Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

It was a close-run thing, but I got my personal computer (with the video editing software) back in time to put together the October Railway Legends, Myths, and Stories. Our original plan had been for me to edit it while we were traveling, but the problem with the computer that turned out to be caused by the swollen battery put paid to that and I had to wait until I got home and got the machine repaired. Here's a story about our visit to the North Dakota Railroad Museum in Mandan, North Dakota, with a bit at the end about stopping by the park in Bismark where the state's Merci Car is on display.



Those of you who follow me regularly here may remember me writing about this while we were on our way to Winnipeg for NASFiC.

Today I worked a half-day for Day Jobbe, as I have to do on Tuesday. This went a little longer than I had planned. I also was working on some other plans, like trying to find an auto air conditioning repair shop in Winnipeg not too far from the Convention Center area. (I called a couple; the first one was a Volvo specialist, but the second told me to bring it in and they would have a look at it. More about this later this week.) Consequently, we did not get away from Glendive MT until nearly Noon. Our goal was the North Dakota State Railroad Museum in Mandan (Bismark's western suburb). That's about 200 miles.

( Cutting Things Fine )

We were very grateful for the guided tour, and we dropped money into the contribution box and also bought a book about the Northern Pacific. It's difficult for us to visit a railroad museum without buying books.

After leaving the museum, we headed across the Missouri River to Bismarck for another railroad-related photo stop.

( To the Merci Train )

Having managed to tick off the two significant things on our to-do list today, we left Bismarck for tonight's hotel and our final night on the road before we get to Winnipeg.

( Turbines in Tow )

We reached the Holiday Inn Express in Jamestown ND shortly after 8 PM. After getting moved in, I discovered that my initial expectation of another Pizza Hut delivery was out of whack: there used to be a Pizza Hut in this city, but it had closed years ago. By the time we realized this, many other local places we might have tried had already closed at 9 PM. Weighing our options, Lisa and I decided to rush off to a local grocery store. We got there about 9:30, with the store closing at 10 PM. Fortunately, we had a good idea what we wanted. We got milk, juice, frozen meals to cook in the room's microwave oven, cold cuts, and, rather to our surprise, a loaf of Dave's Killer Bread; we did not expect to see Dave's bread this far east.

Returning to the hotel, we prepared our dinner and relaxed over another episode of Emergency!.

We had planned to do some laundry tonight, but we got an unwelcome surprise: unlike nearly every other Holiday Inn Express in the USA in which we've stayed, this one does not have a guest laundry. Had we known that, we would probably have tried to do laundry last night and this morning, which would have been pretty easy, because the laundry room at Glendive was diagonally opposite our hotel room and had three or four machines. Fortunately, the Delta Hotel Winnipeg appears to have a guest self-service laundry facility, so maybe we'll get a chance to do laundry sometime in the next few days during NASFiC and before we leave for Churchill two days after the convention.

Tomorrow we push on to Winnipeg, and move-in begins for Pemmi-Con.

When Lisa and I were in Washington DC for DisCon, we managed to get one day at the Smithsonian's Transportation Museum, and there we were able to see and photograph John Bull, the oldest operable steam locomotive in the world. (It last steamed in 1981, aged 150 years old.) This month's episode talks about this locomotive.



For some reason, this video ended up with about ten extra minutes of blank video followed by an extra copy of of the credits. I'm loathe to fix it and re-upload it, though, because it would reset the view counter.

Also (and I don't think this has anything to do with the glitch), this is the first episode that I uploaded in advance. I uploaded it a couple of days ago with it set to go live today on the first of the month. This is important for next month's episode, because we'll be on the road. On August 1, we expect to be in Winnipeg, having just come back from Churchill the previous evening, and about to hit the road westbound. I'd rather not have to worry about whether the hotel wi-fi has enough bandwidth to let me upload the episode. If all goes as planned, I should have that episode edited (we've already shot the talk-to-camera piece) before we leave for Winnipeg, so I can upload it from home and set it to release on August 1.

One of the things we bought on our previous trip to Sacramento was wrong and we needed to return it, but checking the weather showed the possibility of snow from Friday evening through Saturday evening, so an two-night stay was in order, with us leaving Friday and returning Sunday to avoid the snowfall. I then discovered that the "Anniversary Free Night" coupon I have annually from IHG, which gives me one free night in any IHG property that costs 40K or fewer IHG points, was going to expire on Monday, so I booked one room with the free-night coupon and reserved another night on an ordinary reservation, for which the prepaid rate was a good deal. We made our plans to leave around mid-day on Friday, as I'd worked extra hours earlier in the week to free up some time that day. Besides our retail errand, we planned to go visit the California State Railroad Museum on Saturday, as we've not been there for years.

( Then Lisa Twisted Her Ankle )

We left home around Noon, stopped in Reno to collect the rental wheelchair, and headed west on I-80. It was a nice day to travel. I think people wanting to go skiing should have been flocking to the slopes.

( Icy Waterfall at Donner Summit )

We made good time, even with another stop at the Starbucks in Colfax. I'm glad of the delay at Colfax, because without it we wouldn't have been able to snag a shot of a very rare piece of railroad equipment.

( Here Come the Rotaries! )

After our chance encounter with the rotaries, we entered the outskirts of Sacramento, where we headed to Ham Radio Outlet, which was also Lisa's first use of the wheelchair other than when we confirmed if fit her after collecting it in Reno. The antenna Lisa bought from them when we were there a few weeks ago turned out to be Chinese-made (it wasn't properly labeled on the package and she didn't discover this until she opened it when we got home) and she wanted to return it. The HRO folks were very good about doing the return. She chatted with them and one of them pointed out a different antenna that might work. Lisa had a look and agreed, and we ended up buying antennas costing more than the one that we returned.

The Holiday Inn Express on Auburn Blvd. is a place we had stayed several times when I was visiting my late sister at the nursing home. I also later ended up staying in the Crowne Plaza closer to the nursing home, but that Crowne Plaza changed into a Wyndham just after we stayed there on our way to catch the train to DisCon III, and the desk clerk at the Holiday Inn Express told me he had heard it was going to close and be converted into apartments.

When we checked in, we made it clear that although Lisa is in a wheelchair, she did not want a handicapped accessible room, because she wanted a room with a bathtub, not a roll-in shower. My Diamond status didn't get me a room upgrade, but the king room we have is acceptable, and Lisa is able to maneuver around the room in the wheelchair. We have her crutches as well, and she can slowly hobble around after a fashion. After getting moved into the room, we went to a nearby Raley's grocery store and bought food and other supplies for this stay. We didn't mind over-buying non-perishable things because anything we don't use while here we can just take home with us.

Lisa got a nice long hot bath, which she said made her foot feel better. We'll go to the museum tomorrow and spend tomorrow night here in Sacramento. The only complication is that because we're here on a back-to-back reservation, I'll have to check out and then check back in; however, the front desk clerk said that the two reservations are for the same room, so we won't have to move rooms.

This morning, while I was in my bathrobe in the kitchen setting up a cup of coffee to brew, I heard an unusual rumbling from the general direction of the railroad. Looking out the kitchen window, at first I though the rail yard was on fire! However, I quickly realized that it was a rail-grinding train rumbling through slowly east resurfacing the rails. I ran to get my phone and even went out onto the front porch in my bathrobe and slippers (brr!), but I couldn't get my phone unlocked and into video mode fast enough to record the passing sparklers before they were hidden behind the cars spotted in the rail yard. In the pre-dawn twilight, it would have looked great on video.

A bit later that morning, I did get footage of the rail grinder, but it was much less spectacular.

( Heading for the Barn )

Railroads grind the rails periodically to resurface them and remove minor imperfections, allowing trains to run more smoothly. The rail grinding train includes water cars spraying down the tracks so they don't set things on fire.

During our western journey on the California Zephyr, we of course saw other trains. Some of them were once common but are now fading away, including the one I photographed as we passed through Sparks Yard. (We made a brief stop there as well, dropping off railroad crew members who were deadheading from Winnemucca to Sparks.)

( Patching Things Up )

I have spotted this artifact of a memory of a thirty-year-old railroad merger operating on Union Pacific local jobs operating through Fernley out of Sparks. How long it will be here, I don't know.

Yesterday stayed cloudy all day and (relatively) cool. I decided to tackle digging up the growth in the field next to the house, which, once it dries out, is a hazard.

( Creating Defensible Space )

I was masked up while doing yard work, mostly against dust and pollen, but also from wildfire smoke that rolled back in. However, late in the evening, light winds cleared some of it out and cooled things off again. Lisa and I sat on the porch under the awning enjoying cooler air and being able to look at things more than a couple of meters away. A few drops of rain started to fall. As more rain fell, the air cleared some more and we mostly stayed dry, but even where we were getting rain falling on us, it seemed to dry quickly, which shows how dry the air is here.

Rain doesn't usually last very long around here, but this storm had some bite to it. There was also quite of bit of lightning in it, mostly cloud-to-cloud, and I hope that anything that hit the ground either didn't cause fires, or left ones that were extinguished by the rapidly increasing rain. After maybe 30 minutes, my phone blew up with a Flash Flood Warning from the National Weather Service. Water started to flow into the field where I had been cleaning brush earlier in the day. I couldn't get pictures, as it was too dark.

We pulled our chairs closer to the wall under the small awning, but after a while the wind also picked up and we had to head inside. Before we did so, we saw several trains passing through Fernley, all moving slowly. That was because Union Pacific had declared condition "FF" (Flash Flood) for the area, so all trains had to move at reduced speed, looking for washouts on the many small culverts along this stretch of track. We also heard a local maintainer in his hi-rail vehicle, when he pulled in behind the train stopped on the main in order to make room for a westbound train creeping from Hazen to Fernley to pass.

( Drama on the Railroad )

Today, the clouds cleared (too bad; it was nice and cool), the smoke started leaking back into town, and the water had soaked into the thirsty lakebed on which Fernley sits.

( After the Storm )

All in all, we're glad that we did not have to be out in that weather last night (although we would have liked having an enclosed porch from which we could have watched the rain) and that our property is not subject to flooding other than oversize puddles, thanks to the local lay of the land.

I got away from Fernley about Noon today, which made me feel less bad about making a lot of stops along the way. Although I hadn't brought my real camera, I took these photos from the camera phone. Those of you who have never been through this portion of the Sierra Nevada, particularly when the weather it as good as it was today, don't know what you're missing in the way of scenery.

( Photos follow: Nothing really fancy; just a selection of what you get stopping along Interstate 80 in late spring )

After taking these photos, I continued west, making my customary stop at Colfax (although not at Starbucks this time; it was too hot for coffee so I got water and soda from the grocery store there) and pushed on back to San Jose, arriving around 8 PM.

These long drives are hard, but it helps when so much of the scenery is as nice as this.

As those of you following me for a long time may know, back in 2007 after the Yokohama Worldcon, Lisa and I spent two weeks traveling around Japan, and among the things we did was the Seikan Tunnel Tour. This is one of the things I would have included in a "Ten Things I've Done That You Probably Haven't" meme had I decided to try and create one. (travelswithkuma would have to have been an exception, of course.) While looking this up, I find that the Tappi-Kaitei Station (World's Deepest) is slated to close, along with the museum, when the Hokkaidō Shinkansen is completed in 2015. So if you have a hankering to see this unique piece of railroad tunnel construction — probably the last big tunnel to ever be constructed by the traditional shield-tunneling method — you have only a few years left to make the trip.

Hint: If you want to do this trip, stay in Aomori the night before and take your bags with you to continue on to Hakodate or Sapporo. The only trains that stop here are northbound (Aomori to Hakodate), so if you intend to go back to Aomori or points south, you have to ride north and then back the other way. It's more efficient to just keep going northward, and had we realized this on our trip, I think we would have gone on to Sapporo to spend the night there and have at least part of a day there rather than the mere hour we had changing trains. Tappi-Kaitei station's only active purpose is as a gateway to the tunnel tour (it's also an emergency-evacuation station for the tunnel), and there are luggage cages where you can store your stuff after you arrive so you don't have to lug it around with you on the tour.