Meetings Over. Now It’s California Here We Come!
Our meetings have been held at the DoubleTree hotel near the center of town and it has been an excellent experience. The rooms are comfortable, the restaurant very good, and the staff exceptional. I needed some pages printed out for a report I had to present to the meeting and called the front desk to ask about access to their business center. “Oh, no need to do that, Mr. Loomis,” said the young man at reception, “just email it to me and I’ll be glad to print it out for you.”
I just checked the TRAIN STATUS link on the NARP web site and was pleased to find that the westbound Zephyr is essentially running on time. That’s good news, because it’s due here at 11:05 p.m. with departure a half hour later. The concern, of course, is that the train could be hours late. Waiting to board on the open platform at 11:00 p.m. is one thing; waiting to board at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. is quite another.
The Zephyr’s run tomorrow, and the scenery it provides, is pretty much equal to what we saw after leaving Denver and passing through all those canyons. We’ll cross a long stretch of Nevada desert, then, as we leave Truckee, California, the train begins the climb up and over the Sierra Nevada mountains by way of Donner Pass. (That’s the Zephyr passing above Donner Lake in the photo above.) The descent into the Sacramento area is quite lovely and, by 3:00 or 3:15 tomorrow afternoon — assuming once again that the train will still be running more or less on time — I should be in my hotel room in Davis, California.
