Baptism by Atmospheric River

Have you ever experienced monsoon rains? I don't mean just a way to emphatically say "really heavy rain." I mean like the actual seasonal rains in Southeast Asia.

I have. Twice. The first time was in Mumbai, India on a trip with my friend Aleena and her family in the summer of 2006. It was our last day in the city and it had just started sprinkling as we loaded our luggage into the car. We were on our way to the municipal airport to fly to Calcutta. Before getting to the airport, we stopped at one of Aleena’s relative's apartments to say our last goodbyes.

We took maybe 10 minutes to navigate the garden foyer, run upstairs, kick off our flip flops, and hug farewell inside. In that time, the light rain drops had matured into bloated water-balloons that fell in blinding sheets, as if someone sliced the clouds open with a knife.

By the time we exited the apartment building, several inches of water streamed down the sidewalk and street. We fumbled with an umbrella in the foyer, it seemed futile. I could feel the gathering water getting deeper as we stood there. I bunched the loose fabric of my flowy capris pants as if I was about to curtsy, curled my toes to keep from losing my flip flops in the squelching current, and made a tip-toed half-run high-step through the steadily flowing, debris-filled water.

In the prior week we’d spent in Mumbai, I’d seen at least two humans defecating, just out and about. ...I accidentally, photographed one. Well, I purposely photographed him, unknowing at the time that he was toileting because that was a not an assumption I yet made about people I saw squatting in public. He was a cute little boy, maybe age 4, wearing a bright orange and green shirt at the beach crouched against a bright yellow retaining wall. He looked serious as he stared straight at me. Me being that twenty-something white girl fancying herself having an Eat Pray Love experience, I grabbed my camera, holding out hope National Geographic might find me and I wouldn't have to take the LSAT.

(When I got my FILM back, I realized what the kid was actually doing…. LSAT it is....)

I will not include the crapping photo here. Instead, see above culturally inoffensive photographic proof of my presence in India.

Throughout the week we’d also seen cows, dozens of mangy stray dogs, an

d towering piles of uncollected garbage on those streets. I thought of all of that, and the homes we'd seen with dirt floors and tin or tarp roofs and what this rain meant as it all flooded together. We could just board a plane and leave. It was one of the last flights out of the city for a week due to the rain.

.....I digress, this is an RV lifestyle & law blog. But, when I woke in the middle of the night on our first trip out with the RV to Silver Strand State Beach RV Park in San Diego over New Year's Eve, that’s what I thought about.

Hugely annoying from December 31, 2025- January 1, 2026.

I remembered that monsoon

experience when I woke up to pounding rain sometime in the middle of the night on January 1, 2026. Whistling winds rattled the awning that we JUST repaired, with great difficulty and copious amounts of profanity. In the morning, the RV lot was flooded in spots, with campers’ firewood and chairs floating away. And this beach, I'd already known before booking it, is famously polluted from untreated sewage flowing from the Tijuana River. Since it's January, and we didn't intend to swim, it didn't matter to our plans. The beach though, like my photograph of that cute kid crapping in India, tells more than one story. Maybe that's why I had such a vivid recall of that day some 20 years ago.

Anyways, our dogs were befuddled. We left the cat at home for this trip. The dogs did not hide their displeasure at having been removed from their comfy home to a rainy, noisy parking lot with fireworks next to a polluted beach where they couldn't even be let off leash to zoomy and harass the pelicans, whom were totally unbothered by poops or poor weather. The dogs were hugely annoying co-campers.

Unbothered pelicans

But, the goal of the overnight was one of learning, not of pleasure. Mission accomplished, much learning occurred, little pleasure. Though we had some laughs, toasted the New Year, and made it home it with a new to do list that does, you'll be pleased to know, require more caulk.

Needs more caulk.