Sat. Aug. 6        Waiting in Tehachapi for our resupply box

We slept in a bit this morning, then headed out on varous errands.  It was a very warm day.   My errand was to walk 2 miles to Albertson’s and get food for the next couple of days so we don’t need to eat at restaurants.  I planned to get LOTS–we seriously are in calorie deficit.  I chose a route through residential neighborhoods and enjoyed the shady trees and gardens.  Unfortunately, I guess I look like a bum even in my “town” clothes, because I had some occasionally a bit scary run-ins with aggressive dogs protecting their houses from the likes of me.

At the store, I went for a combination of  high calorie food plus fresh fruit and veges.  I’d thought about bringing my pack to carry it in, but didn’t want to risk leaving the pack outside the store unattended.  (I’m sure that NO WAY would they want me bringing it into the store!)  Well, I should have brought it, and maybe left it with a supervisor or something, because I had to carry two HEAVY bags home in the heat.  My poor fingers just about died!  I had to stop every little bit to rest them, so it took a long time to cover the two miles back to the motel, and I was so tired that my hands and arms were shaking.  I couldn’t even hold the phone to make phone calls till I rested a bit.

Those phone calls were my next project-of-the-day.  Somehow, I had to get my prescription refill organized.  After much calling back and forth to the on-call doctor and the pharmacy back home, I finally had the assurance that it would be done, and I could pick up the refill right here in Tehachapi.  Whew!  Now for project #3–laundry!  Just as I headed down the driveway to the laundry machine, a thunderstorm started.  It had been slowly clouding up all morning.  Thunder and rain “drips” continued for a couple of hours. 

We had a delicious lunch in the motel room, then Bill headed out again, and I looked at the phone book for churches so we could go to church tomorrow.  I found 8 nice churches within walking distance, and started phoning to find out their service times.  All of them only had a recorded message, but St. Jude’s, the Episcopal church, gave an additional number to call.  I wanted to check on them anyway, to see if they were “Episcopagans” or real Christians who actually believe the Bible and know the Lord Jesus Christ.  I was glad to hear a “real live person” answering my call and asked them, “Would you describe yourselves as orthodox Christians?”  “We sure would!” said the lady who answered the phone.  When she asked where we were from, all I said was, “Petaluma…” and she joyfully interrupted, “St. John’s!  David Miller!”  It turned out that they knew about my home church and pastor!  St. John’s is one of the minority of American Episcopal churches that actually believes the Bible. The rest are Episcopagans operating under a “go with the flow” mentality which ignores the Bible and has no hope to offer people who struggle with profound problems like addictions, depression, mixed-up sexuality, etc.    Anyway, awhile later the lady (turned out it was the St. Jude’s pastor’s wife) called us back and asked if we’d rather stay with a church family than in a motel.  Of course!  So tomorrow, some church folks will pick us up for church and take us home afterward.  An incredible, un-looked-for blessing!

Shortly afterward Bill returned with my prescription AND a half-gallon of ice cream.  I ate a couple of cupfuls and Bill ate the rest, while I did one more errand–a walk down the street to a quilting store I’d spotted.  My plan was to buy some quilt batting to tie around my waist.  I had been tying my jacket there to “fatten myself up” enough that I could cinch the pack waist belt tightly, but the problem was, my poor jacket would get all wet and stinky from my sweat.  I figured the batting would replace the jacket.  Who cares if batting gets gross?

Bill and I took a nap (again, we find we need rest almost as much as food) before taking a walk to the park down the street for a picnic dinner.  We enjoyed the evening breeze and the dramatic “cloud show”.  Bill couldn’t finish his dinner–he was too stuffed with ice cream!  Then we walked back to the motel, watched a TV program on the bombing of Hiroshima (60 years ago yesterday) and went to bed.  I was really looking forward to FINALLY being able to go to church tomorrow, and meeting fellow Christians who were willing to take us in even though we’d never met before.

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!)