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kevin_standleeDay Jobbe caught up to me last night, and I had work late at night that led to an eight-hour job. It wasn't me having to actively work on something, but a computing job that normally takes a few minutes running for more than eight hours. I was able to set it up and go to bed. It ran longer than the eight hours I expected, but it did get done this morning while I was having breakfast. Unfortunately, it meant that we got away from Tonopah later than we expected. Our thanks to the Belvada Hotel for not holding us strictly to an 11 am check-out. Mind you, given that we stayed nine nights and were responsible for mostly filling their hotel for the better part of a week, it's not too surprising to me that they'd cut us a little slack.
Just after 11 am, we finished loading the last of our stuff from our hotel room in the Belvada into the vehicles. Slightly earlier, we'd made a brief stop at the Vanwood Variety Store, where Lisa bought the two swimsuits on which she'd had her eye, and we finally got to see the owner, who had been out sick during Westercon. The owner seemed very pleased with how much business Westercon generated.
After a brief detour south to Raley's to pick up a battery we couldn't find at Central Nevada Hardware, we needed to refuel Lisa's pickup truck. We went to the place with the lowest fuel prices in Tonopah of which we are aware, which is Rebel Oil's distributorship on Depot Road just north of the Banc Club (site of the former Tonopah & Goldfield train station). This is off the main street and the price (cash or credit) was only $5.139, less than when I refueled here last Thursday. I guess I should have submitted an item to the Tonopah Telegraph to tell people that they could get a significant discount off gasoline by going to this no-frills gas station.
Finally leaving Tonopah, we made a stop at the Miller's rest area. While it's not far north of Tonopah, rest areas are few and far between on US-95. This one has what I think is the last Joshua tree on US-95 north.
There were some enormous dust devils to the north of the rest area. We would see more of them today, as the temperatures got up into the high 30s C (high 90s F).
Although I thought that the sleep I got yesterday and last night would be enough to get us through to Fernley, as we headed north to Hawthorne, there were times when I was gasping to stay awake, despite two big cups of coffee and a Diet Coke. I was almost ready to bail out at Hawthorne and spend another night on the road there. However, Lisa did remind me that if we did that, we'd lose the ability to collect the Rolling Stone after we returned the rental trailer, because the repair shop isn't open on weekends. So we decided to try and stop and get some food and see if that would be sufficient.
We stopped at the Safeway in Hawthorne. To our (pleasant) surprise, the employees there are still wearing masks. Not always that well, but after all of the other places we've been (and the heckler yelling at us in the street yesterday for wearing masks which "the science says don't work, you don't need to wear them, they don't do any good," etc.), it made us feel better. Lisa got some sandwich fixings. I got an eight-piece chicken dinner. For the past week or so, I really feel like I've had way too many carbs and not enough protein. We ate lunch while sitting in the parking lot at Safeway.
While we were at Safeway, I checked the rental contract for the U-Haul trailer. To my horror, I discovered that I'd made the reservation wrong. Instead of being due back on July 8 at 2 pm, it showed the trailer was due back today, July 7, at 2 pm. And it was now 2:45 pm! Fortunately, there is a one-hour grace period, and I called and extended the rental for an additional day, so there was no penalty other than the additional day's rent that I'll owe tomorrow.
Eating lunch did make me feel a bit more alert, so I decided we could go ahead and push the final 100 miles home. There were times when I felt like I might be starting to fade again, but I pulled it together, and we arrived home at 5:45 pm, roughly six hours after we left. Again, we couldn't drive that fast due to the trailer, so 200 miles in six hours including stops isn't that bad.
Unloading went surprisingly smoothly and quickly. In only about 90 minutes, we managed to unload everything from the two vehicles and the rental trailer. Not all of it is in its final location, and indeed some of it is going to have to go back to the Bay Area to be used by our parent organization, SFSFC, and CostumeCon 39 next year, but the vehicles are empty.
Lisa swept the U-Haul with a very special broom. In 2004 at Noreascon 4 in Boston, Lisa, who had driven to Boston in the little pickup, collected a couple of unused brooms that the convention had purchased but not used. She preserved one of those two brooms in its original packaging, unwrapping it eighteen years later at Tonopah and the 2022 Westercon to use while sweeping the Main Hall and in this case the rental trailer. It took almost two decades, but thank you N4 for your help with Westercon!
We nearly have the house cooled down enough to be usable overnight. If all goes well, I won't have to get up early on Friday. We only have to get the U-Haul back to them by 2 pm and collect the RV by 5 pm, plus go do some grocery shopping to restart the house. Fingers crossed that this won't be difficult.
Just after 11 am, we finished loading the last of our stuff from our hotel room in the Belvada into the vehicles. Slightly earlier, we'd made a brief stop at the Vanwood Variety Store, where Lisa bought the two swimsuits on which she'd had her eye, and we finally got to see the owner, who had been out sick during Westercon. The owner seemed very pleased with how much business Westercon generated.
After a brief detour south to Raley's to pick up a battery we couldn't find at Central Nevada Hardware, we needed to refuel Lisa's pickup truck. We went to the place with the lowest fuel prices in Tonopah of which we are aware, which is Rebel Oil's distributorship on Depot Road just north of the Banc Club (site of the former Tonopah & Goldfield train station). This is off the main street and the price (cash or credit) was only $5.139, less than when I refueled here last Thursday. I guess I should have submitted an item to the Tonopah Telegraph to tell people that they could get a significant discount off gasoline by going to this no-frills gas station.
Finally leaving Tonopah, we made a stop at the Miller's rest area. While it's not far north of Tonopah, rest areas are few and far between on US-95. This one has what I think is the last Joshua tree on US-95 north.
There were some enormous dust devils to the north of the rest area. We would see more of them today, as the temperatures got up into the high 30s C (high 90s F).
Although I thought that the sleep I got yesterday and last night would be enough to get us through to Fernley, as we headed north to Hawthorne, there were times when I was gasping to stay awake, despite two big cups of coffee and a Diet Coke. I was almost ready to bail out at Hawthorne and spend another night on the road there. However, Lisa did remind me that if we did that, we'd lose the ability to collect the Rolling Stone after we returned the rental trailer, because the repair shop isn't open on weekends. So we decided to try and stop and get some food and see if that would be sufficient.
We stopped at the Safeway in Hawthorne. To our (pleasant) surprise, the employees there are still wearing masks. Not always that well, but after all of the other places we've been (and the heckler yelling at us in the street yesterday for wearing masks which "the science says don't work, you don't need to wear them, they don't do any good," etc.), it made us feel better. Lisa got some sandwich fixings. I got an eight-piece chicken dinner. For the past week or so, I really feel like I've had way too many carbs and not enough protein. We ate lunch while sitting in the parking lot at Safeway.
While we were at Safeway, I checked the rental contract for the U-Haul trailer. To my horror, I discovered that I'd made the reservation wrong. Instead of being due back on July 8 at 2 pm, it showed the trailer was due back today, July 7, at 2 pm. And it was now 2:45 pm! Fortunately, there is a one-hour grace period, and I called and extended the rental for an additional day, so there was no penalty other than the additional day's rent that I'll owe tomorrow.
Eating lunch did make me feel a bit more alert, so I decided we could go ahead and push the final 100 miles home. There were times when I felt like I might be starting to fade again, but I pulled it together, and we arrived home at 5:45 pm, roughly six hours after we left. Again, we couldn't drive that fast due to the trailer, so 200 miles in six hours including stops isn't that bad.
Unloading went surprisingly smoothly and quickly. In only about 90 minutes, we managed to unload everything from the two vehicles and the rental trailer. Not all of it is in its final location, and indeed some of it is going to have to go back to the Bay Area to be used by our parent organization, SFSFC, and CostumeCon 39 next year, but the vehicles are empty.
Lisa swept the U-Haul with a very special broom. In 2004 at Noreascon 4 in Boston, Lisa, who had driven to Boston in the little pickup, collected a couple of unused brooms that the convention had purchased but not used. She preserved one of those two brooms in its original packaging, unwrapping it eighteen years later at Tonopah and the 2022 Westercon to use while sweeping the Main Hall and in this case the rental trailer. It took almost two decades, but thank you N4 for your help with Westercon!
We nearly have the house cooled down enough to be usable overnight. If all goes well, I won't have to get up early on Friday. We only have to get the U-Haul back to them by 2 pm and collect the RV by 5 pm, plus go do some grocery shopping to restart the house. Fingers crossed that this won't be difficult.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-10 06:18 am (UTC)