Donner Pass, California - Sunday, 29 July 2018, 3pm

From where we stood looking down at Donner Lake at up at "China Wall" (previous blog) it was only a short scramble to the old rail bed of the Trancontinental Railroad (Wikipedia link). It's the old rail bed because it's the original rail route, part of the First Transcontinental Railroad built ( Read more... )

Donner Pass, California - Sunday, 29 July 2018, 2pm

A funny thing happened on the way through the Donner Pass today. ...No, I'm not talking about the doomed Donner Party (Wikipedia link) who resorted to cannibalism after becoming stuck up here in 1846. Though it is the selfsame pass. What happened to us today was an enjoyable dollop of serendipity ( Read more... )

Tahoe City, CA - Sat, 23 Jun 2018, 11:30am.

I've noted before that one of the main positives of Friday Night Halfway is that we can sleep in a bit in the morning instead of getting up at 6am and rushing out of the house for a 4-5 hour drive. Thus we slept in 'til a more civilized hour of about 7:30 today and took it easy rather than rushing. For ( Read more... )

We rolled out of bed this morning later than intended, an unwanted yet predictable consequence of jet lag from having traveling 3 timezones to the east yesterday. Fortunately our first two destinations were less than 10 miles away. We didn't have far to go ( Read more... )

Sacramento Travelog #3
Saturday, 9 April 2016. 4pm.

This afternoon we visited the California State Railroad Museum (wikipedia page) in Sacramento. Like other destinations in Old Town it was an easy walk underneath busy Interstate 5 to reach from our hotel. Here are Five Things from our visit:

1. Paging Sheldon Cooper?I remember from when I was a ( Read more... )

After visiting several waterfalls on Saturday (see previous blogs) we stayed the night at a hotel in Oroville, CA. I know what you're thinking. Oro-where? Oroville. The name is a mashup of Spanish and French words meaning "City of Gold". I don't know why cities in California got named this way. Settlers here at least did better than those in ( Read more... )

Shanghai Trip Journal #10
PVG Airport, Shanghai, China - 1pm Sun 7/26/09

One of items on my short-list of sightseeing attractions in Shanghai was the airport express train. Why? Because it's no ordinary train, it's the only high-speed MagLev train in the world.

Magnetic Levitation (MagLev) technology uses powerful magnets to keep the train suspended ( Read more... )