After taking full advantage of the included breakfast at the Holiday Inn Express, Lisa and I (and Kuma Bear) set off for the California State Railroad Museum in Old Sacramento. We got there early enough to get a good parking space in the garage on the ground floor, where it is easier to wrangle Lisa in her wheelchair from the garage to the museum ( Read more... )

I was overdue for lab tests, and my doctor is still in the Bay Area. Palo Alto Medical Foundation is part of Sutter Health. The nearest lab to me that is open on weekends is in Auburn, but if we had to go that far, there were a couple of places in Roseville and Sacramento that we figured we could visit on an out-and-back day trip. Today was the ( Read more... )

Today was my final day in the SMOFCon hotel, Le Centre Sheraton. To recap, I made a mistake in my hotel booking versus my airline reservation, and by the time I figured this out, the COP15 biodiversity summit that should have been in China was moved to Montreal the week after SMOFCon, and no more hotel rooms downtown could be had. (To their credit ( Read more... )

For our final full day in Chicago, we decided to go to the Museum of Science and Industry. It has been many years since we visited there, and we could get there easily by train.

( To the Trains )

Lisa and I do try and combine our love of trains with our SF fandom activity, and that means when possible, we try to visit railway museums on our convention travel when we can do so. Ironically, traveling by train makes it difficult to visit the various rail museums we see along the route; however, this year's Worldcon looks like an opportunity ( Read more... )

The constant bell-clanging of the BNSF locomotive overnight Saturday drove us out of the house.

( Well, we were planning on this trip anyway... )

Today was the nominal climax of our trip and reason for coming out to Layton, and that was to visit the Utah State Railroad Museum, which is housed in Ogden Union Station along with several other museums, displays, exhibits, and event spaces. After breakfast, we made our way up to Ogden over surface streets from Layton on account of medium-heavy ( Read more... )

Working from the hotel room for four hours before heading for Arizona went okay, but Lisa and I got sloppy. We generally are pretty thorough about "lodgecombing" every hotel room, going through the room a final time before we leave to make sure we haven't left something behind. In our zeal to get going today for the longest single day on this trip ( Read more... )

We checked out of the LAX Marriott this morning and after spending a couple of hours sitting at the Westercon 74 Tonopah table, disassembled the displays, moved everything back out to the Astro, and set off for SMOFCon. Including the two memberships that Lisa Deutsch Harrigan sold for us from the adjacent CostumeCon 39 table, we added a total of ( Read more... )

We worked out that we need to catch a 6:45 AM bus pm Tuesday morning from Europa Bus Terminal (across the street from our hotel) to be at Dublin Airport for 8:45 for our 11:45 AM flight to Reykjavik. We've won our bid for a Saga class upgrade for this flight, which means we'll have access to an airport lounge, and thus we should be able to get ( Read more... )