Must Be Time For Worldcon

...because my mail volume has dropped off dramatically, on account of most of the people who would generate that mail are traveling to Denver or are already here and are either doing touristy things or working on convention set-up.

(Not that this is a bad thing!)

Colorado Railroad Museum

Staying at a hotel only a few miles from where we were going meant we didn't have to rush out of the hotel this morning. After the included breakfast, we moved out to the van and drove over to the Colorado Railroad Museum, arriving shortly after they opened at 10 AM. After buying our admissions, I was about to go look at the "orientation video," but Lisa suggested we go on outside before it got too hot. This was a good idea, because the morning overcast had not yet quite burnt off. We headed outside. Lisa stopped to put together her camera equipment and I spotted rabbits grazing on the grass. (She got a picture of one later.)

We looked all over this wonderful collection of both standard- and narrow-gauge rail equipment focused on Colorado's rich railroad heritage. Lisa took lots of photos, which I'm not going to narrate here, although I did give them short descriptions when I posted them to Flickr.

We stayed four a bit over four hours, including having lunch on the grounds, and we had at least a brief look at everything there. We could probably have stayed longer, but (a) it was getting hot; (b) we were both getting tired from accumulated travel fatigue, and (c) we were getting anxious to get moved in to the hotel downtown.

This was a good railroad museum, and some pieces of it, such as the lovely roundhouse/restoration shop, were particularly noteworthy to us, given that we're members of an Oregon railway museum. We enjoyed our stay and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in railroad history, particularly narrow-gauge and Colorado-based roads.

Denvention Registration

After leaving the museum, we drove downtown, and with only a slight glitch, found the hotel. We were surprised when we pulled into the forecourt and weren't set upon by bellmen, although we didn't mind that. Lisa stayed with the van while I went and checked in. Although we were slightly early, our room was available for us, and the front desk manager brought a cart and took our stuff up to the room with Lisa while I parked.

( Registration and move-in )

After registering and moving the rest of our stuff upstairs, we were both feeling the need for dinner, so we walked a few blocks to the 16th Street Pedestrian Mall, where there are plenty of places to eat and even a few other things of use, such as a Walgreens and a 7-Eleven, and -- one block off the mall -- a 24-hour restaurant (filed for future reference). But instead of eating on the 16th Street Mall, we walked to the local Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, where we ate too much dinner (as shown by my blood sugar reading later). We then picked up a few small things, including some milk, for our breakfast tomorrow. Having brought the electric ice chest, we can keep the milk in the room, after all.

Finally it was back to the room, where I've spent the last few hours working on e-mail, photos, and video. Also, I took a shot at reformatting some of the WSFS Business Meeting agenda, sent to me by Pat McMurray before he left to fly to D3 from the UK. (He'll be here tomorrow.)

I hope to get to bed relatively early, because tomorrow is actually my busiest day of the convention, and I need the rest. However, Lisa and I do have some work that needs doing tonight, including some last-minute research for her First Worldcon Panel. And we do need to make up our minds about what tourism we're going to do post-con, particularly if it requires changing any of our hotel reservations. I've already canceled the return reservation at Wells -- the less time we spend there, the better -- and have a couple of extra vacation days with which to play if we can decide how to spend them.

Kevin Plays With Trains

Something I couldn't post earlier because the upload speed from this connection is awful and it took about two hours to upload a 1-minute video is footage that Lisa shot of me operating a locomotive at the Colorado Railroad Museum. Well, not really; it's their diesel switcher simulator, built into an actual locomotive. I will say that it does sound pretty realistic. It wasn't until I'd finished my turn that I realized just how many operating mistakes I'd made, but I did give a more-or-less correct grade crossing signal (long-long-short-long) and a "train about to move forward" (short-short) signal.