Mr. W and I headed up to our beloved Santa Ynez Valley this weekend to do a little house hunting (more on that later), and after a lovely couple of days spent drinking and daydreaming, we hit a wall on our drive home. A solid wall of traffic.
We were on the 101 freeway almost where it splits to the 33 toward Ojai when we saw dark brownish-grey smoke billowing up from the west of us. The brush that butts up to the freeway was on fire. We weren't surprised when traffic began to slow, and not even when it stopped dead for several minutes.
We were surprised, however, that we then became trapped in place for nearly 2 hours while firefighters battled the flames.
The upside of this was that we got to listen to our audio download of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay. The downside was that after about hour, I had to pee.
People were out of their cars, walking up and down the road, taking pictures and chit-chatting, so I wasn't super excited by the idea of wandering over into a bush. Nor was I overjoyed by the thought of going in the car, with windows all around me and Mr. W sitting in the driver's seat. But unfortunately, I came down with a UTI (Hi Internet! I think UTI goes well with TMI, doesn't it?) last week. And any girl out there knows the last thing you want to do when you have a UTI is hold your pee.
It took a little reassurance on Mr. W's part. He offered to hold up one of his shirts to partially block me, and we arranged my car windshield shade up around another part of me. I still felt exposed, but it was that or nothing. And so I went. Crouched on the floor of the front seat of the Prius. Into a disposable Tupperware container that Mr. W had been eating grapes out of 5 minutes prior.
I'm pretty sure our relationship has reached a whole new level now.
Too embarrassed to dump it out the car door (like the lady in front of us did—no joke), I closed the lid on it and held it between my feet the whole way home.
Hahaha that's a picture of our beer from last night but I couldn't resist throwing it in at this part of the story...
Although things felt better after my bladder was empty, it still seemed like we had to sit there for about four more days. I have an even deeper sympathy for those people who get stuck on the tarmac. I cannot imagine... Finally, the fire department brought in some air support, and after about 7 water dumps and the arrival of Cal-Trans, they decided it was safe for us to begin moving again.
I'm hoping Mr. W will be able to recover from everything that happened today. I'm sure being that close to a brush fire nearly scared the pee out of him...
