Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

So, as I mentioned, in order to get to the eastbound California Zephyr at its origin station of Emeryville, I needed to catch a 4:30 AM bus from San Jose Diridon Station. Light rail doesn't run that early in the morning; otherwise it would be a trivial matter. I had booked a Lyft well in advance and a driver had accepted. After only two hours of sleep (not counting the two-hour nap I had yesterday afternoon), I got cleaned up, dressed, packed, and checked out of the hotel and was out front at 4 AM wondering where my ride was. I checked the Lyft app again and was aghast: I had booked the ride for Monday morning, not today!

Fortunately, the night auditor at the hotel was able to call me a taxi, which arrived very promptly and the driver got me to the station with a few minutes to spare (and the bus was fifteen minutes late anyway). Unfortunately, that cost me twice what the Lyft would have cost. I was, however, able to cancel the Lyft request for Monday morning, so I'm not out anything else.

The bus that showed up is less a connection to the Capitol Corridor and more a connection from the Southern California Amtrak service. However, this worked in my favor. Despite the official Amtrak booking being a bus from San Jose to Oakland, then a ride one stop on the Capitol Corridor to Emeryville, it turns out that after collecting those of us who were waiting at San Jose, the bus goes first to San Francisco to deliver people connecting from the Pacific Surfliner, then goes to Emeryville, then Oakland. Amtrak does not appear to prohibit "short stopping," so I got off at Emeryville, that being where I wanted to be anyway. I checked my bag for the Zephyr and took advantage of having more than two hours before my train to walk to Denny's for breakfast.

( Photos and Further Details of the Trip )

After collecting me from the station, Lisa drove us to Raley's for some groceries, then took us home.

It was a good trip, but I can't sleep on buses, and not much on trains while sitting up, either, so I need to work on catching up on lost sleep tonight.

I have my annual medical exam scheduled for Friday morning in the Bay Area. While I could fly or drive down there, I don't want to drive over the passes with winter weather coming, and flying is annoying if there is an alternative. So tomorrow morning, Lisa will take me to the Amtrak station in Reno and I will take the California Zephyr to Emeryville and the Capitol Corridor train from there to San Jose. On Friday morning, I'll work from my hotel room in the morning, then take light rail to Caltrain for my first ride on the newly electrified system.

Yes, it takes longer to take the train that flying does, but it's generally more pleasant, I don't have to deal with Security Theater, and besides, some of those one-hour flights between RNO and SJC have actually been eight-hour flights when you factor in arriving early and having your flight delayed. And for that matter, my choices between the two cities aren't much better than Amtrak. While Southwest offers lots of flights on that city pair, only one is direct each way. The others mean going through Las Vegas or Burbank or even Phoenix, which doesn't really make them that much faster than the train ride.

There's apt to be snow both going and coming. Here's hoping that it's not so much snow that Union Pacific or Amtrak don't get a fit of the vapors and decide that it's too hard to keep the tracks clear. For now, anyway, the train I'm scheduled to ride is on time making its way toward Helper, Utah for an arrival in Reno at 9:24 AM tomorrow.

91 days after Lisa and I left Reno on the eastbound California Zephyr, she arrived on the westbound CZ, traveling via New Mexico.

( Clickbait, Isn't it? )

I had my back to Lisa's car when she got off the train and thus she was able to sneak up behind me and surprise me. We waited for the crowd to disperse and then took the elevator upstairs and got Lisa, her luggage, and of course Kuma Bear into the Astro. We stopped for groceries at Raley's and I did a couple of other small errands before heading home.

When we got home, I helped Lisa unload things. She will be staying in her travel trailer as it will help her decompress and recover from this three-month-long trip. I went back to work at the Day Jobbe. It took me quite a while to recover, and I was only gone about one-third of the time Lisa was.

Lisa called me this morning from her hotel using her calling card (remember, she has no mobile phone) to let me know she was checking out and hauling her luggage the ~850 m down to Union Station. The plan was for her to hang out in the Metropolitan Lounge until her train left at 2 PM Chicago time. When Union Station remodeled a few years ago, they build a new lounge that opens off the main hall and is huge. It's a very comfortable place to wait for your train. When train time comes, they call it in the lounge and escort all of the first class (sleeping car) passengers down to the train.

As I write this, Amtrak train 5, the westbound California Zephyr, has departed Galesburg IL, having left Chicago on time. I don't expect to hear from Lisa again until Thursday morning. Her scheduled arrival in Reno is 9:13 AM. I will of course be watching the train's progress and will leave for Reno when the train passes on Thursday morning. I hope she gets lots of rest in her roomette and gets to watch the lovely scenery go by without having to worry about connections or hotel rooms or airline flights.

If you'd like to see some of the pictures of our trip so far, see my Mastodon account. The 155 photos and videos I took on my phone are likely to take all night to upload from my phone, and goodness knows if I'll be able to get them and all of Lisa's photos uploaded and cataloged. It's hard to do so when you are traveling and doubly so when you spend a whole lot of the day out of cell phone range.

After falling asleep on the train at Wendover, I woke up again at Salt Lake City, where the train has a servicing stop, mainly because the bed stopped moving and rocking. But presently we started moving and I started sleeping again. Somewhere between Helper and Green River, we woke up, got dressed, Lisa put the beds away, and we ordered breakfast. We're glad that Amtrak does cooked breakfasts on the long-distance trains after an unfortunate period (still happening on some eastern trains) of so-called "flexible" meals. Lisa didn't want the potatoes because it looked on the menu that they would be full of red and green peppers, so were able to get her a bowl of oatmeal instead. (As it happens, the potatoes were plan, the way she and I both like them.)

After breakfast and our departure from Green River UT, I took a shower. It's a little challenging in the tiny shower, but we paid for it and I see no reason not to use it.

We're planning to do an episode of Railway Legends, Myths, and Stories about the Amtrak Superliners, so on this trip we were trying to document all of the different types of rooms. Besides our bedroom, I was able to find a roomette in the next car down that wasn't occupied. Our car attendant told us that room H (the handicapped-accessible room) in our car wouldn't be occupied until Denver, and that we could record it. We also took pictures of the diner, lounge, and coaches.

Mostly we spent the day watching the world go by. That includes the stark vistas of the Utah desert and the amazing scenery through Colorado along the Colorado and Fraser Rivers. We've been this way about eight times (we've lost count), and if you've read about our previous trips, this wasn't that much different. It was full of wonderful views as usual.

Lunch was our usual fare: the Angus burger. After lunch, both of us got sleepy, so Lisa made up the upper bunk and I laid down on the lower sofa and we both napped for at least an hour. Around 3:30 PM, I went to the cafe car and bought us a couple of hot dogs. It was around this time that we learned that with a scheduled 6:30 arrival in Denver, we were going to get another dinner. We both ordered steak this time, and got an early dinner just after leaving Fraser/Winter Park, and thus we enjoyed dinner mostly while passing through the Moffat Tunnel, the highest point on the Amtrak system (9239 ft / 2816 m) and heading down the east side toward Denver.

Just outside of Denver, while we were talking to the conductor he got a message from the dispatcher: a freight train ahead of us had broken in two. That blocked the line and could have meant a long delay, but in the end it was less than 30 minutes, which was a relief. Eventually, we backed into Denver Union Station (The Zephyr has to make a roughly one-mile back-up move due to Denver being a stub-end station) and arrived about 7:45.

We hauled our bags into the station and waited for my checked bag to arrive. I was intrigued by a group of girls in anime-style outfits in the station. I asked them if there was an anime convention in town. They said no; they were just getting ready to do a photo shoot in the station. One photo of them should eventually end up in my photo stream.

After collecting the checked bag, we caught a taxi to the Holiday Inn Express, about 2 km away. The IHG Hotel Indigo would have been much more convenient, but when I had checked, they said that all of their rooms are shower-stall only (no bathtub). The HIX had upgraded us to a King mini-suite, but it also was shower-only, so I asked for a room with at bathtub. They found one; it's relatively small, and because it's not a suite, there's no refrigerator, but it is much better for Lisa.

We walked to Walgreens to get several things. I left my comb behind when packing. In retrospect, I could have asked the hotel for one as part of their "Forgot Something" program, but I'd forgotten, and we found a US-made pocket comb. We also needed to get me a new can of Gold Bond spray power, because to my annoyance, the almost-full can I had has stopped working. Oh, well. We also got some cold drinks (we were both very thirsty). With no refrigerator, we put Lisa's orange juice on ice. Having had four meals on the train, we were not at all hungry, so we finished unpacking, Lisa got a bath, and I got my computer running.

I've forgotten my computer mouse, and the touchpad on my computer doesn't work very well, but we probably can get another one tomorrow. It's just as well, I guess, that we're spending an extra night here. As I mentioned, we have an end-to-end reservation for IHG points reasons. The front desk folks said I just have to come down tomorrow and have them redo the keys; we won't have to switch rooms.

So tomorrow we have a mostly unscheduled day, and that's fine with me.

So today I had to make some tough decisions about what to pack. I have to carry some of our camera gear in my luggage, and I need to leave space for Lisa to give me things to take home with me. My United flight appears to allow two checked bags, so I'm trying to squeeze a soft-sided empty bag into my large suitcase that I'll use to for the homeward-bound overflow. I will also use that bag for the train trips for carrying just what I need in the cabin, so I don't have to futz around with my large luggage.

I saw that the train that will be our eastbound California Zephyr tomorrow afternoon passed by here this morning only around an hour late, so there's a reasonable chance that it might be on time out of Reno tomorrow. That means we need to be ready to leave by about 2 PM to get to the Amtrak station in Reno, get unloaded, and park the car in the garage across the street. I will, however, keep watching the Amtrak status of the train in case of an unusual delay.

While I considered bringing my WSFS uniform, which many of you know was part of the previous Glasgow Worldcon's theme of "Spaceport Glasgow," not only does it not match the current theme, but I'm concerned that there are too many people who would flat-out resent me wearing it. Besides, the hat would be challenging to fit into my bag considering all of the other things like the tripod and a bunch of cables that I'm carrying. It's sort of a pity, though, as I've almost lost enough weight that the uniform fits much better than it has in years.

Because the internet connectivity on board the train is nearly nonexistent, I don't expect to post anything again until after we get into the hotel in Denver on Friday evening.

As anyone reading this for long should know, two Amtrak trains pass our house most days: the westbound (#5) and eastbound (#6) California Zephyr. Amtrak has recently changed their schedule to insert more recovery time, but before they did that, the westbound, when running on time, passed Fernley at about 7:45 AM, and the eastbound passed around 4:45 PM. I have a meeting every morning from 7 to 8 AM, so I sometimes don't notice when #5 passes. Yesterday afternoon, I heard the dispatcher talking to an Amtrak train and realized that he was talking to #5, not #6. Checking the Amtrak Status map, I saw that the westbound train was running roughly eight hours late. Late running isn't unusual (unfortunately), but this was a bit more than usual. The eastbound train was roughly on time, which meant that there was a possibility of something happening that Lisa and I have witnessed here at Fernley only once: a meet of the two Amtrak trains in front of our house.

The Nevada Subdivision that runs from Sparks to Winnemucca is single track with passing sidings every ten miles or so. Fernley is one of those sidings. The one to the west is called Thisbe, and the one to the east is Darwin.

I kept an eye on the train status map, and it eventually became clear that they weren't going to meet here at Fernley. I did photograph the two trains as they passed.

( Trains Passing in the Afternoon )

One place that this pair of trains cannot meet is Reno itself, which only has one platform. I think that the two trains have converged on the station at least once before, which looks like it causes all manner of trouble for the dispatcher, who has to hold one of them out of the station, blocking both tracks and thus all other rail traffic in the area. (The railroad is double-tracked from Sparks to the Bay Area except for a couple of single-track sections in the Sierra Nevada where Southern Pacific tore up one line to save money when they were in a "burn-the-furniture" mode before Union Pacific merged them.) I bet it's pretty chaotic at the station itself, too, as they try to deal with two trains nearly simultaneously when it's normally one in the morning and another in the afternoon.

Amtrak canceled trains 5/6 (the California Zephyr) west of Salt Lake City due to the severe weather conditions out here. I can see that it would have been pretty difficult for them to get through. Interstate 80 has been closed most of today, and I've not seen many trains of any sort here. Thursday was the last westbound Amtrak coming this way before the cancellations. The westbound train was running more than nine hours late, and we were following its progress on Amtrak's Track Your Train map. The train came to a halt at Darwin siding (east of Fernley), but we did not hear anything on the radio scanner to explain why. Venturing out into the howling windstorm, we could see lots of red blinking lights down the tracks. After maybe an hour, the wind had subsided a bit and Amtrak finally came through, but the blinking lights were still there, so we got in the Astro and drove down to Main Street Park (former home of the Bottlecap Gazebo). We could see lots of fire engines and a bucket truck on the opposite side of the tracks, but no obvious fire. Lisa then noticed that none of the houses in that are were showing any lights. It was too dark to take any photos, but the next morning when I ran out to get some milk, I saw what appears to explain the emergency vehicles, the lack of lights on the houses, and the extra hour of delay that afflicted Amtrak.

( The Next Day )

Although the Rolling Stone is ready to be collected, we told Big O not to expect us until Monday. There's no sense trying to drive that RV in a wind storm.

Edit, March 3: There had been a bucket truck out there the night before when I couldn't take pictures, but I've had it pointed out to me that there was no bucket on the truck in this picture and it was actually a pole truck designed to hold a pole in position like this pending a proper fix.

It did snow overnight, but only about 2-3 cm rather than ten times that amount in the big storm in January.

( Snow Pictures )

This afternoon, the snow turned to rain, which led to lots of slush. There may be more snow tonight, but it doesn't look like it should be much to worry about. Unlike California, we didn't get much wind either, for which we're grateful.

I still do not regret laying in supplies. They don't go to waste, and they make us more secure. Instead of worrying about the weather, we could shoot the studio version of the next Railway Legends, Myths, and Stories.

As much as I love hanging around the con suite at SMOFCon, I turned in relatively early because I knew I had to be up too early to head home. Thanks to spending too much time reading mail and answering messages, I ended up with only around two hours of sleep before getting up, showering, and packing. Had I had a better idea of how much time it would actually take me to do that and to walk to the train station, and that the station wouldn't open until 4 AM, I could probably have had another 30 minutes of sleep, which would have been helpful.

( Providence to Boston )

Across the street from Back Bay station there was a Logan Express bus waiting. Again, you can't pay cash for the $3 fare, but they do take credit cards. At that hour of the morning, the trip between the train and airport was significantly quicker than the traffic-clogged drive from the airport last Thursday.

At Logan, it was pretty simple to drop my bag after putting my jacket into the luggage, as I didn't expect to need it again until I got to Reno. (I'd managed to check the bag via the United app and get the boarding pass up.) Terrorization was no more difficult than usual, and I got to the gate about an hour before boarding, so I could get breakfast.

( Kevin Needs Coffee Badly )

The flight boarded and departed on time. It was completely full, but I had an aisle seat at the back of the aircraft, which suited me fine as I have to use the lavatory a lot these days thanks to the medications I'm taking for blood pressure and diabetes.

It was a 6 1/2-hour flight to SFO, which gave me enough time to watch the second and third Hobbit movies. I'd never seen any of them before this trip, and I watched part 1 on the way out. Now I understand how much some people complained about padding, particularly part three, which seemed to be mostly a continuous set of fight scenes with a tiny bit of dialog.

At SFO, I used the last of my United Club passes for the roughly two hour layover I had before my flight to Reno. The Reno flight was on the E concourse, which is relatively small and the United Club there reflected that. I might have been better off using the on the F concourse on which I'd arrived, but it seemed more prudent to use a location closer to my gate. In any event, I got my money's worth out of the pass (I get two of them per year from the United credit card), once I found a bit of space where I could sit and eat the meatballs and other food on offer on the buffet.

As my flight time approached, I left the club and went to the gate, arriving at just the right time to be the first person in Boarding Group 2 before they called Group 1. The aircraft, an Embraer 175, was also full, but the 2 x 2 seating had wider seats with more legroom than what I suffered through on the B757 from Boston. on the 757, my knees were jammed into the seat in front of me even before the person in front of me reclined. On the E175, there must have been as much as 5 cm legroom between my knees and the seat ahead of me, and I felt like the seat was actually as wide as my shoulders, which is rare on anything short of business class.

We departed (that is, pushed back from the gate) on time, but sat on the taxiway for a long time. After takeoff, the pilot explained that the flight ahead of us had encountered birds, and the delay was for the airport maintenance team to come out and clean up the mess. The flight itself was quite short (around 40 minutes) and did not justify a beverage service.

Because of the issue with the birds at SFO and slight ground delay at RNO due to an outbound plane needed to clear the gate, and with my bag being apparently the last one off the belt, Lisa had to orbit the airport a few times before I got out to the curb. I saw here driving by just as I exited the terminal, but had to wait about ten minutes before she got back around to collect me and we headed for home.

( Amtrak Locomotive Dumped at Thisbe )

We got home late in the afternoon. I unpacked stuff, and something to eat, answered messages, and collapsed into bed. I decided to take today off as well (leaving me with only 17 hours of PTO remaining, my lowest balance in several years) and I needed it. I did not wake up this morning until around 11:30 AM, after over sixteen hours of sleep. While not completely recovered, I think tomorrow won't be quite as awful as today would have been had I had to work today.