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kevin_standlee) wrote2021-12-13 09:00 pm
kevin_standlee) wrote2021-12-13 09:00 pm
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Worldcon 2021 Trip Day 8: Pre-Con Tourism Day
Today is the only day before DisCon III that we had available for doing DC-area tourism. We decided to go to the Smithsonian Museum of American History mainly to see the Transportation Wing. We would have preferred to sleep in longer, but it seemed like a waste, especially with the weather so nice: clear but not cold, running roughly what it was in Fernley before we left.
The Woodley Park station of the Washington Metro is only a few blocks from the hotel. Click through the video if you want to see our train arriving at the platform. I worked out how to buy a stored-value card for Lisa and myself and loaded what I think should be close to enough for what we'll be doing (but we can of course put more value on the cards as needed).
After changing at Federal Center, we headed off to Smithsonian station on the Mall.
Although I attended the DC SMOFCon, I didn't really see much of Washington on that trip, so this is my first "real" trip to the nation's capitol. That's the Smithsonian Castle on the right.
I knew that The Mall was big, but it was hard to get a feel for how big until we started walking on it.
We concentrated on the Transportation wing, because we knew we weren't going to have enough energy to see much more than that. The centerpiece exhibit here for us was the John Bull, the British-built/US-operated 1831 locomotive that has the distinction of being the oldest operable steam locomotive in the world — it last ran in 1981. It now sits on a portion of rail that is itself historic, from an early iron bridge.
Another locomotive on display is named Jupiter, but not the one that was at the Golden Spike ceremony, but a narrow-gauge locomotive built for a line to Santa Cruz, California.
Southern 1401 includes a voiceover of the crew talking about the district over they would be running.
Streetcars are represented by this car of the Washington system.
This view shows how the DC system followed local ordinances forbidding overhead electric lines. The cars used a central electrical conduit within Washington City, and overhead electric "trolley" lines outside the city. Note that this isn't a cable car like San Francisco; there was an electrical line down inside of that center slot.
This Chicago Transit Authority car display included dramatized passengers from the period when the car was in operation.
Other modes of transportation including cars, buses, and ships were included; I just didn't take many pictures of them. They included two pretty rare birds: a Tucker...
...and an EV1. I saw EV1s running around the Bay Area for the short period before GM called them all back and destroyed them.
Adjacent areas included various kinds of engines (steam, electric, internal-combustion, and even hot air) and a section on Thomas Edison.
Also in this wing was a section on food. I was much taken by this exhibit, which is Julia Child's kitchen from her long-running cooking show, The French Chef. I learned from this that Child was as tall as I am and had her kitchen built specifically with higher counters and appliances. Lisa and I would like that.
We spent four hours in just this one wing of the museum and realized that we didn't have enough energy for anything else. We enjoyed the train travel, but even with sleeping-car travel, we're more worn than we originally thought, so we had to head back to the hotel early.
The Department of Agriculture buildings are on the side of The Mall where the Metro station is, and on one side of the building is this geographic marker with the US Forest Service logo on it. As some of you know, I'm a child of a Forest Service officer, so this resonated with me.
We found our way back on the Metro to Woodley Park, where we ascended through what I think may be the longest escalator I've ever ridden. Wikipedia says they rise 102 feet, and are only the third-highest on the Metro. (Apparently the Wheaton station has an 230-foot (70 m) escalator, the longest escalator in the western hemisphere.)
One of Lisa's feet was paining her, and we limped back to the hotel, where she made lunch out of supplies that we've been accumulating on the trip. I bought a burrito from the Chipotle near the hotel. After that, Lisa stayed with the room while I first went to the front desk and asked them to both fix our house phone and replace the low battery on the room safe, and if possible to bring us some extra cups, coffee, and tea, as we don't need our room serviced. I then delivered the Winnipeg bid supplies that I transported from Montreal to Fernley to Los Angeles and then across the country by train to the Winnipeg suite for use by the 2023 bid this weekend. I have to admit that I'll be happy to not have to carry that stuff around with me anymore.
When I got back to the room, most of the issues had been resolved, although the hotel couldn't recreate the low-battery warning, so they didn't replace it. That makes me nervous; however, if the lock does fail, they can get it open by a manual override.
I had a bunch of messages to answer in the afternoon, including finding out more about helping Winnipeg validate site selection votes in advance of the convention. The bids and the administering convention have to confirm that every ballot cast in advance is from a registered member before at-convention voting can open, because memberships can't vote more than once. I have administered cases where one person voted, then transferred their membership, and the transferee innocently tried to vote the same membership because they didn't know it had been used.
I have been advised that we can expect on the order of 2,500 advance votes that we will have to validate tomorrow. That may take a while. And another challenge is that those ballots all have to be set so we we, the bidders can't see how the individuals voted. I'm not really looking forward to this. I had to deal with validating thousands of voters' records in an election in which Winnipeg was a party once before, thirty years ago in Chicago. I hope we can do the validation faster than the 12 hours it took us to validate 2,107 ballots back in 1991!
The Woodley Park station of the Washington Metro is only a few blocks from the hotel. Click through the video if you want to see our train arriving at the platform. I worked out how to buy a stored-value card for Lisa and myself and loaded what I think should be close to enough for what we'll be doing (but we can of course put more value on the cards as needed).
After changing at Federal Center, we headed off to Smithsonian station on the Mall.
Although I attended the DC SMOFCon, I didn't really see much of Washington on that trip, so this is my first "real" trip to the nation's capitol. That's the Smithsonian Castle on the right.
I knew that The Mall was big, but it was hard to get a feel for how big until we started walking on it.
We concentrated on the Transportation wing, because we knew we weren't going to have enough energy to see much more than that. The centerpiece exhibit here for us was the John Bull, the British-built/US-operated 1831 locomotive that has the distinction of being the oldest operable steam locomotive in the world — it last ran in 1981. It now sits on a portion of rail that is itself historic, from an early iron bridge.
Another locomotive on display is named Jupiter, but not the one that was at the Golden Spike ceremony, but a narrow-gauge locomotive built for a line to Santa Cruz, California.
Southern 1401 includes a voiceover of the crew talking about the district over they would be running.
Streetcars are represented by this car of the Washington system.
This view shows how the DC system followed local ordinances forbidding overhead electric lines. The cars used a central electrical conduit within Washington City, and overhead electric "trolley" lines outside the city. Note that this isn't a cable car like San Francisco; there was an electrical line down inside of that center slot.
This Chicago Transit Authority car display included dramatized passengers from the period when the car was in operation.
Other modes of transportation including cars, buses, and ships were included; I just didn't take many pictures of them. They included two pretty rare birds: a Tucker...
...and an EV1. I saw EV1s running around the Bay Area for the short period before GM called them all back and destroyed them.
Adjacent areas included various kinds of engines (steam, electric, internal-combustion, and even hot air) and a section on Thomas Edison.
Also in this wing was a section on food. I was much taken by this exhibit, which is Julia Child's kitchen from her long-running cooking show, The French Chef. I learned from this that Child was as tall as I am and had her kitchen built specifically with higher counters and appliances. Lisa and I would like that.
We spent four hours in just this one wing of the museum and realized that we didn't have enough energy for anything else. We enjoyed the train travel, but even with sleeping-car travel, we're more worn than we originally thought, so we had to head back to the hotel early.
The Department of Agriculture buildings are on the side of The Mall where the Metro station is, and on one side of the building is this geographic marker with the US Forest Service logo on it. As some of you know, I'm a child of a Forest Service officer, so this resonated with me.
We found our way back on the Metro to Woodley Park, where we ascended through what I think may be the longest escalator I've ever ridden. Wikipedia says they rise 102 feet, and are only the third-highest on the Metro. (Apparently the Wheaton station has an 230-foot (70 m) escalator, the longest escalator in the western hemisphere.)
One of Lisa's feet was paining her, and we limped back to the hotel, where she made lunch out of supplies that we've been accumulating on the trip. I bought a burrito from the Chipotle near the hotel. After that, Lisa stayed with the room while I first went to the front desk and asked them to both fix our house phone and replace the low battery on the room safe, and if possible to bring us some extra cups, coffee, and tea, as we don't need our room serviced. I then delivered the Winnipeg bid supplies that I transported from Montreal to Fernley to Los Angeles and then across the country by train to the Winnipeg suite for use by the 2023 bid this weekend. I have to admit that I'll be happy to not have to carry that stuff around with me anymore.
When I got back to the room, most of the issues had been resolved, although the hotel couldn't recreate the low-battery warning, so they didn't replace it. That makes me nervous; however, if the lock does fail, they can get it open by a manual override.
I had a bunch of messages to answer in the afternoon, including finding out more about helping Winnipeg validate site selection votes in advance of the convention. The bids and the administering convention have to confirm that every ballot cast in advance is from a registered member before at-convention voting can open, because memberships can't vote more than once. I have administered cases where one person voted, then transferred their membership, and the transferee innocently tried to vote the same membership because they didn't know it had been used.
I have been advised that we can expect on the order of 2,500 advance votes that we will have to validate tomorrow. That may take a while. And another challenge is that those ballots all have to be set so we we, the bidders can't see how the individuals voted. I'm not really looking forward to this. I had to deal with validating thousands of voters' records in an election in which Winnipeg was a party once before, thirty years ago in Chicago. I hope we can do the validation faster than the 12 hours it took us to validate 2,107 ballots back in 1991!
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