tiredGetting my van from the mechanic's shop was trivial: by arrangement, he left the keys in the glove compartment and locked them in, and I walked over from Fremont Amtrak and let myself in with the spare set. Because the fix was so trivially easy, he didn't even charge me. He's a good mechanic. This is why I keep coming back to him even when it's not always convenient to do so.
We zoomed past Fernley House this morning, and even though we were set up to photograph and video-record the pass, we actually missed a good shot of our own house because when you're going 70 MPH, it's not always easy to get your timing right. But the house looked to be in one piece, and besides, we reckon that the Sheriff's Department patrols for which we signed up would have called us had there been anything amiss.
When we were approaching Chicago last week and it looked like we might not get fed, Lisa bought a couple of microwave pasta meals from the cafe car but didn't have them heated up, as we waited on developments. As it happened, they did feed us on the 9-hour-late train, and we ended up keeping the meals with us all the way through Detcon and back on the return trip. This afternoon, knowing that it would be quite a while between lunch in the dining car and when we'd get to the hotel in Fremont, Lisa produced the two meals and asked the cafe car attendant if he'd heat them up for us. Normally they can't prepare "outside" food, but he recognized these as things they have sold and believed Lisa's story (particularly because it was too weird to have been made up) and he heated the dinners for us as the train left Sacramento. So that pair of microwave meals first put on the California Zephyr at Oakland traveled all the way to Chicago, then Detroit, then back to California before finally being consumed around Davis, California.
I've more about which I could write and a lot more photos and videos to post than what actually made it online, but I'm exhausted and while I don't have to go to work tomorrow, I can't sleep all day (particularly if I want the included breakfast), so it's time to go to bed and see if I can sleep in a bed that isn't moving.
