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 ( Read more... )

If you'd like to know a bit more about the trip from Winnipeg to Churchill that Lisa and I and four others with whom we traveled was like, YouTuber Kuga's Travel made the same trip (albeit only one way, Winnipeg-Churchill) as we did. In fact, based on the date he traveled, he rode the same train north as we did south, as we arrived the evening ( Read more... )

I have a lot of pictures from the Churchill-to-Winnipeg return train trip, but I haven't had time to caption them, which means they're useless. If you follow me on Mastodon, you will have seen some of them when I had a little bit of bandwidth on the train trip ( Read more... )

We arrived in Churchill, Manitoba this morning at 8 AM, an hour early, in part due to the fact that due to a derailment on the branch to Thompson, Manitoba, we did not go to Thompson at all. Indeed, because the back-and-forth on the Thompson Subdivision, we actually stopped for around eight hours at The Pas, not because of any blockage on the line ( Read more... )

As I write this, we're packing up our hotel room in the Delta and fretting over (1) Leaving behind things we probably should have kept and (2) Finding enough space for everything we have kept with us. I'm sure we will manage somehow ( Read more... )

While the rest of the country has suffered cold weather for the past few weeks, it has been (relatively) mild here in Fernley, but that will change for the next few days, as a series of storms is coming through. This morning, we got about 1 cm accumulation, and the timing was right with me sweeping snow off the porch as Amtrak came through.

( Snowtime for Amtrak )

Even though it's still six months until Worldcon, I'm going through fits trying to work out our train travel plans. If I'd had about 2,000 more Amtrak points a month ago than I currently do, I would have booked the trip already, but I needed to wait for the next cycle on my Amtrak credit card to go through and deposit more points into the Amtrak ( Read more... )

Yesterday's travels went at least as well as could be expected. Even the fact that the California Zephyr was late into Reno was not that big a deal, for while it meant I couldn't get breakfast on the train (service ends 9 AM; the train basically needs to be right on time if you're going to get boarded and your ticket checked with enough time to get ( Read more... )

Lisa has been sleeping days and up nights this past week (in part as a reaction to the hot weather), so at the end of her day and the beginning of mine, she took me in to Reno to catch the train to the Bay Area, where I'll be working for the next two weeks.

( Train Travelogue )

The special Trains Issue of The Drink Tank is out, including my story, "The Day I (Almost) Wrecked a Train."

A couple things that have come up since I submitted the story:

• There's a word missing in the last paragraph of the second column of page 19. It should read, "We didn't have to move the tram very far...." That one is my fault, not Chris'.
• ( Read more... )