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kevin_standleeWe managed to make it home to Fernley today, running ahead of a storm that should arrive tomorrow.
I did share photos on Twitter today, but I'm too tired to catalog them on Flickr again, so only a few photos here.
We did not set an alarm, and took our time getting out of the hotel room. Breakfast was a yogurt and hard-boiled eggs purchased from the shop in the hotel lobby, plus bits picked up from Starbucks once we got rolling.
For the last time, we moved the pile of luggage from our hotel room, this time to the minivan, and set off for home.
The weather was really nice today, and both Lisa and I wanted to get home as long as we thought we could do so safely. That meant we wanted to get across Donner Summit by sundown if possible. We had a few snags in our travel as we tried to do some errands along the way that didn't work out, but what was working in our favor was that, after we grabbed some lunch in Rocklin (east of Sacramento), most traffic was going the way we were not, as lost of folks were driving home from a long holiday weekend in the mountains. The pavement was mostly dry, even as we started getting to snow accumulations. This photo, taken above Colfax, shows the contrasting traffic as well as the high railroad bridge over which we traveled yesterday on the California Zephyr.
Lisa drove, taking advantage of the mostly dry conditions. The clear weather started to cloud up. Spending the night in a hotel in Sacramento would have risked getting stuck if the storm moved in early. We made it to Donner Summit just about sundown.
There was a lot of snow piled up in the Donner Summit rest area — at least 2.5 meters, I estimate. Well done, CalTrans, for clearing the roads and preparing for the next storm.
The weather held and we made it to Reno, but did not stop, and we got home to Fernley about 6 PM.
The house was intact. While it was -4°C outside, the inside temperature was still +10°C. The electric heaters had held the cold at bay. It will take a while to get things warmed up again, but I got a fire going and then Lisa and I unloaded the minivan.
We'd originally hoped to get some milk from Family Dollar on the way home, but they were out, so instead I ran over to Grocery Outlet after we got things to a point where we can at least stop for tonight. There is a lot that still needs to be done, but it can wait.
I totaled up our rail mileage for this trip: 8,671 miles. It's not the trip we planned, and lots of things did not go as planned, both while traveling and while at Worldcon, and all of those things were dissatisfying. However, I'm trying to look at the bright side. We don't appear to have caught COVID-19 (despite being exposed to people we know who did later test positive). We got to see things we'd never seen before and had always wanted to see. Even though we couldn't do our "circle" trip (more a lumpy figure-of-eight, had it worked out) and our Amtrak bedroom was canceled, we still had a private room on all legs of the trip and didn't have to ping-pong between rooms the way some people did, or have to spend an extra week in a hotel somewhere due to train cancellations. Even when we ran badly late, friends stepped in to help. We threaded a needle of good weather between storms, and we made it home on the scheduled day. So overall, it was not as good as we had hoped, but it was far better than it might have been.
Tomorrow will be, I hope, a day off. No alarm set. No major things to do other than put my home office back together in preparation to returning to work on Tuesday.
I did share photos on Twitter today, but I'm too tired to catalog them on Flickr again, so only a few photos here.
We did not set an alarm, and took our time getting out of the hotel room. Breakfast was a yogurt and hard-boiled eggs purchased from the shop in the hotel lobby, plus bits picked up from Starbucks once we got rolling.
For the last time, we moved the pile of luggage from our hotel room, this time to the minivan, and set off for home.
The weather was really nice today, and both Lisa and I wanted to get home as long as we thought we could do so safely. That meant we wanted to get across Donner Summit by sundown if possible. We had a few snags in our travel as we tried to do some errands along the way that didn't work out, but what was working in our favor was that, after we grabbed some lunch in Rocklin (east of Sacramento), most traffic was going the way we were not, as lost of folks were driving home from a long holiday weekend in the mountains. The pavement was mostly dry, even as we started getting to snow accumulations. This photo, taken above Colfax, shows the contrasting traffic as well as the high railroad bridge over which we traveled yesterday on the California Zephyr.
Lisa drove, taking advantage of the mostly dry conditions. The clear weather started to cloud up. Spending the night in a hotel in Sacramento would have risked getting stuck if the storm moved in early. We made it to Donner Summit just about sundown.
There was a lot of snow piled up in the Donner Summit rest area — at least 2.5 meters, I estimate. Well done, CalTrans, for clearing the roads and preparing for the next storm.
The weather held and we made it to Reno, but did not stop, and we got home to Fernley about 6 PM.
The house was intact. While it was -4°C outside, the inside temperature was still +10°C. The electric heaters had held the cold at bay. It will take a while to get things warmed up again, but I got a fire going and then Lisa and I unloaded the minivan.
We'd originally hoped to get some milk from Family Dollar on the way home, but they were out, so instead I ran over to Grocery Outlet after we got things to a point where we can at least stop for tonight. There is a lot that still needs to be done, but it can wait.
I totaled up our rail mileage for this trip: 8,671 miles. It's not the trip we planned, and lots of things did not go as planned, both while traveling and while at Worldcon, and all of those things were dissatisfying. However, I'm trying to look at the bright side. We don't appear to have caught COVID-19 (despite being exposed to people we know who did later test positive). We got to see things we'd never seen before and had always wanted to see. Even though we couldn't do our "circle" trip (more a lumpy figure-of-eight, had it worked out) and our Amtrak bedroom was canceled, we still had a private room on all legs of the trip and didn't have to ping-pong between rooms the way some people did, or have to spend an extra week in a hotel somewhere due to train cancellations. Even when we ran badly late, friends stepped in to help. We threaded a needle of good weather between storms, and we made it home on the scheduled day. So overall, it was not as good as we had hoped, but it was far better than it might have been.
Tomorrow will be, I hope, a day off. No alarm set. No major things to do other than put my home office back together in preparation to returning to work on Tuesday.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-03 06:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-05 01:01 pm (UTC)It was a strange trip. But interesting.