Fri. Aug. 5     Back in California; return to Tehachapi

I woke up this morning on the train and immediately peeked out thewindow to see where we were.  Aha! I knew we were in the low hills just before the Sacramento Valley, which meant the train was running late.  So I got dresed and tiptoed up tothe parlor car for coffee and goodies.  the attendant told me that the dining car would open soon,and we had plenty of time for breakfast thre, with the train 1 and a half hours late. 

So bill and I “put the beds away” and enjoyed meeting 2 new people at breakfast. One was a lady who owns her own pharmacy, and she had some tales to tell~!  The bottom line was: get all your prescriptions at the SAME pharmacy, so if there’s a problem, they can spot it instantly! Thencame an announcement:”If you were scheduled to detrain at Sacramento and take an Amtrak bus to meet Train 712, DON’T do it!  Stay on this train, get off in Martinez, and get on Train 714.”  Oh boy, that applied to us, and it meant we’d arrive in Bakersfield much later thanwe’d hoped and would have no chance to pick up our resupply box in Tehachapi today.

So we stayed with the train as it followed the pretty route along the Carquinez Strait, past the World War 2 “mothball fleet” and on across and over to Martinez.  This is where we normally get on and off the train when we are travelling from HOME.  Martinez was cool and windy–very refreshing after the heat in Washington. And it was busy too, thre were lots of trains coming and going.  After a 45 minute wait, we were aboard #714 and of to Bakersfield, rolling along first through the oil refineries, then the Sacramento River Delta, thenthe farmlands of the San Joaquin Valley.  We peered toward the east, trying hard to make out the High Sierras, but all we could see were clouds piled high.  Hmmm…that means thunderstorms up there!   Oh boy!

At every stop, a lot of people got on and of the tain–seems tht a lot of Valleyfolks tavel Amtrak.  By 4:30 pm, we were in Bakersfield an it was 104 degrees in the shade–but there were masses of dark gray clouds that looked like rain up in the direction of Tehachapi.  We had less than an hour to wait for the Regional Transit bus that would take us back into the mountains; a 30-plus mile ride for only $2 each!  Wow, the people here don’t know how good they have it!   Back home, a Golden Gate transit bus that makes the run from Petaluma to San Francisco costs us over $8 each!  As the bus climbed higher and higher, the clouds ahead got bigger and darker.  By the time we got off the bus in Tehachapi, it was starting to rain a bit.

We headed for the Santa Fe motel, which is a lot less expensive than where we stayed before, and very hiker-friendly–they even gave us a “PCT hiker guide to Tehachapi.” But a phone call home revealed badnews–our resuply box had been returned (apparently something about it was “not correct”) so it would not be waiting for us at the post office in the morning.  Oh no!  That meant it would be 3 or 4 days of waiting for it to arrive again, because the post office was closed on Sunday.  And it was a BIG box, with a lot of food and supplies in it.  That meant our planned schedule was totally “blown away.”  to add to the fun, in the box was supposed to be a refill of a prescription that I use, and our daughter said that when she went to get the refill to put in the box, they refused to give it to her.  Apparently the prescription had run out.  So somehow, here in Tehachapi, I had to find a way to get the prescription I needed.

All we could do was to say, “OK, Lord, obviously You are up to something here.  Don’t know what it is, so PLEASE help us be patient!”  The only thing we could conclude was that because Bill and I were still very tired,  and Bill’s foot was still hurting a lot, and I needed to organize my prescription, maybe God decided we need to rest more before the challenge of final high desert plus High Sierra. 

(Note: Since I am the kind of person who likes to know “what happens in the end”, let me say this: our delay in Tehachapi (which turned out to be several days) may have saved our lives.  Had we started when we’d PLANNED to start, we would have landed up in the middle of a horrendous storm, right in the place where several people were killed by lightning.   When we got to that point later on, saw the destruction caused by the storm and realized, “This is where we WOULD have been, had we not been delayed in Tehachapi”, we had some VERY fervent, grateful prayers to God for taking care of us!)