MODULES:

Trip Notes: Part I
Trip Notes: Part II
Game Notes: Earlier
Game Notes: Further
Finished Journal Entry

[3 May 2000, 11:45 am departure time]

Forestville: What a way to start! Davey Tree is still working on Rio Vista - so I'm having to drive down Champs d'Elysees in this beast. Yow! -- Mile 160, Rohnert Park, so I probably started at mile 145, um (mumble) 67290, Rohnert Park, so 65275 for Forestville, starting point. BroadDaylight.Com - expose your site! Wow CNET has a radio station now, CNET Radio 910, San Francisco. Reprogram the radios to include that, yeah! [trivia deleted]

Sonoma: Um, what I've been hearing on CNET Radio, I almost wish I was in San Mateo at Napster headquarters, where Metallica's Lars (and who knows who else?) are gonna show up to yell at Napster, and there are zillions of Napster fans and Metallica fans on opposite sides of the street, yelling at each other, according to reports. And it sounds like a big party and I kinda wish I was going to San Mateo, but there won't be any aliens there so I'll continue on towards Area 51.

Enroute I will think about: screen design; news features, bulletin features, reporting - I should transcribe each day's dictation at the end of each day [HAH!] and make sure that I have it all together by the time we get, Jake and I get back. Screen design: BUTTONS. Need to have lots of buttons. Don't have near enough buttons on my screens. More'n'more buttons. I have a good start on my subscription screen, that has, that has buttons. Need to do more buttons on all my screens. [trivia deleted]

Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, would not qualify for government computer jobs - all dropouts! Tsk. -- Wow, I just passed a couple semis, hauling HUGE engines - I dunno, for big earthmovers? Woh. -- Dean Edell says: If God wanted us to walk around with an enema tube up our butts, He'd a'made us that way! -- South side of Sonoma, it's just GORGEOUS here at noon or 12:45 or whenever this is, uh the mustards'n'radishes in bloom, the fields so green - wow. All the grapevines are leafing-out - nothing huge yet, but uh they're getting there.

Fairfield: Just past Travis, right before North Texas Street, it looked like on the hillside, very neatly carved in the lawn was the word PRECARIOUS. Hmm. [trivia deleted]

Sacramento: Going over the Sacramento River right now, I can see the Sierras off in the distance, uh passing the Sacramento County Line sign, passing a sign below, on the side of a building pointing to a LEVEE LEAK - and now, Sacramento City Limis, population 370,000 or thereabouts. Wind is blowing, commercial flags are flying, dust-devils rising off in the distance, or maybe that's a tractor going thru a field, kicking up the dirt. -- Motoring through the Coast Ranges, across the Central Valley and Sacramento (nexus of political control in this nation-state called California) and over the Sierras, surrounded by vast throngs of mind-controlled robots in their cloned vehicles - but am I amy better than they?

past Auburn: Now we're at 4000 feet, Um, gee how high is Donner? Uh, probably will have to stop at Donner for a minute. Uh Donner's at 7200, so I still have a bit more climbing to do. Absolutely beautiful day for a drive across the Sierras. Back around Auburn I could look off to the south and see ranges of snowy mountains, as far as you could see it was snow down that way. Out here though it's sunny, clear, well there's puffy clouds all over, sparkling sky... 3 o'clock, elevation 5000 feet... zone change, different trees, different soil, very sandy up here, coming up to Blue Canyon and the Tahoe National Forest boundary.

Cisco: Across the Placer County line, BEAUTIFUL waterfall, er cascades right under the freeway, uh what's this? the Cisco Grove exit is the one just after it... snowy mountains around me up here... elevations's around 6200-6300 according to the altimeter. Uh, more cascades. Wow, it's GREAT having a river running right down between the lanes of the freeway. Looks like there's the old road down there next to it. Maybe, coming back if I'm not in a hurry, I will take that old road and run down by the river there - I'll have to see what exit that'll be up here. BIG BEND - that might be the exit. Or maybe there's another exit further to the east that continues on - I'll have to check the uh atlases. Well the next exit is Rainbow Road - I can use that as an indicator. Yeah there's no through road here, so that'll be the BIG BEND exit to take the old highway. Probably.

The facility up here is Rainbow Lodge. And just past Rainbow Lodge there's snow right alongside the freeway. It's melted off the sunny slopes just above the freeway but on the north-facing slope it's still pretty snowy there. I can see a train going by on the tracks there to the south, on the snowy north-facing slope. And I'm alongside the river again - ah, this is gorgeous. Nice pools down there - bet they're a bit chilly. A cabin - o, that's a nice place to have a cabin, except for the road noise, of course. What's this? The South Yuba River. A Ford just went by with Santa Rosa licence plate frame, Prestige Motors, and a licence of BOB WHO.

Donner Summit: elevation 7239, mile 67470, so that's what? 195 miles from Forestville... Woh! Snowy icy lake there, snowy mountains ahead - snow all around! Yeah, on the way back I'll have to take the Old Donner Pass Road, for the my first time, see what it's like - I'll have time then. Huh, Donner Lake is within Truckee city limits, or so it looks... coming back I should probably get off at 89 in Truckee, the South Lake Tahoe exit, take the old roads over from there.

via Reno: 3:55, outskirts of Reno. 4 o'clock, downtown Reno, US 395 intersection, I just passed a bar, the Twelve Step Room. Hah. Bumper sticker: A Woman's Place is in the Maul. Sierra Trading Post / CostCo parking lot, 4:05. Hot damn. ... 8 o'clock, Ft. Churchill... Yerington, elevation 4378, mile 469... time 8:25, um, getting tired too. [park at the fairgrounds outside Yerington]

Thursday, May 4th, 7 in the morning

Yerington: The refrigerator isn't operating... heading towards Walker Lake now... ah, out in the valleys of central Nevada, somewhere above 5000 foot elevation. Mina and Luning are up ahead - don't think I'll see the guy with porcupines though... Sometimes even a god won't put up with you, but porcupines are less discriminating.

Schurz: Schurz Nevada, intersection of Alt.95 and 95, a big sign: just 2 1/2 hours to Tonopah, about 138 miles. I just filled up with propane but the refrigerator still isn't working. Bother. So the next stop is Hawthorne, and o-boy, I'm a'hafta have more refrigerator service... although I think the problem's in the LP gas detector. I'll finish this cup of coffee I just bought and find some appropriate place (I don't think it'll be Mina or Luning, I think it'll be before then) and pull out the detector and see if I can jiggle it back into operation.

Walker Lake: Breakfast stop along Walker Lake, just past a sign showing BigHorn Sheep Crossing. Coming up to Sportsman's Beach here. Um, I pulled out the LP detector module, and couldn't see anything right OR wrong with it, it's all unitized. I switch it on an all I get's one beep, not the series of chirps I usually hear, so I guess it's time to replace it. Meanwhile: Walker Lake is beautiful, there snow on the steep mountains to the west of it. Uh 8 in the morning and it's uh already pretty warm, down here at this level, which is maybe 4600 feet... Town of Walker Lake - Walker Lake State Rec Area - uh this does NOT look like a booming resort...

Anyway, when I hit Hawthorne I'd better look for RV service. Cause there ain't a'gonna be any for quite a ways beyond, like maybe DEFINATELY to Tonopah... Hawthorne being something of a destination with its casino, just might have RV service as tourist support. I hope. Better reset my altimeter up here at Hawthorne, the map says that Walker Lake is 3976...

Hawthorne: Hawthorne, a vast weapons depot and munitions plant, an explosive place, yeah. Well, lots of signs saying Danger, Danger, No Trespassing, US Army, Danger. Ah, there's a Property Disposal Office, I wonder what kinda good property they have for sale today? Worn out trucks, worn out jeeps - worn out Hummers! Well, yeah, maybe an old Hummer, that's be fun... Mah Lord! There's civilization in Hawthorne! I see the big golder arches of MacDonalds 'way up thar! The CineDome Theatre - an old quonset hut.

Located RV repair shop - Scotty's, east past the casino about 4 blocks. There is no repair for the LP detector to be had in Hawthorne. Back in Reno I can go to Safari RV on Kitzke Lane, or Sierra Mountain RV, but Safari is recommended, and I guess I hafta find a block of ice somewhere.

Heading outa Hawthorne at a quarter after nine, a waste of time - Mina, 33 miles - Tonopah, 103. Then what, another 100 miles beyond that to Rachel? So, I'll hit Rachel some time after noon...

past Hawthorne: Somewhere out here I start to question the wisdom of this venture but what the hell, too late to turn back now. -- 9:30, 9:35, Luning, 10 miles to Mina, looks like 90 something to Tonopah. And Luning here looks like the town where we saw the guy with the porcupines, yeah, this is it. The rest area's paved now. The old buildings are really falling down. Got some good pictures, I hope, of the Long Branch Saloon. Ah, Mina. [Sign:] NO EXPLOSIVE-LADEN VEHICLES ARE ALLOWED TO PARK WITHIN THE TOWN OF MINA. Boy, that's reassuring. Compared to Luning, Mina is a glittering metropolis. That's not saying much. -- OK, leaving Mina, Tonopah is 70 miles... 10 o'clock in the morning, and it's a warm day, at about 4500 feet sez the altimeter, and the map agrees: Mina, 4565.

Ah, the snowy high Sierra comes into view, or maybe that's the White Mountains - just ahead up here is the cutoff down to Benton, and then Lee Vining, so could be, let's see, depending on the direction there, that's probably the White Mountains. -- Oh boy! Billy's Day-Night Massage Parlor! Sauna and Massage, that is. -- Desert Lobster, Visitors Welcome!

Redlick Summit: Short rest break at Redlick Summit, 5053 feet, time 10:45, distance to go: forever. Brain activity: low. Just past that summit, look off to the southwest, there's a vast salt playa with big snowy mountains beyond it. Map shows that as the Columbus Salt Marsh; and the mountains beyond are definately the Whites. BIG salt marsh, 8 or 10 miles across. GOOD place to stay away from.

Coaldale: Coaldale, junction with US 6. The Whites are mighty impressive off there to the west. US 6 heading on over to Bishop. Coaldale: ain't much to it... knobby little cindercones, ash spews and the like here at Coaldale, on the northeast side of the highway. I'm stuck in road construction - Tonopah's getting further and further away...

Tonopah: 490 miles from Forestville -- Tohopah High School, home of the Muckers - what kinda comment could I add to THAT? ... No camp stoves in town, so I had to settle for 4 cans of Sterno at 2 bucks each. Zhnow... The Twister Inn RV Park...

Thursday 4 May 2000, 2:25 pm

(Turning off on the Extraterrestrial Highway, 59 miles to Rachel - a few vehicles on up ahead, looks like the geek gathering is underway...)

(Dang it, I forgot to being the deely-bobbers... maybe they'll be some for sale in Rachel.)

Ideas on webpage design have been going thru my head. Uh, a simple interface that could be appealing would be to take the ideas of the guy who did the very simple screen design, just sketching out a design on paper, scanning that, putting that up as the image, uh, as the whole screen with area-mapping. Combine that with what I did with a lot of the Harry Oliver pages, for displaying the images... put up a background and then center the image on the background. Well, I could put up on the screen images of naked male and female people, just standing there, ah heading: WHERE DOES IT HURT? and image-mapped so that each area of their anatomy links to sardonically advise on spiritual healing. It's all part of a faith-healing site.

Something totally different that would be very usable with CSS positioning commands, would be to have as the background just the spiral-ring notebook, and then position, have 9 images, each image being of some hand-written text, each of those linking you to uh the appropriate other stuff. That could be a way to redesign my OTRS homepage / index. I could even have some of those images being animated GIFs like naked people hopping up'n'down, or rotating words ...

Another design idea, maybe related to this one on the positioning, would be to construct an ideogram, Chinese or Japanese... where each element of the ideogram is a different color, sorta stylized, and is independently positioned,, so that the ideogram would change sizes or aspects depending on the size and shape of the page. For that matter, I could turn uh standard alphabetic letters, alphanumerics, into ideograms, by separating their parts, having each part being a different color, being a vivid graphic, a rounded slash, whatever... The point is, that you could make a screen look the way you want it to look, only if you have it ENTIRELY as a graphic. Next best thing, is to have the positioning control, so you can have the elements of the screen placed where you want on the screen, no matter what size or shape the screen is. And then the elements that are positioned can either be text characters generated by the browser, or graphics to give ya that specific control. And I'm sure I'll talk more about screen design later.

Thursday, In And Around Rachel

But now, yeah, that's definately Rachel up there. As I'm coming towards the bottom of this valley there's some big black thing over to the left of the road. No, it's not The Black Mailbox On Steroids, it's... well, it looks kinda big just to be a watertank... but yeah, I guess that's just what it is, a watertank. Not an alien manifestation. Bother. Uh, the trip counter's at 745, that means 600 miles (and change) from Forestville to Rachel, 'cause I'm just about a mile out of town now... OK, here's Rachel, and it doesn't exactly look overrun... There's maybe a dozen trailers and RVs accumulated. But there is a stage set-up for stuff tonight and tomorrow - UFO LANDING ZONE, STARDATE MAY 4, 2000! ...ah, finally stopped, time: 3:26.

I just met a nice couple, Luke and Joyce from Caliente, come up here to watch the geekfest, get away from their own little beautiful part of the desert. A production crew is setting up the display here... they have flashing lights, and who knows what else... I see the, they got the alien beacon up, I got some pictures, it's not all that impressive, it's uh 10 feet high and 8 feet across [much wind noise - unintelligible] shape on top. Satellite crew's here, so this is gona get beamed around the world. I am debating with myself whether or not to actually go into the Little A-Le'Inn [much wind noise]... [sonic booms, twin contrails overhead]

I went down to the Area51 Research Center, Glenn Campbell's establishment. He's not in, doesn't come back here very much, like maybe once a year, has a couple nice volunteers in there, tending the store, they don't want to have anything to do with the Little A-Le'Inn, or anything that's going on around it. None of the people associated with Glenn Campbell seem to be too welcome around the Little A-Le'Inn. Funny 'bout that... [schedule misunderstanding trivia deleted] ...Costume contest... [severe wind noise]

Evening: The flyers posted on the door of the Little A-Le-Inn said that the first 100 people here would get free copies of the film. Didn't happen. Eh. So. Well let's see, I whacked one of the producers in the nose, but that was inadvertant, I didn't mean to break it. She just happened to walk behind me right as I swung my arm out to wave and cheer the costume contestants. My wrist collided rather forcefully with her proposcis. Ouch.

[Friday 5 May 2000 - Rachel, NV]

Morning: I talked to a reporter [Patrick] from Montreal who interviewed me extensively - I didn't get what publication he wrote for, I'll have to see if I get any email inquiries. He said he'd seen my SkeptiNews bulletins on Deja.Com and I gave him the SkeptiNews URL. Then I went back to the Area51 Research Center, talked with the guys there and various of the customers, bought a few more things. Looking around Rachel, it's a cool day, clouded-over - today's supposed to be the X-Rides, a bike race down to the Black Mailbox and back, that's 20 miles and back - I don't think I'm in shape for that. But... I might try, riding with the X-Riders up to the first summit [NOT!] - supposed to be this evening, or later this afternoon. All the crews for the film promotion pulled out, got all that infrastructure dismantled. The winning costume last night was this nutty construction worker, who was certainly hyperactive. The $1000 prize, he said was gonna go to buy beer for his crew. He was the one who was swinging from the crane.

I was told about the Hilton in Las Vegas, has a big show, the Star Trek Experience, with IMax, very kinetic. Sounds really good - I'll have to try that.

Early afternoon: I'm kinda torn between staying here in Rachel, where there's food and facilities nearby, and more souvenirs, or going on down the road toward the Black Mailbox or some of the other airspace viewing spots near it, except being Friday, there's probably not gonna be a lot of airspace activity over the weekend, so I don't know if I'd even see anything down there in the night sky. Or head in that direction a little bit, go to Tempiute... But somewhere along here, today or tomorrow, I'll go down to the Groom Lake Road and go out to the Border. Yeah, I hafta go to the Border. I can't come down here to Area51 without having gone to the Restricted Zone. What kind of UFOlogy-ologist would I be if I skipped that?

I need a page that links to my reports and guides. Yes I do. And putting that Paranormal Journal there, heh heh. OK this one would be called AREA 51 OR BUST, the journal for this drive, meagre as it will be, although I have a lot of pictures of the aliens in costumes, and Rachel, and probably of the Border area, when I get up there... just coming up to Coyote Summit now... just having left Rachel, where I got pictures of all the UFO-oriented signs and debris, as well as the abandoned millworks across the road, with its bomb shelter. Push-button access to the guides and reports and journals? Hmm, maybe. Holy Moly! There's a big line of RVs and trailers headin' down towards Rachel! Why the hell would they want to do that? I mean, it's like 20 of'em in a row. This is a convoy, a caravan. And no bikes to be seen. Dang, guess I'll have to go back to Rachel, see if that's where they're settin' up. Or not, as the case may be.

Friday, Out To Area51 Itself

I stopped at the (formerly) Black Mailbox, got many picture so the graffiti.] Driving up here on the Groom Lake Road toward the restricted zone, I think when I was in Germany on manoeveres, I went up to Hof and got near the East/West German border, with the fences and the guardposts. Uh, I understand this border isn't quite as physically segregated, doesn't have the fences, but it does have guardposts and the guards are authorized to use deadly force. So I feel kind of like I'm heading for East Germany. A little drier here, though... 10 miles off of highway 375 on Groom Lake Road, it's the beginning of restricted airspace. No aircraft are visible at the moment, although there are some contrails up ahead, over the test range. I'm in a Joshua Tree forest, have been for a ways, let's see, the elevation by altimeter is about 4500-4600 feet, but that could be off a bit.

Late afternoon: At the Border. There's a photojournalist here, says he came from Paris just to do a story about Rachel. He appears to be an Arab. Taking a lot of pictures - got a shot of the workers' bus driving by a 3:45. On the hill to the south there's a car, pickup, with a couple people obviously surveilling us. [Severe wind noise] They're honking when we get close to the Border - I thank them for the warning.

Heading away from the Border now. Chatted a bit there with this French reporter. He recounted a tale that Patrick, the Quebecois reporter, told me this morning, having been told by an old old woman here in Rachel that somebody years ago, he and his girlfriend drove up to the Border and took down one of the signs, one of the Entry Prohibited signs, and threw it in the trunk of his car, and drove down the road. And 10 or 20 miles further on down the road the sheriff stopped'em and said, "Please give us the sign back." Yes, they ARE watching. I saw at least two electronic sensors with solar cells sitting on top of the hill to the south of the crossing. And then there's the guards in the pickup, honking. Actually, just as I walked up to the Border, or just before I got to the Border, another pickup went by quickly, raising a cloud of dust. So there ARE people around here watching. Didn't see no AY-LEE-INS tho...

OK, the Bus, yeah, that bus went by, carrying... workers? Or... spies and aliens, yeah! "Here comes the Alien Bus ferrying the crowd to populate the Little A-Le-Inn tonight." I might ask the question: Where does the Bus go from here? Towards Rachel? Towards Alamo? Towards... points unknown? Probably not towards Rachel, or it'd be noticed. Obviously, an observer should position themself so as to observe the movement of the Bus as it heads into the outside world.

On to Part 2