Natterings From Nepantla

For anyone planning to attend this year's Worldcon but nervous about the effect that indiscriminate firings at the FAA may have on US airports, I wish to point out that Amtrak runs 2 trains and 4 buses per day between Seattle and Vancouver, BC.

For next year, there's no cross-border rail service, but Greyhound/FlixBus does have a route that will take you between Anaheim and Tijuana, and I'm sure there are additional bus options.

Okay, technically the CAT bus, run by Columbia Area Transit. But their domain is

While perusing the maps at UrbanRail.Net, I thought of a fun (to me) exercise: If you were going to travel around North America by rail only, how many of those city rail systems would you be able to get to? ("North America" here means "US and Canada", since Mexico has only just started rebuilding its passenger rail system.)

The connection between long-distance and local rail wouldn't have to be in the same building, but it would need to be reasonably close, since the long-distance traveller will probably have non-negligible luggage.

Cities that didn't make the cut were a mix of too far to walk, no long-distance rail service at all, and systems that haven't even started getting built yet.

And the list is:

• Baltimore
• Boston
• Buffalo
• Chicago
• Cleveland
• Dallas
• Denver
• Detroit
• Kansas City
• Los Angeles
• Memphis
• Miami (not from its Amtrak station, but via SunRail, which has stops in common with Amtrak)
• Milwaukee
• Minneapolis
• Montreal
• Newark
• New Orleans
• New York City
• Norfolk
• Oklahoma City
• Ottawa
• Philadelphia
• Pittsburgh
• Portland, OR
• Salt Lake City
• San Diego
• San Francisco (not served by Amtrak trains, but can be reached via Caltrain from San Jose)
• Santa Ana (starting in 2025)
• San Jose
• Sacramento
• St. Louis
• Seattle
• Tacoma
• Tucson
• Toronto
• Vancouver, BC
• Washington, DC

Australia Day: If you are not Australian, have you ever been to Australia? How much do you know about Australia? If you went to school somewhere other than Australia, how much were you taught about Australia in school?

I've never been to Australia. There were plans for a household trip to New Zealand for the 2020 Worldcon until stuff happened, but that's as close as I've ever had a chance to get. (Similarly, I've been to the UK but not continental Europe, and Japan but not mainland Asia. Not sure what this says about me.)

I know some random facts about Australia, like that the world's longest stretch of straight railway runs across something called the Nullarbor Plain. In school I was taught the same basics that every child in the US learns about Australia, which is that it's a continent and contains kangaroos.

After illness, an emergency, the SO being unable to make it, and other business failed to stop me travelling, what finally got me was a taxi not showing up.

( Detailed travel woes )

So a matter of a few minutes turned into a 24-hour delay. I reported the situation to the Westercon mailing list, changed my bus reservation, and started looking at hotels near the Reno airport. Not long after, I heard from the con chair, who was putting the word out to other staff members who might be passing through Reno to see if any of them might be able to pick me up on the way.

That did not pan out, and I had figured it probably wouldn't, so I used part of my unexpected time at the airport to convert the gaming signup sheets into a format that could be printed from any modern computer, figuring I'd probably be asking someone already at the con to print them out for me. Once in Reno and at my hotel, no last-minute chance encounter with someone who happened to be travelling to Westercon from the Reno airport having occurred, I sent them to the head of programming, along with a separate note about them in case the e-mail with attachments got caught in a spam filter. Then a couple hours later I realized that what I really should do was send them to the staff mailing list, which would allow me to see whether they got though, plus it would let them get to whoever was still able to check their e-mail, which busy people like the head of programming might not be. Not my most organized moment, there.

Anyway, the signup sheets did get printed and I'm now at the Reno airport again, able to catch the bus and get to Tonopah this evening. The net effect is that there's no game library at the con today, and the Friday afternoon KeyForge session had to be cancelled. There is at least no effect on the two games being run by one of the guests of honor, since the signup sheets are in place and his first session isn't until Saturday afternoon. So it could be worse, but I have still caused a program item to be cancelled, and made extra work for multiple people, and I feel like I've let the whole convention down.

So, stuff happens, but the next reasonable question is what do I do to make sure this doesn't happen the next time I'm on a con staff? I have managed the early-morning hustle down to the bus stop before, but travelling with enough luggage for a full convention, probably the better solution is to order the taxi an hour earlier from now on.

Alaska Airlines's Web site is currently proclaiming it to be The Official Airline of Rescheduled Events.

My map and instruction book for the 2021 St. Valentine's Day Massacre arrived yesterday. What is that, you ask, because there's no point in me making this post if you don't?

It's a map rally. Every contestant gets the latest Rand McNally road atlas for North America (yes, they do still make physical ones) and a list of instructions to plot out a course on the map. Questions are asked periodically about whether you "see" (go within 1/4" of) certain things to check if you're following the course correctly. Along the way you meet an assortment of odd characters and learn an interesting bit or two of local trivia.

I first discovered this sometime in my teens, tried it a few times alone and with family members, and then only have tried it a couple times since moving out. It's one more thing I never quite found time for, which means it's one more thing I have more time for now that I have no commute. Plus, vicarious travel is just the thing I need right now.

If this sounds at all interesting, here's the official page. There is no way to sign up electronically; you have to send a physical check to the address at the bottom of the page. The deadline to enter is Valentine's Day, and the deadline for sending your answers in is March 8.

I get the impression from reading a couple of recent articles about it that its lack of embrace of the Internet is due to an expectation that it is on its way out anyway. I have a feeling that it may be gaining attendance this year, though.

Two articles on a common theme:

1. A piece headlined "WalletHub says, incorrectly, that Portland is the 8th best place to celebrate Christmas this year" would normally be a snapback about Portland being ranked so low. Instead:

According to a new study from WalletHub, Portland is the eighth-best place to celebrate Christmas in 2020.

WalletHub is, sadly, quite wrong about this.

There is only one best place to celebrate Christmas this year and that is your house, whether it is in Portland, Medford or Bangor, Maine.

2. The Washington Post invokes P. G. Wodehouse, which is always a good way to start, to examine the joys of not going to the mall, not meeting with family, and not travelling in general, such as:

First I won’t leave my warm house, roommate and cat to drive onto central Florida’s main artery, Interstate 4, a ride that has provided me with more scares and longer wait times than anything at Disney or Universal. As night falls and it starts to rain, I won’t have to stop watching “The Great British Baking Show” to white-knuckle it for 50 miles between two semis on the “Florida ice,” a dangerous soup of grease and water that makes the highway good and slippery when showers start. I’ll enjoy not being so tense that I clench my muscles until I become the rare case of a living person going into rigor mortis.

Day 13: ( Read more... )

Day 14: ( Read more... )

Next time: Homeward bound

Staying off-site turned out not to be the best decision. It was cheaper, we were right next to Disney World, and within a block of bus service into it, with multiple restaurants and a grocery store within a couple blocks, and we decided to drive in on a couple days. But. Orlando in mid-September is the sort of hot that saps all your energy, and the extra hop of the bus plus internal Disney transportation added noticeable time when we just wanted to get back to the hotel and rest. Next time, we definitely need to go when it's cooler, and stay on-site, and just pay the extra fee if we happen to have a vehicle with us (although cooler times of year in Orlando mean probably too wintry to be driving on parts of our cross-country route, so we probably won't).

But we did get to all four parks, and ride lots of rides and all the monorails, and try interesting snacks, and so there was a lot of fun. Some highlights I can recall:

• Favorite ride that Disneyland doesn't have: Mickey's PhilharMagic, where Donald Duck gets magically transported into various big Disney movie musical numbers. Extra props to whichever Imagineer looked at the scene in The Little Mermaid where Ariel sings wistfully about joining the human world and said, "What this really needs is Donald Duck getting electrocuted."
• Animal Kingdom has at times tried to play down its zoo aspects, at one point running a promotion called Nahtazu (say it out loud). Look, it's a zoo. It's the most amazing zoo I've ever visited, and it should be proud of that fact.
• Epcot is too freaking huge. I mean, you could easily spend two or three days just working your way around World Showcase. This is why I want to spend a week at WDW if I get the chance to go back.
• Sign that I have become an old person: The part of Expedition Everest where you get yanked backwards into the darkness failed to move me, so to speak. Take away enough visual and vestibular cues and I don't have enough information to be scared. I was amused by the sight at the point where the train stops as the track switches behind it, though. Apparently the backwards acceleration is sharp enough to dislodge loose hair scrunchies, which can be seen dotting the walls there. I dubbed it the Valley of Lost Ponytails.
• Best queue entertainment: Seven Dwarves Mine Train, which has multiple games on great big touch screens to keep you and, more importantly, all the small children around you from getting bored. The actual ride is kind of a letdown after that.
• We mostly stayed away from rides that are also at Disneyland, but we did check out the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean. The Mansion in WDW has an extra room and its own queue games, but Pirates is barely half the ride you get in Anaheim. OTOH, it does have a much better-themed exterior, where you wind in and out of something resembling an old Spanish fort, as opposed to the nieghborhood-pool feeling of the Disneyland queue.
• Rides which no longer exist at Disneyland were fair game. WDW still has a PeopleMover and I still hate whoever had it removed from Disneyland.
• Best appeal to my inner geek: The Land, which is half cheesy out-of-date paean to farmers, but half real live research facility.
• Favorite oddity: Ellen's Energy Adventure, a ride which took a whopping 45 minutes. First there's a pre-show film, then suddenly the screen is moving out of the way and the auditorium splits up and you realize it's actually three huge ride vehicles. You travel through some animatronic entertainment, then everything forms back up and you see a second film, then you get animatronic dinosaurs, which I'm guessing were the original selling point of this ride. Then one more short film. A strange but entertaining experience. I'm sorry to hear it was closed soon after we visited, and I'm glad I got the chance to experience it.
• The Swan and Dolphin, WDW's conference hotel, would be a great place for a Smofcon. I have now visited the miniature golf course which a short walk from it, and I believe the substantial number of mini-golf fans in SMOFdom would find it worthwhile.

Some aspects of our timing worked out well. Hitting the lull between Labor Day and the Epcot Food & Wine Festival, crowds were fairly light for most of the visit. I took a nervous look at the National Hurricane Center's forecast page every evening and morning as we were heading toward Orlando, but we lucked out with a few dry days.

The SO got a Haunted Mansion top hat to remember the experience by, and I got a T-shirt with Donald Duck on it. We made our last night in Orlando an early one so as to be rested to get back on the road the next day, although we would have had to anyway because that was the evening that a storm with a serious amount of rain hit Florida.

Next time: Cars and geology again