Crossing A Bridge

The Clarion Hotel project continued on as the Sacramento project finished up and I was soon spending all of my weekdays in Millbrae. And I soon discovered that if I wanted to get home to Lassen County before midnight, I would have to be on the Bay Bridge and headed east by 1 PM on a Friday. Any time later than that and the traffic was simply horrendous.

Winter time was the worst. In miles traveled, it made more sense to drive up I-80 and into Reno before heading north to Janesville. But Donner Pass is one of the few roads where chain controls are rigidly enforced and my company truck was not a 4-wheel drive model. When chains were required, I had to put them on. And join the crowd in the right lane that was traveling at 20 mph.

If I chose to travel the alternate route, Highways 32 and 36, I had to deal with roads that were not plowed or poorly plowed. Scary times going over Fredonyer Pass in a blizzard! Plus, these roads were lightly traveled in the winter and there’s definitely safety in numbers.

Once safely home on a Friday night, I had to start planning for a return trip on Sunday evening. Would there be a storm? Which way should I go? And one of my monumental mistakes had me sitting in traffic on I-80 in Verdi, Nevada. Thousands of us waited as the CHP directed 50 cars at a time over the pass at Donner. It took me 11 hours to go from Reno to Sacramento.

OK, back to work. Some of the panels for the Clarion were quite large and we needed to get an oversized load permit from CalTrans so that we could get them over the mountain.

Here’s how that works. You contact CalTrans and tell them all about your load. Size, height and weight. Origin and destination. You can tell them when you would like to make the trip…but they will tell you. And they also tell you which roads you can take and at what hours. It’s all pretty tightly controlled. As it should be. Until your truck gets to the toll plaza at the Bay Bridge. That was where the CHP directed our truck to join a few other ‘Wide Loads’ just west of the toll booths. The officer then said that in a few minutes, the toll booths would shutdown just long enough for these three trucks to get in gear and head for the bridge itself. He said, “You’ve only got a minute, so straddle the white lines and don’t let those b******d’s get ahead of you!” It worked.