Westward, Ho!

I saw my first California Highway Patrol motorcycle officer up close the other day. Gave me flashbacks to watching Erik Estrada & co. on tv as a kid! Seriously, he was very impressive in his tight-fitting blouse and even tighter-fitting pants and boots. ;-) There had been some sort of accident on The 5 a bit ahead of where I was, just beyond the 5/805 Merge, and his task was to do a traffic break for a few minutes to give his colleagues in a patrol car a chance to push the cars out of the way. So he turned on his lights and started weaving across 2 lanes, and then 3 lanes, and then finally doing sweeping S's across all 6 lanes, his bike leaning deeply into the turns, and all the cars slowed and stayed behind him. *I* would not want to put my body in front of 6 lanes of speeding freeway traffic while on a motorcycle. Those CHP folks earn their pay, IMO.

Something I didn't know until I moved out here...there is no "California State Police." All state police functions are performed by the California Highway Patrol. Some googling revealed that the State Police, which was a very small body, was merged into the CHP about 20 years ago as a budget and streamlining measure.

While on the subject of cars and police and such, I now have my official California driver's license. So I think I'm now an official Californian. :-) Hopefully I will never see a CHP officer up *really* close....