Tonopah 4th of July Celebrations

On Sunday, after we returned from visiting the Eye of Sauron Crescent Dunes plant, we walked a short distance (two short blocks from the hotel) up Main Street to see the Tonopah 4th of July Children's Parade.

( Here Come the Kids )

The parade was short, and the road was reopened after roughly thirty minutes. Even as a main highway, there wasn't a lot of traffic backup on a holiday, and those people who were in a hurry could (slowly) make their way around downtown.

Watching this parade makes Lisa and me wonder if there is some way we could work Westercon into it. While it's nominally a Children's parade, if we donated some money to their charity and if there were enough Westercon costumers interested in staying through the final day of the convention (Monday, July 4 is the final day of Westercon 74 next year), it sounds like a short five block parade might be fun. I reckon the key thing is how many people would be willing to do it before we even consider asking the parade organizers if they are interested.

( Evening Fireworks )

As we left the fireworks display around 9:40, Lisa asked if we could get an orange juice, as we'd forgotten to pick one up at Raley's earlier. Both Raley's and Family Dollar close at 9 PM, so we made the rounds of the convenience stores/gas stations along Main Street. Several also had closed at 9 PM, and one that was open until 10 PM didn't have juice, but the Texaco food mart at the south end of town is still open 24 hours and had some orange juice. It's hard to say what the store hours will be next July, and some of these places that have been closing at 9 used to be open 24 hours before the pandemic. If things return to some semblance of normality, they may also return to being open around the clock to serve overnight through traffic.

Done With Tonopah -- But Not For Long

Before and after the 4th of July Parade yesterday, Lisa and I took some more pictures around the hotel-convention center area.

( Saying Hello to the Statues )

This morning, Lisa and I were not in a hurry, and we used most of our available time to have a slow breakfast and eventually pack up the room and move everything back to the minivan. We checked out, told the desk clerk that we would be back in a few days and would be bringing some friends, then started for home.

Although I had enough fuel to get home if necessary, I thought it best to refuel first. There is a relatively minimal gas station off the main street: Rebel Oil, which is mostly a distributor, but also has pumps available to the public that can be accessed 24/7 with a credit/debit card. The price of their fuel was some 17 cents/gallon less that the stations on Main Street; however, if you go there to save money, be aware that there is nothing there but gas pumps. No convenience store or anything else.

We left Tonopah at 11:05 AM, and we made it home to Fernley at 3:10 PM. That included a 15-minute stop at the Luning Rest Area to eat a couple of snack boxes we had bought at Raley's earlier in the trip, two brief stops in Hawthorne, and a brief stop at the Fernley post office to collect our mail as we passed on by. That was pretty good time for the 206 miles / 332 km between the gas station in Tonopah and our home in Fernley via Fallon.

Something that we learned from visiting Tonopah on the 4th of July weekend over which we originally planned to hold Westercon 74 is that we will have to do local outreach to let local restaurants, particularly those in the core section around the middle of town, that our event will be there and to encourage them to stay open rather than to take the holiday off. This will be part of a broader campaign to make ourselves better known in Tonopah itself, something that we weren't planning on doing until we were less than one year out lest we confuse people into turning up on the wrong weekend.