Travel Day #20: Hollywood

Accidents do happen. We try to avoid them, but they happen. Particularly when you’re driving something 8.5 feet wide (which is a foot and a half wider than an average sedan) in moderate 4-lane downtown traffic and both ogling and trying to avoid using the Rolls Royce that’s passing you in the right lane as a speed bump. I may have drifted a little to the left? My driver-side mirror made a friend of a a van’s driver-side mirror in the oncoming lane. BLAM! My mirror folded hard into the driver’s door. Still moving, I pushed it back open, expecting to see shattered glass. Instead, the mirror was blowing in the breeze, dangling by the heater wires. I gathered it up with my left hand, still trapped in motion in that left lane. At the next stoplight, I was able to see that there were 4 clips on the back of the mirror, so I snapped it back into the housing to worry about proper adjustment later. The lower, wide angle mirror was still in place and still giving me a good view for now. A few traffic lights later, though, a familiar white van appeared besides us. We stopped and talked a minute. She thought her mirror arm was broken, though she was happy to show me that the glass was in tact and her power mirror operation was still fine. I had to demonstrate to her that the arm is designed to be collapsible by showing her the feature on the passenger side of her van. That satisfied her. We shook hands and were on our way.

Though calm and collected during the ordeal, once it was over, I started to get a little rattled. Pulling away from the curb of the side street we had ducked into, I thought I double-checked, using both my right mirror as well as my backup camera, the location of the small tree so close to the side of the road. I needed to make sure, as I turned left to get onto the street, which causes the tail end of the RV to swing right toward the curb, that I wasn’t going to hit the tree. It looked good, I started moving… still good… I’m keeping an eye on the left mirror and ahead of me for traffic, now, I’m almost fully into the street and starting to speed up, and… SCRAAAPE! What now? It didn’t sound like the low hanging ends of tree branches we’ve heard scrape across the roof a couple of times. Maybe a little louder? Maybe to the side more than on the roof? Oh good grief, did I avoid one disaster only to do something even more stupid immediately after? This time, I wasn’t pulling over. I put it in park right there in the lane of that side street and jumped out and held my breath during the too-long walk around to the rear passenger side. And.. no big smash up! I didn’t hit the tree! That confirms that I was correctly avoiding it. What made that noise, then? Upon closer inspection, I could see evidence of where a pencil-thick tree branch dragged along the last 6 feet of the RV about 8 feet up. No damage, just a clear line where it’s wiped the dust off. Whew. One close call is enough… two is too much! And I was clearly getting too cocky of my more than 3,000 accident/incident free miles. Time to get OUT of the city!

We were off the planned route, anyway. Mom had spent some time with the map in the morning, and realized just how close we were to Santa Monica and Santa Barbara, and really wanted to go through both.  I knew, from my research, if we took any of the major streets in Hollywood straight West, we’d get to Santa Monica, so that’s what I’d been doing. Our original route took us in a more direct Northwesterly route toward the Pismo Beach area, coincidentally right past the mansion filming location of Mom’s favorite TV show: The Bachelor/Bachelorette. She declared she’d rather see the beach. I was also in none too much of a hurry to get onto to the Pacific Coast Highway (Route 1) because I’ve heard it can be slow. As it was, we weren’t scheduled to get to the campground until 8:30pm. But we were leaving Hollywood a couple hours earlier than planned, so maybe it would be a wash.

Mom felt the detour was worth it. She was quite happy to see the coast and the towns. Traffic was quite slow on Route 1, which we learned is generously sprinkled with stoplights in this area. The morning had started just after 7am for me, when I departed the campground in Anaheim with all 3 of my passengers still in bed. (Remember, we were inside Disneyland until after midnight the night before, too). I knew the traffic would be slow around LA, but I was amazed that it took more than 2 hours to get the less than 50 miles from Anaheim to the Paramount Studio lot in LA. We had to skip the planned drive-by viewings of 4 points of interest in Hollywood just to get there at a decent time as it was. We were able to hit them up on the way out of town (Walk of Fame, Chinese Theater) but by mid-afternoon, my eyes were pretty tired. The road’s shoulder in this area is wide enough for parking, so I eventually just pulled over at one point, and crawled in the back and flopped on the bed. I know I slept, but I wasn’t sure how long. Mom said it was only 20 minutes, but I felt like it was a whole new day. We made a couple more photo stops as we continued North, and I even took a little detour through the center of Santa Barbara.

It was kind of neat to have a train following us down the last road to our campground; the tracks paralleled the street which paralleled the beach. Well, it was neat until we made the turn into the campground at the same time the train started blowing it’s whistle for the upcoming crossing. It was quite loud? Would we have to hear that all night? I did hear it one more time, but I was probably tired enough to sleep through any other whistles that may have sounded. So that worked out pretty well. It reminded me of our train experience in Arizona, too. When we pulled into the KOA right off the highway, I looked to see why I couldn’t see any truck/traffic noise, and found that there was a berm for the train tracks which nicely blocked the sound. I was really happy to see that, until about 20 minutes later when 4 different trains had already passed by. I’m pretty sure it did continue like that all night long – a train every few minutes – but it didn’t bother us (me) one bit, and nobody complained the next morning.