10:03 am: Westercon Thursday
We're at Westercon. We drove down, taking two days and somewhat unconventional route avoiding freeways. From the Bay Area, out CA 120 to Yosimite and over Tioga Pass, stopping at Tuolumne Meadows for a picnic lunch. Pretty, of course, but the bugs were biting and the altitude too high to do much walking around without spending a night acclimating. Then continued CA 120 around south of Mono Lake, stopping at a cute historical display at the other end of the Bodie Railway (built to bring timber to Bodie, now a famous ghost town, which we visited earlier this year.) East to US 6 to Tonopah, with a diversion to visit another ghost town, Candelaria. (Metallic City, the "sin" suburb of Candeleria, was not recognizable.)
Stayed overnight in Tonopah in a entirely adequate Best Western, ate at what was supposed to be the best restaurant in town, a not-very-good Mexican. Tonopah does look like it's headed for ghost town status pretty quickly, and was generally uncharming. I'd recommend Austin if you're looking for a nice out-of-the-way Nevada town. Left Tonopah bright-and-early taking US 95 south through Las Vegas; generally pretty country but empty, empty; after LV took US 93 across Hoover Dam.
Lots of construction around the dam, building a new bridge across the Colorado just south of the dam. The bridge is a good idea; it's really kind of silly to route all the traffic across the dam, but I'm glad I got to do it before the road is rerouted. Given the amount of pedestrian traffic touring the dam, I expect they'll stop allowing vehicle traffic across the top.
Another long, lonely run on route 93 to Kingman, surprisingly running through several thunderstorms along the way. Stopped in Kingman for a much better Mexican lunch at El Palacios in downtown Kingman, and
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lin_mcallister even found a knitting/spinning shop a few doors down and bought a new "Navajo" style floor spindle, in hopes Jirel is calming down from kittenhood enough to make spinning possible in the house again. So Kingman was a much more pleasant stop than Tonopah.
Left Kingman on I-40, this being the one spot we couldn't avoid freeways, but shortly turned southeast on US 93 again, a surprisingly good road without much traffic; much more of it was divided 4-lane highway than shown on our reasonably-recent AAA map. 93 ended at US 60 in the extremely boring town of Wickenburg; then US 60 into the Phoenix freeway system Spent more time on 60 than we should have, driving through SURPRISE! and Sun City when we should have taken 303 south to 10. However 303 didn't exist when I first learned my way around the Phoenix freeways so I didn't think of it.
Arrived a the hotel and had even more trouble parking than we had when World Fantasy was in the same hotel; there were many spots closed off for construction, etc. Finally parked and unloaded, finding out at hotel registration that valet parking was included; that will make it easier if we decide to move the truck again.
About all we had the energy for was having a beer and finding dinner. We were sorely disappointed that of the three restaurants and pubs we remembered fondly from World Fantasy, all three were out of business. Restaurants have a short half-life, but three for three was worse than I expected. We ended up walking in to Caffe Boa, an Italian "bistro/wine bar" just across Mill from the west exit of the hotel. Wasn't expecting much, but we were extremely pleased. There were lots of high-priced bottles on the wine list, but picking through the specials yielded an interesting sounding Austrian Pinot Noir at a reasonable price, which turned out to be light and fruity, very nice for the hot steamy weather. I had a cold-cut plate with sopressata, brasaole, and cotto; the sopressata was equivalent to what I'm used to in the Bay Area, but the brasaole (which is basically beef cured like ham) was as good as I had in Florence and the cotto was the best I remember. Then I had ravioli stuffed with artichoke and cheese, served with two sauces, a red and a white. The ravioli were great, obviously fresh pasta and light-but-creamy stuffing. The white sauce was very good but not outstanding, but the red sauce contained a secret ingredient: lots of very good olive oil. Lin had an arugula salad and mushroom risotto, both of which she liked; the risotto was much lighter than what we had in Milan, and contained lots of morels which is always going to please Lin.
After dinner, Lin was too tired to do much; I managed to make it to the San Jose party for an hour or so but was out of energy by 10:30 or so.
Phoenix is apparently experiencing an early season version of the Arizona "monsoon"; it's not only terribly hot as one expect of Phoenix in July, it's humid. Even the locals are complaining.
nostalgic
sleepy
scared
pleased