Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Today was going to be a full day of tourism at a place that many of our friends said we should make the extra effort to visit: the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center - National Air and Space Museum near Dulles Airport.

( A Full and Fulfilling Day )

I had to take a break between galleries, fetch my water bottle and a food bar from my tote bag in the locker, and go outside and drink and eat them when my energy began to flag. The museum currently has no food service. Then it was back inside to look at the space wing, and more amazing things.

( Up Close With Discovery )

I really enjoyed all of this museum that we saw, but on top of the accumulated fatigue of the past week, spending hours standing on the hard concrete floors started taking a toll on us, and we needed to start working our way back to base one last time.

The bus was waiting at the stop in front of the museum when we came out. When we got back to Wiehle-Reston East, we briefly stopped at the CVS there, but they were also out of COVID tests. To our annoyance, the time spent on that wild-goose chase meant that we missed the train by less than 30 seconds and had to wait almost a half hour for the next one. And it was getting windy and cold. Lisa suggested that we just stand inside one of the elevators for a while, as nobody was using them. At least it was out of the wind.

Given that cases have been reported at DisCon III — now including at least one person who was in the same room as me for a while during the convention — I really want some more of the home COVID tests. I guess we should have bought more than just two sets when we were in Chicago last week. I hope the Walgreen's near our hotel in Chicago will still have more kits when we get there on Thursday.

This was an eight-hour day of tourism: four hours traveling and four hours looking at the incredible displays. I could easily go back here several times and not exhaust its possibilities. I do not know if I'll ever get another chance to do so, but if I do, I hope can make it here once again.

On our way back to the hotel, we ordered take-out dinner from the Indian restaurant nearest the hotel, took our things back to the hotel, and by the time I walked back to the restaurant, our dinner was ready for me to carry to our room for our last dinner here.

We leave tomorrow for Chicago on the Capitol Limited (the other DC-to-Chicago route; we came east on the Cardinal). That train leaves at 4 PM. The Omni was able to give us a 2 PM check-out, which is terrific. We can get some extra sleep, then spend the rest of the morning packing, and we'll need that time because we've really spread out into this room. The trip to Chicago is relatively short — too short, actually, as I doubt our hotel will let us check in at 9 AM when we arrive, but we'll see what we can do when we get there.

The Omni was eerily quiet tonight. I saw one other fan on her way out with her luggage. I don't know if we're the last people leaving, but it's a very different place tonight than it was a few days ago.

Today is the only day before DisCon III that we had available for doing DC-area tourism. We decided to go to the Smithsonian Museum of American History mainly to see the Transportation Wing. We would have preferred to sleep in longer, but it seemed like a waste, especially with the weather so nice: clear but not cold, running roughly what it was in Fernley before we left.

( Train to the Train (and Boat, and Car, and Bus...) )

We spent four hours in just this one wing of the museum and realized that we didn't have enough energy for anything else. We enjoyed the train travel, but even with sleeping-car travel, we're more worn than we originally thought, so we had to head back to the hotel early.

( Return to the Shoreham )

One of Lisa's feet was paining her, and we limped back to the hotel, where she made lunch out of supplies that we've been accumulating on the trip. I bought a burrito from the Chipotle near the hotel. After that, Lisa stayed with the room while I first went to the front desk and asked them to both fix our house phone and replace the low battery on the room safe, and if possible to bring us some extra cups, coffee, and tea, as we don't need our room serviced. I then delivered the Winnipeg bid supplies that I transported from Montreal to Fernley to Los Angeles and then across the country by train to the Winnipeg suite for use by the 2023 bid this weekend. I have to admit that I'll be happy to not have to carry that stuff around with me anymore.

When I got back to the room, most of the issues had been resolved, although the hotel couldn't recreate the low-battery warning, so they didn't replace it. That makes me nervous; however, if the lock does fail, they can get it open by a manual override.

I had a bunch of messages to answer in the afternoon, including finding out more about helping Winnipeg validate site selection votes in advance of the convention. The bids and the administering convention have to confirm that every ballot cast in advance is from a registered member before at-convention voting can open, because memberships can't vote more than once. I have administered cases where one person voted, then transferred their membership, and the transferee innocently tried to vote the same membership because they didn't know it had been used.

I have been advised that we can expect on the order of 2,500 advance votes that we will have to validate tomorrow. That may take a while. And another challenge is that those ballots all have to be set so we we, the bidders can't see how the individuals voted. I'm not really looking forward to this. I had to deal with validating thousands of voters' records in an election in which Winnipeg was a party once before, thirty years ago in Chicago. I hope we can do the validation faster than the 12 hours it took us to validate 2,107 ballots back in 1991!

We slept in slightly this morning and took our time getting going, including enjoying a leisurely breakfast in the Doubletree Hotel restaurant with Don and Jill Eastlake and Sally Woerhle. This means we were about an hour behind my planned schedule for this leg of the trip, but it wasn't that big a deal as we had no appointments to keep. The minvan started right up, and there were no more warning lights or hassles other than it continues to be more difficult to start after it has gotten warm. On this leg of the trip we did not have to resort to starter fluid to restart it after a stop, but this is going to continue to be a problem until I can get my mechanic to correct the underlying problems with the engine adjustment.

Because we weren't in a huge hurry today, we had the freedom to make a few diversions from the main route, including one that led to a fantastic view of the Columbia River Gorge from on high.

( Rowena Crest )

Earlier in the day, during a stint where Lisa took the wheel along US-395 paralleling the BNSF railroad, I got some railfan photography.

( Grainger Coming Through )

I have started a new Pacific Northwest album in my Flickr account into which I put all of today's photos.

We arrived in Portland around 6:30 PM, and rather than fight rush-hour traffic, we went straight to on of our favorite places to eat in Portland, the Hawthorne Fish House, where we restrained ourselves from ordering the largest platters of fish and only ordered the second-largest. By the time we were done with dinner, traffic had subsided sufficiently to make the trip on to the Holiday Inn in Gladstone a much easier trip.

Tomorrow morning, we'll skip the included breakfast at the HIX and have breakfast at Bob's Red Mill restaurant, another of our favorite Portland places.