Adventure! Day 23 - Fresno?
We got up to our 5am alarm only to find the flight out of Fresno was delayed and we had woken up super early for nothing. Luckily, some people had not gotten up at first call. I am not some people. We let them sleep another hour while those of us who did wake up loaded the van and made breakfast. Cooking the bacon the night before was the perfect idea.
Right now it looks like Damien’s connecting flight should be OK. He will arrive in Orlando pretty late for Florida time and then drive home. Luckily we are on West Coast time, so it will only feel like 10pm for him. It might be hard to get up at 7 for work, but if he goes to sleep right away, he should get at least 6 hours. I bet the dogs will be excited to see him.
We have an interesting day of airport shenanigans - drop Damien at 9:00, then pick up Anna at 1:30 and drop Kayleigh, and then on to Ojai with a stop in Ventura to see Tara’s grandparents.
We are currently killing time in Fresno. We found a Yemeni coffee shop; the coffee is delicious and the WiFi is fast enough. We booked a tour of the Forestiere Gardens for after we drop Damien and before we drop Kayleigh and get Anna. In the late 1800s (maybe early 1900s), Baldassare Forestiere ended up in Fresno via Boston via Italy and started digging to avoid the heat, eventually planting gardens underground. It felt like Italy there to me. He worked for 40 years at creating his vision of this amazing underground resort. His family still owns the land to this day, and there are many underground areas he built that are not open to tour. It’s 103 degrees today, but underground in the garden it was 80.
After an unfortunate trip to an international grocery store, we left Kayleigh at the airport and acquired Anna. Tara is driving for a minute and then Eli will drive. Our next actual stop is in 4 hours or so. Our brakes are getting squeakier, but I’m hopeful it’s dust causing the noise and not bad brake pads, which would be weird as they are new and we have only driven 2000 miles or so (they should last 20-30 times that amount from what I can gather from “searching it up”).
Historic temps out here - currently driving through Bakersfield and it’s 111 degrees.
Well. We’ve had multiple adventures today. Our AC stopped blowing and at the exact same time we saw a giant road sign that said to turn off AC to avoid overheating. So we pulled off at the next rest stop and decided to see what was what. At the same time, Damien was getting on his flight, so we lost access to our resident dad. After standing around our engine for a while looking at the fluid levels and trying to decide if we needed to add any coolant, a man came up to us and asked what was up. I told him I thought we were OK but that our AC quit blowing and we decided to pull off just in case.
Turns out he is a mechanic and owns a V10 bus just like ours (we had pulled in and parked right next to his). He took a look and told us exactly what to do, and then did it for us - all while educating us about our engine and how to avoid over heating. I even talked to him about the squeaking brakes, and he told me what to do about that too. I am supposed to wait until the vehicle is cold and then spray a certain cleaner on the rotors. But he said that they are totally fine. He also looked at our engine’s fire extinguisher system and told us we got lucky because it has a heat sensor - if we had overheated, it might have triggered the system to put out the nonexistent fire. That would have been something.
Hours later I’m still marveling that we managed to pull off and park in a random rest stop right next to a mechanic with our exact same type of engine who wanted to help us. How?
And then we arrived at the home of Virginia and Roman to the most nutritious and beautiful spread of food made care by Tara’s sister, and we all ate and filled our bellies. There was even an amazing plum pie made with plums picked from cousin Alex’s tree, with whipped cream on top.
But sorrow of all sorrows - while we were all sitting outside in the beautiful 65 degree weather, Alivia heard that Kayleigh’s flight got canceled. I don’t know what will happen for Kayleigh now.
Damien’s flight landed and he’s on his way home now. Kayleigh got a hotel and will fly out tomorrow. We are going to sleep and plan to sleep as long as we can.
