your mom's name," he asks, and when I tell him, he says "This is it. This is the house!"
This house was a prefab. My mom moved it into place in two pieces. Wondering why I didn't recognize it? Here's the house in approximately 1975:
and here it is today, taken from almost the same angle:
Joe, the man who bought it from Mom has, for 20 years, been busy adding to it, and making
major changes to the landscaping. He hopes to be all done in a year or two.
Here's another series to show you the change in the view, 1975 versus 2007 (I realize this may be a little boring to most of you -- sorry). Those pointy trees in the background helped me find the general location of the house.
The changes in the "inside" of the house are more dramatic. I put "inside" in quotes, since the walls have changed such that some things that used to be
outside are now
inside. Again, 1975 versus 2007:
Here's a picture of Joe and his lovely wife.
He invited me to stay for a drink, and I would have enjoyed that, but there was the matter of the campground gate, and I'd already stayed longer than I should have. So after a few more pictures, I headed "home."
I now had to find my way to the campground in an hour and a half. When I got to downtown El Cajon, it was dark and poorly lit. My sense of direction had completely abandoned me. I criss-crossed the city, stopping for directions five times. Since seconds counted, I'd have to make a snap decision as to which person at the convenience store (not the one behind the counter) would give the best directions. One stop was necessary because the road "Woodside" turned into "Mission Trails." Same problem again. Hell on wheels, huh?
Believe it or not, the breakthrough came with a scholarly-looking toothless gentleman on a bicycle, and I finally got back to the gate with 35 minutes to spare.
Time to unwind and go to sleep. The plan was to wake up early the next morning and drive the 9 hours to the Bay Area. Looking for a good way to induce insomnia? Here's one: tell yourself "If you don't fall asleep
right now, you'll fall asleep behind the wheel tomorrow, and crash into a tomato truck."
Despite that, I fell asleep before too long.
It helped to have a dry sleeping bag. A few nights earlier, I'd hung the sleeping bag on the line, but because of some weird dew-point phenomenon, it was wet at 8 PM even though the skies were clear. It was somewhere between damp and sopping, and even "wearing" it inside out did not help. I dreamt that I was on a trans-Atlantic solo sea voyage, and a wave had come into the cabin (I made that up).
Here's a picture of the El Cajon city planners:
One flawed measure of how good a trip was: whether you'd like to do it again. In this case, I don't want to repeat it, at least not for a while. But that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it. Perhaps I'm not eager to go again because it was a little too crowded in Southern California for a hermit like me. Or maybe there was too much effort (driving, parking, camping, buying ice, etc) to want it to be a regular occurrence. I've done many trips that were enjoyable, but which I don't want to repeat. Doesn't mean they weren't fun.
