Making the Most of Detours

While relocating from Oregon to southern California, I was escorted off the Pacific Coast Highway by two patrol cars with flashing lights. I’m blaming it on my son, Jeremy. He recommended a jog over to the coastal highway from the 101. 

“Beautiful scenery,” he said. “Less traffic,” he said. 

Jeremy was right. The Pacific Ocean was gorgeous as the sun painted a fiery sky and then bowed off stage. And there was zero traffic. None behind, none ahead, none coming from the opposite direction. Which struck me as rather odd.

And then out of nowhere, two highway patrol cars charged in with lights flashing, pinning my car so I couldn’t make a quick get-away. 

“Where are you going, ma’am?” (I could not, for the life of me, recall the name of my son and daughter-in-law’s town, which, right there, didn’t look suspicious at all.)

“Where are you coming from?” Oregon

“Do you live in Oregon?” Yes.

“How did you get on this highway?” Um … drove?

“Didn’t you see the flashing signs indicating the highway is closed?” No.

The CHP neglected to place flashing “Highway Closed” signs at the entrance to the Pacific Coast Highway from Rice Road. And now I’m going to jail. That’s just great.

After further questioning, they provided my very own private escort—one in front, one on my rear bumper—back in the direction from whence I had come.

Welcome to southern California. 

And it happened this way: when my adult children were in town for their dad’s Celebration of Life service, they strategized over possibilities for my future. Behind my back.

Jeremy and my daughter-in-law Denise took me to dinner before they left town. “Mom,” they said, “we think you should take an early retirement and keep blogging. We think you should get back into speaking and write more books. And here’s how you can afford to do that.” Whereupon they presented options.

One of the possibilities was to live temporarily in their Marina del Rey apartment for free. And that’s how I traded the wild beauty of the Pacific Northwest for Southern California. A new community. Living alone. This was a detour I hadn’t planned, but it’s what happened. And I was motivated to make the most of it.

I wrote for hours on end. Designed a new website. Played tourist at Griffith Observatory, Getty Museum high in the hills above Malibu, and the Museum of Tolerance in downtown L.A.

My daughter-in-law’s pink-rimmed bicycle took me to the grocery store, the post office, and out past the marina. I pedaled as far as the Santa Monica Pier one day. And numerous times to Venice Beach for the fabulous fish tacos and equally fabulous street entertainment. 

When Jeremy and Denise were home periodically, we hiked in the Hollywood Hills and sampled some of the best cuisine around Los Angeles. There are so many sunny, freckled, whimsical memories playing in my head from a land called Southern California, a place I had no intention of ever living, but a delightful detour of a place. 

My friend Al writes a weekly blog. One of his articles was about life’s detours. “While I love to plan,” he wrote, “too often I baptize the plan, and when stuff happens, I want to blame God for the detour. Thinking back, real adventure waits in the detours.” 

There’s a passage in Genesis about a 400-year detour God had in mind for Abram, who was later named Abraham:

“As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. Then the Lord said to him, ‘Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions.’” – Genesis 15:12-14

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never had a 400-year detour (although some of them have felt that long).

So, if detours and waiting are a part of life on this planet, then what if we could make the most of the side streets we hadn’t planned on taking—into infertility, divorce, or caring for a spouse with Lou Gehrig’s disease?

What if we could pull out our Maps app to discover what there is to see and explore along the route? 

What if we braved our way through the detour with an attitude of learning, adjusting, and falling deeper into love and trust with God who was not caught off guard by any of this? 

This I know for sure: No matter how inconvenient a detour is, it gets us to where we want to go because it gets us to where God wants us to be, even if we didn’t know we wanted to be there.