How Dry I Am (Not)

New userpic: This new Welcome to Fernley sign went up on the edge of town as you enter from the west on old US 40. I of course like the train theme.

The dry climate here in Fernley is of course one of the major reasons Lisa wanted to move here. But as we found this week, it's not always bone dry.

Because it's hot during the day, Lisa has been being nearly nocturnal except when doing painting. She's been sleeping a lot during the day and working at night when it's pleasantly cool. But I have to keep a bit more "regular" schedule (I'm working from home today, for instance.)

We have air conditioning in the trailer, but not in the main house. (Another reason to spend hot days in the trailer and cool nights in the house.) It still being fairly warm when I went to bed, I turned on the air conditioning. Some hours later, Lisa came inside. I woke up slightly and vaguely heard her complaining that the air conditioning did not sound right. Then I heard the door open and shortly thereafter footsteps on the roof, followed by Lisa's laughter as she came down from the roof of the trailer. As she came inside, she said, "It looks like a snowcone machine up there on the roof," and she turned off the compressor on the AC unit.

Although it's a lot drier in Fernley than in Mehama, at night when it cools down, the humidity goes up, and there was enough humidity that the AC unit froze over. This hadn't happened to her because when she was sleeping with the AC running, the sun was beating down on the trailer and icing was not an issue.

Travel Plans Change

Our original travel plans to Seattle were for us to leave very early tomorrow morning and drive to Bend, where I could use a Holiday Inn coupon for a free night, then on to Seattle the next day. I was a little concerned about how long this first leg of the trip was going to be. Now 450 miles isn't too awful, but as we've gotten older, Lisa and I have become less tolerant of simply driving with no stops at all, and our average travel speed has gone down.

I suggested we try and head out on Monday evening. Lisa was agreeable to that, but then where would we stop for the night? Either we only go the relatively short distance to Susanville (which is actually about 20 miles out of our planned route), or we hope that one of the few wayside motels along US-395 north of Susanville are still there — I can't find any of them online, and they all looked pretty dodgy the last time we drove through there — or we push through to Alturas, roughly halfway to Bend.

Neither Susanville nor Alturas have hotels in the Holiday Inn or Quality Inn families, the two groups in which I have any night accumulations. But there's a Super 8 in Alturas, and the price wasn't too bad, so we booked a room.

Having done this, we could probably have changed the Bend night to something closer to Portland, but we instead decided to make the middle leg (Alturas to Burns) on Tuesday the "short leg," especially as the way in which I booked the Bend night makes it slightly more difficult to change than an ordinary reservation. (Indeed, since I was redeeming a coupon, it's possible I might not have been able to rebook it at all; I am not certain.