Tonopah Field Trip
Apr. 28th, 2022 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kevin_standleeAs I've mentioned, the Tonopah Westercon 74 committee is holding an in-person meeting in Tonopah this weekend. Lisa and I got away from Fernley about Noon today, and arrived in Tonopah about 4:30, with four stops (gas, food, restroom) along the way. We're staying in the Belvada Hotel, which is the closest of Tonopah's hotels to the Convention Center, and is where we plan to stay while we are at Westercon 74.
This is the lobby of the Belvada Hotel. Our initial plans for Westercon, assuming the hotel is amenable, is to have advance registration pickup and possibly Friday at-con registration, in this area. The lobby of the Tonopah Convention Center isn't suitable for much of a queue, and it seems like a bad idea to make people queue outside in the sun.
After a short wait to clean up a confusion with our hotel reservation (we accidentally ended up with two reservations), we checked in and started moving luggage. As those of you who read about our road trips know, we travel heavy, and it took a while to move in to our room, which is one of the four queen kitchenettes in the Belvada Hotel.
Two of the four rooms have a four-burner stove with a convection oven, like this one. The other two have two-burner stove tops with no oven. We've already reserved one of the rooms like this one (they've pre-blocked us) for Westercon 74, because we will be here for about ten days and having a kitchen is key to our travel plans.
Kuma Bear checks out the queen bed. This is not the largest room in the Belvada, and there are a few faults in it, but it's more than made up for by having a kitchenette.
One fault that we learned from previous stays is the the corners of the bed-frame on these beds are shin-barkers. After our last stay in this room, knowing we would be back, we came equipped with protective gear.
Some time ago, we bought a length of pipe insulation (I've been calling it a "pool noodle" for its resemblance to the swimming toy) and brought it with us to Tonopah. Lisa cut lengths of it and wrapped it around the corners. While we may still bump into the corners of the bed, but they are much less likely to crack our shins and ankles.
After moving in to the hotel, we took a short walk to scout out something we hope to do at Westercon 74.
Lisa here is inspecting an area of the convention center/Belvada's shared parking lot diagonally across the street from the Tonopah Convention Center opposite of the barbecue area. We plan to hold a barbecue one afternoon of Westercon, and we are considering (with permission having been tentatively given) erecting a small marquee here to provide an outdoor shaded seating area. It won't hold everyone, of course, but with COVID concerns, giving more space for our members to spread out, especially while eating, is on our minds.
After a walk around the convention center area, we walked over to the Jim Butler Inn & Suites. They wrote to us via our Facebook page to ask for a poster for their window. We don't have large posters, but we do have small flyers, and I delivered three of them for them as they want to promote our convention. While talking to the woman at the front desk, I learned that she had worked at the Atlantis Hotel in Reno during Renovation, the 2011 Worldcon, so she sort of knows the kind of event to expect, albeit much smaller.
Having delivered the posters, it was time to go buy some groceries. We'll be here three nights, and not all of them will be spent eating in restaurants. Also, anything we get that we don't use we can probably take home with us, as we have the electric ice chest in the minivan.
Lisa spoke with the store manager at the Raley's (the only grocery store in Tonopah) about how to make an advance large special order of groceries.
While there is a process for them obtaining specialty items that they do not normally stock, Lisa took a look around the store for things that they do regularly stock, especially individually packaged items. (The TCC has warming cabinets, refrigerators, and freezers, the latter of which is why she was looking at ice cream.)
Besides things like this, she looked at what sorts of fruits like bananas and oranges they had, and other dry individually packaged snacks not pictured here. She'll consult with the rest of the Hospitality team and put together a rather long grocery shopping list.
As we pulled out of Raley's, we spotted a bus from Salt Lake Express, the company that runs a once-a-day trip each way between Las Vegas and Reno via Tonopah. As we had been unable to find an answer to some practical questions we've had, we decided to follow the bus to its stop.
Here are the two buses: the one of the left is from Las Vegas and the one on the right is from Reno. They stop here in Tonopah for around twenty minutes, which allows time for a rest stop, and more importantly, the way they work is that the through passengers change buses, and the drivers return to their home bases. This means the drivers are home every night.
The bus stop is at the Chevron station at the north end of Tonopah, next to the Quality Inn. This is not the most convenient location should one want to get to the downtown hotels roughly a mile or so south of here, but I'm sure we'll figure something out if people do travel to Tonopah by bus.
With a very productive day behind us, we returned to the hotel, where Lisa cooked us a nice dinner and we relaxed for a while watching YouTube history videos over the hotel's decent wi-fi connection. I need to get some sleep now, though, because part of the deal with my management to make this trip with only one day off is that I owe them a couple of hours of work very early tomorrow morning.
Incidentally, while hardly anyone around here is wearing a face covering (one other customer at the grocery store was doing so), nobody has given us any static about us wearing masks, and we even spoke to people interested in attending Westercon (like the clerk at the grocery store) who didn't flinch at us warning them that vaccination and masks are required. They seemed to understand that with our members traveling from far and wide, we don't want to be a super-spreader event for us — and for the local residents of Tonopah!
This is the lobby of the Belvada Hotel. Our initial plans for Westercon, assuming the hotel is amenable, is to have advance registration pickup and possibly Friday at-con registration, in this area. The lobby of the Tonopah Convention Center isn't suitable for much of a queue, and it seems like a bad idea to make people queue outside in the sun.
After a short wait to clean up a confusion with our hotel reservation (we accidentally ended up with two reservations), we checked in and started moving luggage. As those of you who read about our road trips know, we travel heavy, and it took a while to move in to our room, which is one of the four queen kitchenettes in the Belvada Hotel.
Two of the four rooms have a four-burner stove with a convection oven, like this one. The other two have two-burner stove tops with no oven. We've already reserved one of the rooms like this one (they've pre-blocked us) for Westercon 74, because we will be here for about ten days and having a kitchen is key to our travel plans.
Kuma Bear checks out the queen bed. This is not the largest room in the Belvada, and there are a few faults in it, but it's more than made up for by having a kitchenette.
One fault that we learned from previous stays is the the corners of the bed-frame on these beds are shin-barkers. After our last stay in this room, knowing we would be back, we came equipped with protective gear.
Some time ago, we bought a length of pipe insulation (I've been calling it a "pool noodle" for its resemblance to the swimming toy) and brought it with us to Tonopah. Lisa cut lengths of it and wrapped it around the corners. While we may still bump into the corners of the bed, but they are much less likely to crack our shins and ankles.
After moving in to the hotel, we took a short walk to scout out something we hope to do at Westercon 74.
Lisa here is inspecting an area of the convention center/Belvada's shared parking lot diagonally across the street from the Tonopah Convention Center opposite of the barbecue area. We plan to hold a barbecue one afternoon of Westercon, and we are considering (with permission having been tentatively given) erecting a small marquee here to provide an outdoor shaded seating area. It won't hold everyone, of course, but with COVID concerns, giving more space for our members to spread out, especially while eating, is on our minds.
After a walk around the convention center area, we walked over to the Jim Butler Inn & Suites. They wrote to us via our Facebook page to ask for a poster for their window. We don't have large posters, but we do have small flyers, and I delivered three of them for them as they want to promote our convention. While talking to the woman at the front desk, I learned that she had worked at the Atlantis Hotel in Reno during Renovation, the 2011 Worldcon, so she sort of knows the kind of event to expect, albeit much smaller.
Having delivered the posters, it was time to go buy some groceries. We'll be here three nights, and not all of them will be spent eating in restaurants. Also, anything we get that we don't use we can probably take home with us, as we have the electric ice chest in the minivan.
Lisa spoke with the store manager at the Raley's (the only grocery store in Tonopah) about how to make an advance large special order of groceries.
While there is a process for them obtaining specialty items that they do not normally stock, Lisa took a look around the store for things that they do regularly stock, especially individually packaged items. (The TCC has warming cabinets, refrigerators, and freezers, the latter of which is why she was looking at ice cream.)
Besides things like this, she looked at what sorts of fruits like bananas and oranges they had, and other dry individually packaged snacks not pictured here. She'll consult with the rest of the Hospitality team and put together a rather long grocery shopping list.
As we pulled out of Raley's, we spotted a bus from Salt Lake Express, the company that runs a once-a-day trip each way between Las Vegas and Reno via Tonopah. As we had been unable to find an answer to some practical questions we've had, we decided to follow the bus to its stop.
Here are the two buses: the one of the left is from Las Vegas and the one on the right is from Reno. They stop here in Tonopah for around twenty minutes, which allows time for a rest stop, and more importantly, the way they work is that the through passengers change buses, and the drivers return to their home bases. This means the drivers are home every night.
The bus stop is at the Chevron station at the north end of Tonopah, next to the Quality Inn. This is not the most convenient location should one want to get to the downtown hotels roughly a mile or so south of here, but I'm sure we'll figure something out if people do travel to Tonopah by bus.
With a very productive day behind us, we returned to the hotel, where Lisa cooked us a nice dinner and we relaxed for a while watching YouTube history videos over the hotel's decent wi-fi connection. I need to get some sleep now, though, because part of the deal with my management to make this trip with only one day off is that I owe them a couple of hours of work very early tomorrow morning.
Incidentally, while hardly anyone around here is wearing a face covering (one other customer at the grocery store was doing so), nobody has given us any static about us wearing masks, and we even spoke to people interested in attending Westercon (like the clerk at the grocery store) who didn't flinch at us warning them that vaccination and masks are required. They seemed to understand that with our members traveling from far and wide, we don't want to be a super-spreader event for us — and for the local residents of Tonopah!
no subject
Date: 2022-04-29 06:04 am (UTC)Wish I could be there this weekend, but my boss is traveling so I need to be at work.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-29 05:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-29 06:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-29 05:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-30 01:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-30 02:11 pm (UTC)The out-and-back nature out of Reno-based drivers means that Salt Lake Express can't put on a bigger bus if we have a surge of people coming to/leaving from Tonopah, though. We'd have to charter our own buses, which doesn't look financially practical.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-29 04:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-29 05:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-29 09:04 pm (UTC)