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Tahoe
I figured I’d better start planning how or if I should make the drive to Salt Lake and Denver the next two days since the weather forecast was for a lot of snow. I stopped into an auto and tire store and got an education about snow tires and chains, as well as the best route out to Reno (answer: Rt 50 to Incline Village, then over Spooner pass to Carson City, on to Reno). I figured I’d make up my mind tomorrow after checking out the bus schedule (as an alternative to driving) and the weather. I checked into the Big Pines Mountain House a couple of blocks west of 50 and south of state line in an area with a lot of lodges for the skiers. You can see them tramping through town in their ski boots carrying their gear. Some of the runs end nearby. I can’t imagine what it must be like skiing down those very straight, long, narrow, and steep grades towards the town and the lake. I got a taste of that driving down off the pass. At the lodge as I was checking in was a guy with a yellow lab (very friendly!) and he was hoping to get a ticket to see the Moodies. His other fave group: The Temptations. Go figure. I saw him the next morning and he had seen the show. As I was closing in on Tahoe I figured I’d have some time for a massage and booked one at Harrahs for 6. Every time I’ve been here (3 times) for the Moodies, I’ve had a massage, and no matter where it was, even at Tahoe City, they’ve always been top notch. I’m glad I didn’t book it for 6:30 as the show started at 7:30. I picked up my ticket at will call, not knowing until then what seat I got. I’d called in a few hours after they went onsale and was about 25th in line. My first estimate was correct: it was second row. J
Concert I was on the left, 2nd row (though the band stood well back from the edge of the stage), and it was a nice small room. I heard it holds 730 or so. I guess it’s the size and shape of the room that determines how they set up the sound now. In fact, the sound level was down from the usual (which was fine with me). I can remember times when they’d go from an outdoor to small indoor venues and we’d be blasted for nights before they recognized the error. The sound guy comes out and adjusts the sliders on his tablet and all is well. This night, from the left side I didn’t hear much in the way of Paul’s keyboards, but I was in great position to get pix of Norda and Julie. The lighting was reasonably good, both Jays were in a good mood, and I got lots of pix, so I was a happy camper. I noticed for the first time tonight several large floor lights that swivel on cue, and those are probably some of the ones that point colors into the audience. John’s guitar and bass were again in evidence and I am always happy about that. Justin was back to his usual self, with smiles starting during Tuesday afternoon and more, all the way through. But his voice was as rocky as I’ve ever heard it and was wiping his nose. It has been cracking a couple of times per concert this tour, but this time, there was one crack during Nights that made the audience gasp. He did the ending in three careful breaths and the final, usually lengthy, “wail” was very short. Speaking of breath, Graeme was sucking oxygen from a tank from at least TA on. (Recall that Tahoe is over a mile above sea level.) But his dance was every bit as funky as usual. He left out the bit about his lap being available at the bar for the ladies, tho… The audience was full of us regulars so that turned on the rest of the crowd. Norda again encouraged everybody to get up for Singer, gesturing with her arms. I guess she does that every night. She’s in darkness at that point. A few of us went up to the stage for Singer, and back again for Question and See-Saw. At the end I gave some envelopes to Julie with pix for the band. In my notes I wished they enjoy the rest of the tour. It turned out to be prophetic. Afterwards, I suggested to one of the venue managers that they get them back for multiple dates… that more people would come from across the country. She was already considering 2 or 3 at a time for future bookings. Hal decided to sell the tambourines online rather than at the concerts. He also said look for the Moodies to return to southern California, move up the coast to Canada, across and down to the Midwest and East. Six weeks starting in July. (This is not confirmed – don’t hold either one of us to this!) Hal wasn’t going to be driving to Denver because of the weather, instead opting to go to Albuquerque directly. This was a chilling reality. I suggested he go down 395 to Lone Pine, where I’d stayed, and then across Death Valley to Vegas then to Albuquerque. I’m probably the only one making this drive other than the roadies and they have more than one driver, no doubt… I checked the Greyhound schedule online and found that the morning bus left Reno at 7:15 am. There’s no way I’d get down the hill, leave the car at the airport and get to that bus on time. The other option would be taking the 7:30 pm bus, but that would be 20 plus hours in a row to Denver, assuming it was relatively ontime. If it was late, I’d miss the concert anyway. Same for the train. That had been my original plan… but checking the train’s ontime performance, I found that it was often a few hours later than the 6:58 pm arrival time, so I’d surely miss the concert to take it. Everything I was hearing was that the Rockies would really get dumped on, making driving very difficult. I also saw the pile up on Interstate 70 west of Denver on the weather channel. Not a comforting thought to sleep on.
Reno I got up around 7 thinking I’d check the weather channel and see if things had gotten any better. TV didn’t work this morning. It was snowing and blowing outside with a few inches on the ground. I checked Nevada DOT online and things were pretty bleak. Chains or snow tires required to get out of Tahoe and for another part of I-80. I remembered that I had made it clear to the people at the Monterey Airport Alamo/National where I got the car, that I was driving it into snowy territory and needed a snow-worthy vehicle, they had assured me that the car they were renting me would drive in snow, and that it had all-wheel drive and all weather tires and that is all I would need. I was still thinking of doing the drive, starting out by going to the auto/tire store and getting outfitted with chains and an emergency roadside kit. The night before I’d been watching the weather channel with its in-depth discussion of how to recover from various types of skids, how to set flares on the road when you’ve gone off it, keeping warm, etc. All this stuff is foreign to a Floridian. Louise, from the place I was staying at (the Big Pines Mountain House), was out wiping snow off of the cars with a brush. She came and did mine (good thing… I was totally unequipped… the rental car had absolutely nothing for this) and I drove it over to the front office to check out. The lady at the front was saying that all exits from Tahoe were chains mandatory (for every vehicle, no matter what kind of tires or wheel drive). In fact one of the other guests, driving a 4 wheel drive with larger back wheels was turned away, so I certainly would have been. Louise had to move my car at one point and had some trouble, saying that the Saturn SUV, made of lightweight composite (good for gas mileage, not so good when you need a heavy vehicle on snow) was not a good choice. That helped decide me on not trying to get to Salt Lake City by evening and to Denver by show time the next day. It was a very hard decision to make. I had little time for error and the morning was already going fast. I’d bought the ticket second-hand for $100 – a pit section ticket, probably the best one I’d gotten for this tour, and I knew that a lot of the regulars would be in Denver. I’m also not typically a quitter. It takes a lot for me to give up on something. But no way of getting accurate road information across 3 states for the upcoming 36 hours and the prospect of possibly having to drive (a) in hazardous conditions and (b) very slowly in bad weather for long periods of time, making the pair of 8.5 hour drives perhaps 10 or 15 hour drives, plus you lose an hour crossing into Utah, and I figured I’d better call it a day. I’ll probably never know if I made the right decision. But if I wanted to catch the train home this day, I’d have to get a move on. So I called Alamo roadside assistance. They said I could not put chains on the vehicle. Hertz had told me the same thing back when I was planning to go to Utah and then again to Yosemite.
At the Reno airport Alamo/National, the guy said I shouldn’t have abandoned the vehicle, and they would have to tow it down the mountain to the airport and charge me the fee for towing, manpower, etc. I lost it. It’s the ultimate in irresponsibility the way they set you up to think you have a snow-worthy vehicle, find you have to have chains, then tell you not to put chains on, to leave the vehicle and then Gotcha! After a long while a manager came out and took the information about what the manager at roadside assistance had told me and where the car was. Problem was, this guy who said I could leave it was not from roadside assistance, so I’m probably in trouble. I asked if they could send someone up on the shuttle for $24 to get the car. Nope. They don’t have personnel to spare. In reality they don’t care and are supposed to hire a third-party tow service. Their first loose estimate was $250. They said it could take five or six hours. I fear the worst. If I am charged you’d better believe I’m going to take this up with at least one, if not three attorneys general, since this is unfair trade practices. The lodge is all set to back me up. The short ride to the Amtrak station, next to Harrahs, was $20 by cab. The train was to leave around 4pm. As soon as I got there, I found out the train was 3 hours late coming from the San Francisco bay area. It was stuck in the Sierra.. By 7 pm they were talking arrival around 9 or 10 and after that they announced that the snowplow sent to clear the rails had derailed along a single track section…. Amtrak gives vouchers for future travel if a train is only 4 hours late, and usually it takes a whole lot longer than just going across California to rack up this kind of delay. As I write this bit, I’m sitting wrapped up in my winter parka in the freezing Reno Amtrak station, having only nipped out briefly for some good food at a nearby sports bar – good burger, fantastic key lime pie dipped in chocolate on a stick. Ate half and saved half of each for later. That’s one of the things I liked about Denver. There was a place downtown where they served legit key lime pie, with Florida Key limes, light yellow, tart and great consistency. This was when I visited for a week in 1993 about the time I became a Moodies fan and first laid eyes on Red Rocks after a weekend of biking in the Rockies. I was pretty much stuck in the train station at Reno because there was no place to store the luggage. A few old-timers from the Midwest did look after my stuff when I made a reconnaissance run walking the largely empty streets of Reno (encountering the occasional group of young males) to the local bus station to see if they were running on time, since the trainman didn’t have the right number. I had feared the worst about the train snowplow getting righted so was thinking I should check to see if the buses were running on time (the last one east did leave on time). But the delay did give me time to start catching up on these chronicles.
Epilogue The train finally left at 3 am, only 11 hours late… At least there was lots of room, considering 170 people got off. I’ll bet they were unhappy. They were stuck behind a Union Pacific dinky snowplow that had derailed in the deep snow at the summit of the Sierra. The way the conductor was telling the story, UP took over southern pacific a few years back and didn’t want to do things the way SP did (stupid macho) so retired the giant, rotary snowplows that were tailor made for heavy, deep, Sierra snows and replaced them with dinky ones that derail. Amtrak is helpless since UP owns the rails and has priority. At least I slept well bundled up in my parka, with Moody Blues fan blanket and biking jacket for the feet (it was pretty cold in the train).
To make matters worse, I got a phone call from the team leader of a Greenways project I’m helping bid for, and they needed paperwork from my files at home pronto. So I was madly trying to reach my friend at home to rifle my 9 file cabinets, and desperately searching for wifi links from the train whenever the train pulled into a town to see if I could get what I needed online. I did consider getting off the train at SLC and going straight to the airport, but I’d called Expedia a couple of days before and was finding few reasonably direct flights and they were all expensive. And I’d heard that NYC was getting 10 inches of snow. Who knows what reality is. But all’s well that ends wSaell. Wouldn’t ya know it… the little village of Helper, Utah was the only one with accessible wifi to help me out of this fix, allowing me to access my woman-owned business status online (did it in the few minutes we stopped there), and my friend found the files in the cabinet I thought it might be in as well. She faxed and I emailed the online links from Denver in the AM. :-D The train continued something like 12-13 hours late through the plains and they gave us all beef stew free for dinner. There was talk that Amtrak would put me up in a hotel once arriving in Chicago since the next train would be the next day and they did indeed put us up at the Hyatt plus $20 as we arrived after 4 am…. As I finalize these notes, the train to NYC is probably going to end up getting me there five hours late (plus the 24 hours having missed the previous day’s train). But they do give you vouchers when the trains are at least 4 hours late and I’ve had time for a once over of all the Moodies pix I took (except those in my pocket from Vegas 3 and Sacramento awaiting recovery). Let’s see, Vegas 1: 23 (I left early for the “Love” show), Vegas 2: 165, Vegas 3: 119 shots not counting those in my pocket, Pasadena: 164, Pechanga1: 180, Pechanga2: 165, Sacramento (in my pocket), Santa Ynez; 90, San Jose: 3, Tahoe: 120. I’ve never totaled pix taken during a tour before! This would be 1029 plus any recovered photos. Then there’s Yosemite: 264, Valley of Fire 123, Zion Canyon 115, Kolub Canyon 115, Red Rock Canyon 82, San Simeon to Big Sur 82, Santa Cruz to San Francisco 79, Point Lobos 152, Mt. Whitney 21, Morro Bay and Cambria 17, San Francisco 47, Pacific Grove and Asilomar sunsets 40, L.A. Arboretum 69, and Death Valley 152 to name some. I wish that the ending of this tour had not been so rough, but that’s one of the reasons I started taking pix of the Moodies to begin with all those (12) years ago. It was to keep the memories fresh and alive.
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