Ready to Cast Off

Our 1700-mile (each way) road trip to San Antonio will start under a literal (not figurative) pall due to the massive brush fires in the Sierra Nevada that are blanketing northern Nevada with smoke. The smoke really started getting heavy here yesterday afternoon, and Lisa even observed light ash fall when we went out to get our hair cut. (There's a nice little one-chair hair shop two blocks from Fernley House, and the woman there works on both men and women, so we both got trimmed before the trip.) You can feel the smoke in your eyes and it can't be doing good things to our lungs, but it is keeping things at least 5-10 degrees cooler, which is welcome.

Three days ago Lisa spent the day cleaning and vacuuming out the minivan and doing small repairs to make it more comfortable for the trip. Two days ago we went and washed the van. Yesterday, I bought the local Bank of America branch out of their entire stock ($60) of $2 bills for tips along the way. (Although some of them are 1960-series red-seal US Notes so I'm loathe to spend them.) Then I fueled the van on the way home. We've been packing things into the van for the last couple of days. (I would have put the case of wine jorhett asked us to transport to Texas for him in the van already, but I didn't want the wine to get hot, so it has stayed out of the sun in the living room and will get packed with other stuff around it for insulation later this morning.) Today I have a small amount of Day Jobbe to do, and then we can finalize packing and head south early this afternoon.

I really feel like Lisa has been working much harder than I have been this week. I've been spending ten hours a day on Day Jobbe so we can leave early, but she's been bustling around, packing boxes, finishing costumes, cleaning and packing the van, and otherwise working at the retail logistics of travel while I deal with the wholesale ones for our company's clients.

Today's stage is the short one: only as far as Tonopah, where I get to stay in the hotel that we used for the Tonopah Westercon bid two years ago. Hey, who knows, we might get lucky with their dice cage and get a free night.

Stage 1: Fernley to Tonopah

Our original plans had us leaving Fernley at 2 PM, but thanks to Lisa's extensive pre-packing and my getting my work cleared by 11 AM, we left the house around 11:30 AM, although we did immediately stop for lunch at Arby's before heading east just past Noon on US-50A to Fallon and then south on US-95. The air was thick with smoke. The route south of Fallon was a road neither of us had ever traveled. Much of it is very stark, although with all that smoke, we hardly could see much of it. The two-lane road has a 70 MPH speed limit, and there wasn't a lot of traffic southbound. There was quite a bit of it northbound, much of it very likely heading toward Burning Man from the look of the vehicles and the odd piles of stuff lashed to their roofs.

( This Place is Da Bomb )

Lots more photos of bombs and other military stuff in the Hawthorne Set.

We left Hawthorne still well ahead of our original schedule. But it didn't last.

( Being Good Samaritans )

Having earned lots of Karma points for helping the folks stranded at Coaldale, we got to Tonopah just before 6 PM.

( Lisa Shows Me the Convention Center )

Today was a relatively short leg; the shortest of the entire trip, actually. Tomorrow we had better get moving early, because our goal is Kingman, Arizona, and that's a longer trip than we did today. However, we did pretty good today and I hope the rest of the trip goes as smoothly as today did.