I might not even note this anniversary except that six years is an interesting round number to me: my kids are six years apart, so Julian is now as old as Calvin was when the pandemic took over our lives: ten years old, about to turn eleven, in the spring of fifth grade; about to finish elementary school and move on to middle school. Both Calvin and Julian had outdoor school scheduled for the end of March. Calvin's was canceled in the waves of closures that closed school and public spaces and kept us shut in our houses struggling to work and go to school. Julian's hasn't happened yet, but I have every expectation that it will. (None of the looming crises seem likely to disrupt daily life in Santa Cruz enough that they would cancel outdoor school in a couple of weeks.)

These days I can go months without thinking about COVID-19 at all. I can't remember the last time I took a nasal swab test. For the most part I think of COVID-19 as just another endemic respiratory infection; though if I were to test positive I'd still take it more seriously than other infections. It's no longer on my list of things to worry about (it's been replaced at the top of the list by what to do next after my startup got acquired by a tech giant).

The calm after the storm above Main Beach

As the accute phase of the pandemic receeds it's hard to remember what a weird time it was in our lives.

Rivos GA0 die

Holding the slab of plastic in person, I can turn the die so it catches the light and exposes the physical design of the circuitry in the chip. I did most of my work in the CPU cores in the middle of the top of the die. Most of the footprint is consumed by a grid of GPU-like processing elements, which of course ended up being used for LLM workloads because generative AI is consuming all of the oxygen in the tech sector.

When I left my stable big-tech job in the summer of 2022 to join a chip startup, it felt like I was jumping off a cliff hoping to fly. At the time Rivos had the architecture docs describing what to build, and a big-picture outline of the firmware stack necessary to bring the chip up out of reset and securely boot to Linux. I filled in some of the big empty spaces in the firmware stack, writing machine-mode firmware for the RISC-V applications cores to manage the boot process and remain resident to provide runtime services to the Linux kernel. It was the biggest, and most rewarding, software project I've ever created — and I wrote it from scratch, in bare-metal Rust.

In our moment of triumph, after successfully bringing up our chip in our lab last summer, we were acquired by a tech giant only interested in our AI accelerator core. (I guess everyone's an AI company now.) They don't seem to care about the chip we built or the people who made it happen. We're not going to build a follow-up chip building on the lessons we learned here, and we're not going to sell the RISC-V CPU cores we built into a data center near you. I will cherish this chunk of plastic and silicon as my most tangible monument to the rise and fall of the best job I ever had.

In the Great Basin somewhere in Nevada

We ate breakfast in the dining car while the scenery of the high desert in Nevada rolled by outside the train window: dry land with scrubby shrubs and low rocky hills in the middle distance.

California Zephyr stops in Reno

Our train made a lengthy station stop in Reno, giving me plenty of time to step out onto the platform and walk the length of the train. I recorded the numbers of each of the cars in the train, from front to back:

1. 61 GE Genesis diesel locomotive
2. 158 GE Genesis diesel locomotive
3. 39012 Transition sleeper
4. 32033 Sleeper
5. 32006 Sleeper (this was the car that we traveled in)
6. 38045 Dining
7. 33022 Sightseer lounge
8. 34041 Coach
9. 31012 Coach/baggage

According to the car numbers, this was a mixture of Superliner I cars (built by Pullman between 1975 and 1981) and Superliner II cars (built by Bombardier between 1991 and 1996).

Heading out of Reno we began to climb into the Sierras, following the Truckee River. I took the opportunity to take a shower on the lower level of my sleeper car (which was probably the first time I've had a shower in a moving vehicle); this was considerably more comfortable than any overnight plane flight I've had.

Snow along the Truckee River

As we continued west, following the route laid out for the first trans-continental railroad, I joined Kiesa in the observation car for a better view of the scenery leading up to Truckee and over Donner Pass. Unlike Winter Park where I spent three days skiing, the Tahoe basin got dumped with snow starting at Christmas (to the point where I began to wonder how much snow was too much snow to begin to disrupt train travel). We traveled in a break in the long line of storms; the skies around Truckee were partly cloudy. The train stopped in a snow-covered Truckee, where every ticket was sold and the train crew expected every seat to be full (and kept reminding us to move bags off seats in the coach cars).

Kiesa in the California Zephyr observation car

West of Truckee the train made its final approach to Donner Pass, heading up a long valley then looping back the other side to gain elevation at a grade more gentle than nearby I-80. The trees were completely covered in snow; it looked like the trees were flocked and that someone had gone overboard dumping too much snow on the trees than they could handle.

Snow above Donner Lake

I tried to track the progress of our train with Google Maps cross-referencing the Roseville Subdivision page on Wikipedia, but I didn't have a detailed map of precisely which of the tracks were considered the current main line. We cut through a ridge in a tunnel and emerged with a commanding view of Donner Lake below, with the interstate highway visible on the other side. I could just make out trucks and cars crawling up the grade to Donner Summit, and I indulged a look at Google Maps to see how bad traffic was on the highway.

Snow sheds leading up to Donner Pass

As we climbed slowly to the Sierra crest surrounded by trees covered by sticky snow we traveled through a series of snow sheds protecting the track from the heaviest winter snow. In this picture the snow shed visible on the left is part of our route; the snow sheds on the mountainside in the middle of the picture make up the original route to Donner Summit, now mothballed (but not officially abandoned) in favor of a lower-elevation tunnel through the mountains to the left.

California Zephyr observation car in Tunnel no. 41

Our trip through the Sierra crest ended with a trip to the two-mile-long Tunnel number 41, built a few hundred feet below the old rail route across Donner Pass. We emerged through the tunnel's west portal under the Sugar Bowl Ski Resort, and began our long gradual descent down the still-snow-covered west side of the Sierras towards Sacramento.

Once we were past Sugar Bowl the magnificence of the scenery began to subside; we were traveling through more snow-covered forests with occasional views of the interstate highway but there were no more stunning vistas of mountain scenery. I headed back to my sleeper roomette, transiting the hallway next to the full-sized sleeper rooms to the right, with the snow-covered scenery sliding by on the left. It was an interesting experience walking through a large, climate-controlled vehicle next to the outdoor scenery, jostling as the train bumped along the tracks but isolated and protected from whatever I could see outside.

Superliner sleeper car hallway

We ate lunch in the dining car on our long descent towards Sacramento, as the snow began to subside and the forest began to transition from evergreen to deciduous. I watched the 2017 version of Murder on the Orient Express. Having just seen the 1974 version the night before I approached watching the movie like a fairy tale: what choices would they make in this version that were like or unlike the other? I liked both versions but it was also clear that they were products of the time in which they were made, influenced by and commenting on their environment rather than faithfully reproducing the original 1934 novel.

Roseville station building

The train stopped in a number of cities on the long broad valley descending towards Sacramento. I got out at Roseville and walked around the station platform in the beginnings of the next storm of the system of storms that hit California starting at Christmas. (This storm turned out to be the final storm of the month; the weather remained uncharacteristically dry for the next six weeks until the middle of February.) West of Sacramento, the Yolo Bypass was flooded with overflow from the Sacramento River from the winter storms.

Yolo Bypass, flooded

From Sacramento the rest of the way to Emeryville I knew the route from previous trips on the Capitol Corridor (once to Sacramento, a few times from Martinez). The long-distance California Zephyr made fewer stops along the way than the regional Capitol Corridor. We rolled through Solano County, crossed the Carquinez Strait, stopped in Richmond, and finally pulled into the last stop at Emeryville, two-and-a-half days after the train left Chicago and 31 hours after we boarded the train in Winter Park.

California Zephyr arrives in Emeryville

The Amtrak station in Emeryville may be convenient for people trying to get to Emeryville, but it was not especially convenient for us, because we needed to get back to our car where we had parked at SFO two weeks ago before Christmas. To get there we boarded the Amtrak coach parked in the parking garage opposite the train platform and drove across the traffic on the Bay Bridge to San Francisco. I expected the coach to drop us off inside the Salesforce Transit Center, but instead it dropped us off in the rain on the curb in front of Salesforce Tower a half-hour after leaving Emeryville. From there it was a two-block walk through the rain to Embarcadero Station, where we road a slow creaky elevator down to the BART platform, permanently staffed by an attendant whose primary purpose seemed to be to keep unhoused people from using the elevator as a urinal. From Embarcadero we took BART to SFO then caught the people-mover to long-term parking, finally arriving at the car more than an hour after arriving in San Francisco. (In retrospect the better choice looked like it would be to transfer to BART at Richmond.)

Amtrak coach arrives in San Francisco

We drove the rest of the way home, arriving home after being away for almost two weeks visiting family for Christmas, skiing for New Year's, and taking the train the rest of the way to the Bay Area. The California Zephyr in a sleeper car was a great experience and I'm thrilled we got a chance to ride it.

Before we left Winter Park I walked around the ski village and found a shop selling Mary Jane stickers. I hadn't really been able to ski Mary Jane because of the marginal snow, but I still wanted a "No Pain/No Jane" sticker, and I hadn't been able to find it at the other shop I visited in the ski village in front of our ski condo. This particular shop also had trail markers for sale, including the trail named Cranmer that I had spent entirely too much time on, so I didn't feel like I needed to get a trail marker to remember it.

Moffat Tunnel west portal

The westbound California Zephyr exits the Moffat Tunnel opposite the Winter Park ski village, but it skips the train platform at the ski village to the station a few miles away in the town of Winter Park. (The ski train stops there, then proceeds to the Winter Park/Fraser station to wait until the end of the day and head back down the mountain.) To get to the Winter Park/Fraser station we had to catch a local bus, which picked us up at the ski village and carried us down highway 40, then meandered through a residential neighborhood before dropping us off at the Amtrak station. We arrived with plenty of time before the train was scheduled to arrive at 10:53 MST.

Continental Divide above the town of Winter Park

From the town of Fraser I could see the Continental Divide to the east, covered in snow; but I couldn't identify any of the mountains I saw. I spent twenty-five years living in Boulder looking up at these mountains from the east, and I can still name every one of them; but from the west they all looked different and found it disorienting. The one formation I could identify was Devil's Thumb, sticking up from the ridge below Point 12,660.

California Zephyr at Winter Park station

Our train arrived right on time, pulling into the unstaffed station where we waited on the platform with maybe two dozen other people. There were boarding positions marked in letters on the single platform, but it wasn't clear what those positions corresponded to. We waited towards the end of the platform on the theory that the sleeper cars would be at the front of the train. When the train stopped we had to walk backwards along the train until we found our car, the third sleeper car, conveniently located right in front of the dining car.

When we boarded our two roomettes weren't ready yet so the sleeper car attendant directed us to one of the full-sized sleeper rooms around the corner to wait for a few minutes until he prepared our rooms. Each of the full-sized rooms was at least twice as big as the roomettes we traveled in, but they still held only two people; though it looked like there was a sliding partition door to join adjacent rooms.

It was only a few minutes after the train pulled out of the Winter Park station that our roomettes were ready. We moved into our rooms and settled in for the trip overnight to Emeryville. I ended up in a room with Calvin; Kiesa and Julian occupied another room across the hall and several rooms away.

I like trains and I will go to great lengths to find excuses to ride them; but Kiesa is especially interested in sleeper trains (probably because it gives her a chance to sit and read and do nothing else with all of her meals catered for her). So this trip had something for each of us.

Grand Valley from a train window

We rode in sleeper #32006. According to the Superliner article on Wikipedia, this was one of the Superliner I cars built by Pullman-Standard between 1975 and 1981. (These were the last rail cars that Pullman built. A few of the cars in our train were Superliner II cars, built to the same design by Bombardier in the 1990s.)

Our train headed north, stopped in Granby, then turned west to follow the Colorado River. From where I sat in my roomette, I could only see out the right side of the train, so I missed half of the scenery. West of Kremmling the tracks left highway 40 and continued following the Colorado River downstream into a rugged canyon that my map tells me is Red Gorge. Around this time we headed to the dining car for lunch (our sleeper car tickets included meals in the dining car) and had the opportunity to pick our table; but we picked wrong and ended up with a table on the right side of the train, where the view was mostly the hillside; rather than the left side of the train, where we could have seen sweeping views of the rocky gorge above the river. (The windows were large enough that we could still look across the aisle but it wasn't the same impact.)

Calvin, Jaeger, Kiesa, and Julian at lunch on the California Zephyr

After lunch I traded seats with Julian and rode with Kiesa; though I still ended up in a backward-facing seat. This gave me the chance to look out the left side of the train as we entered another section of canyon on the Colorado River, downstream of the town of McCoy in the general vicinity of Burns. (None of these town names mean anything to me; this wasn't a part of Colorado I visited.)

Scenery along the Colorado River

I watched my map and the time carefully so I knew when we were coming into Glenwood Canyon. As the train headed through Dotsero I headed back to the observation car and found a seat looking out the right side of the train.

California Zephyr observation car

The Superliner observation car is probably the best part of the whole train, with large windows offering an expansive view of the scenery, plus windows curving into the ceiling offering a view of the walls of Glenwood Canyon climbing high above the train.

I-70 enters a tunnel in Glenwood Canyon

Glenwood Canyon is an engineering marvel, fitting an entire Interstate highway (two lanes in each direction) and a long-distance heavy-rail line, plus a bike path, into a narrow canyon carved by the Colorado River. The highway mostly sits on the north side of the canyon; the rail line the south side. In places the westbound lanes are carried on long viaducts; in others the only place to fit the westbound lanes is a tunnel, while the eastbound lanes can remain on the surface next to the river.

I-70 viaduct in Glenwood Canyon

When I moved to Colorado with my family in 1991, I-70 was still under construction; it was one of the last pieces of the original interstate highway system to be completed. While I lived in Colorado I drove Glenwood Canyon multiple times (most recently ten years ago while moving from Boulder to San Francisco); this was my first chance to see the highway from the perspective of a train on the opposite bank.

Jaeger, Kiesa, and Calvin in the California Zephyr observation car

I got Kiesa and Calvin to join me in the observation car, though I think I may have mislead Kiesa about what I was interested in seeing in the canyon. I was there for the engineering marvels, though the natural scenery was stunning too.

I-70 crosses the Colorado River into a pair of tunnels

My favorite part of Glenwood Canyon is the Hanging Lake Tunnels: where all four lanes of the highway crosses the river on a bridge and immediately enter a pair of tunnels, leaving the whole canyon untouched for a short distance, except for the parking lot at the Hanging Lake rest stop where weary drivers see dire signs warning them of the dangerous conditions on the strenuous trail climbing to the lake.

Colorado River in western Colorado

We emerged from Glenwood Canyon into Glenwood Springs and stopped at the station, our first stop since Granby a few hours earlier. I left the observation lounge and returned to the roomette. We continued traveling west, following the Colorado river through western Colorado, past Rifle (where we didn't stop) and Grand Junction (where we did stop). I got out of the train at Grand Junction, to stretch my legs and walk along the train platform; but I didn't leave the platform. (This was one of the longer station stops on the route, and the conductor told us we could visit the convenience store in the station where we could buy things not sold on board like phone power adapters.)

We continued west as the sun set. In the dark we entered Utah and left the Colorado river behind. We ate supper in the dining car, as the trin rolled through the deserts of Utah through the evening, then returned to our roomettes.

For the trip I downloaded two movie versions of Murder on the Orient Express on my iPad, intending to watch both of them on the two days of my train trip. For Sunday night I picked the 1974 version and found it quite enjoyable for my train trip. (I was amused to see The sliding door connecting adjacent rooms that I had seen earlier in the day on our sleeper carriage as a plot point in the movie.) Then I prepared my little room for night (Calvin took the top bunk, folded down from the ceiling; I got the bottom bunk, formed by folding down the chairs facing each other) and discovered the blue night light in my room, which I had also seen in the movie. It felt a bit like the movie was coming to life around me; but the movie stopped there and no further plot points escaped into my life.

I went to sleep on the westbound California Zephyr as the train traveled between Provo and Salt Lake City, and onward along the Great Salt Lake towards California.

Julian, Kiesa, Calvin, and Jaeger at Winter Park

I signed up the kids for ski lessons, and on Thursday morning, New Year's Day, we headed out to pick up their rental gear and drop them off at their lessons. (Julian had an all-day kids lesson; Calvin had a half-day adult lesson.)

Julian at Winter Park ski school

With the kids properly geared up and deposited at their lessons, I headed to the new gondola that replaced the Zephyr Mountain Express chair (named "The Gondola" because that's what everyone will call it anyway) to see what I could find that was worth skiing.

I spent most of my time half-way up the Winter Park side of the mountain, skiing the Explorer Express and Prospector Express lifts. Explorer mainly served the longest blue run that was open, Cranmer. Prospector climbed above the one and only black run that was open, Engeldive; it had a few bumps but the snow between the bumps was scraped down to the ground, exposing dead grass and dirt and rocks and the branches of scrubby pine trees growing on the slope. I skied it once each of the three days we were at Winter Park but the poor snow conditions meant it wasn't worth repeating. There was so little snow on the ground it felt like November, even though the calendar said January.

At the top of The Gondola at Winter Park

My phone rang late in the morning while I was riding Prospector Express. (I'm always nervous pulling out my phone on a chair lift because I'm worried I'll drop it onto the slope below.) I missed the call from the ski school but got the call from Kiesa a minute later that Julian wasn't feeling well and needed to be picked up. (She was on a quest to explore the town of Winter Park, a few miles away by bus.) I skied to the bottom, picked up Julian, and took him back to the ski condo where we were staying. Kiesa arrived with Calvin, and we all ate lunch before I headed out to ski with Calvin.

Calvin and Jaeger on a ski lift at Winter Park

I was frustrated by the lack of good terrain to ski, but the conditions on the mountain meant that Calvin could ski everything that was open. We went higher on the mountain, to Olympia Express and High Lonesome Express. Olympia served White Rabbit, which was one of the more interesting blue runs open; we spent much of our time here. (It began to develop bumps during our trip, but these bumps grew icy and began to show grass between the bumps.) High Lonesome climbed to the top of Mary Jane, albeit from the back of the hill, and served a smattering of steeper green runs that were somewhat less crowded than the runs lower on the mountain.

Calvin skis at Winter Park

On Friday, our second day at Winter Park, Julian stayed off the mountain, Calvin returned to a half-day ski lesson, and I skied by myself in the morning before meeting Calvin for lunch. It had been snowing lightly on Thursday afternoon, and snowed a couple of inches overnight, which was just enough to dust over the thinner places on the ski trails but not enough to materially change conditions. In the afternoon in a break in between ski runs we stopped at a kiosk called Waffle Cabin, near the base of the Looking Glass lift, for a small hot handheld Belgian waffle drizzled with chocolate syrup. It was beginning to snow again, and we ate our waffles off to the side of the ski train in the forest surrounded by snow.

Waffle Cabin at Winter Park

On Saturday, Julian returned to ski school and ended up in a smaller group with just three kids, one of whom had never skied before. He had a better time with more personalized attention. It snowed another couple of inches overnight, enough to finally dust the neighboring peaks with snow. On the trees there was a noticeable line, maybe around 10,000 feet, where the frost and snow coating the trees intensified, looking like a flocked Christmas tree.

Top of Mary Jane after a few inches of snow

I stopped for coffee at Lunch Rock at the top of Mary Jane (accessible only from the back via High Lonesome Express; all of the lifts running up from the Mary Jane side where closed). I saw a gray jay stalking the tables in the sun, looking for food that might have been left behind by people eating on the sunny outdoor patio.

Gray jay perched on ski racks

Even though I didn't get the ski experience I was hoping for it was still nice to spend three days at Winter Park at New Year's.

Riding Explorer Express in sketchy snow

After the lifts closed on Saturday we returned our rental equipment and rode The Gondola up to the top of the Winter Park side. This was intended to get us to the post-skiing entertainment at the lodge, but we took the time to look around in the snow.

Calvin, Kiesa, and Julian at the top of Winter Park

I tried to time our ascent so we'd see the alpenglow on the surrounding mountains, but by the time we arrived the sun had set, leaving only the dramatically-colored lenticular clouds hanging over the Continental Divide across the valley to the east.

Lenticular clouds at sunset over the Continental Divide

Several days of snow had covered the visible mountains with enough snow that the bare rock was no longer quite as visible.

Parry Peak covered in snow

We caught the gondola back down to the base and packed our suitcases to catch the train home for the final part of our Christmas/New Year's travel.

Because of our complicated multi-city itinerary, we flew into Omaha and flew out of Kansas City. This meant that my very first visit to Kansas City's airport was driving up to it. This is an unusual experience for me; most of the time when I visit a new airport I fly in first and then depart via the same airport.

We checked our bags, went through security, and headed down the walkway to our gate at the end of the furthest concourse. Once we had settled down at the crowded gate to wait for our flight, we began to hear a series of ominous announcements on the PA, starting with "If you are pre-security please exit the terminal". (Our announcement to please exit the airport has raised many questions already answered by the announcement.) We were already well past security and settled at our gate, so it seemed like the announcement didn't apply to us. Over the next several minutes we heard additional announcements repeating and somewhat clarifying the announcement (they explicitly excluded everyone already through security). The announcements stopped after a couple of minutes, and we proceeded to board our flight and depart for Denver. (Kiesa scoured the Internet for information and eventually found local news reports that said there was a threat that the airport had to investigate, but they didn't think it was especially credible, and it turned out not to be anything.)

737 wing descending into Denver

We landed in Denver without further incident. I took the kids on a trip to the very end of concourse A to the nearest Snarf's, makers of my favorite sandwiches. (I picked up a jar of their pickled peppers to take home with me.) I found Kiesa next to baggage claim and we ate our lunch and waited for the shuttle to take us to Winter Park.

My inspiration for the ski trip to Winter Park was to take the ski train from Denver to Winter Park, then catch the long-distance California Zephyr the rest of the way home from Winter Park. But the ski train only operates on weekends, and only operates up the mountain to Winter Park in the morning and down the mountain to Denver in the evening. This meant that the train wouldn't work for our trip; but it turned out there were enough other shuttle operators that were set up to pick people up from the airport and drive us up the mountain in their vans and drop us off where we needed to be in the mountains.

We caught the shuttle van we had reserved when it pulled up to the curb outside the airport terminal and rode through Denver and into the mountains to Winter Park. There was construction underway to expand the two lanes of I-70 climbing Floyd Hill to three lanes. As we climbed into the Rocky Mountains I began to wonder if I should be seeing more snow. There was some snow on the mountains flanking the highway, but at the highest elevations above treeline the mountains were bare of snow. There was enough snow for skiing at Berthoud Pass, and as we descended into the north-facing slopes of the Grand Valley the snow grew deeper below treeline. (We passed a pickup truck pulling a trailer that had somehow gotten itself stuck with the trailer hanging precariously off the road in a snowbank, while another four-wheel-drive vehicle stopped nearby trying to figure out if they could help.) The Mary Jane base area was closed (due to poor snow conditions, I learned the next day). We turned into the Winter Park base area and stopped right in front of the Zephyr Mountain Lodge, the closest lodging to the ski lifts, where we were staying for our ski trip to Winter Park.

Winter Park base from the Zephyr Mountain Lodge

In the evening, after we'd unpacked in our cozy one-bedroom ski condo, I set out to do the laundry we'd accumulated since leaving Lincoln. The laundry room itself was easy to find, down the hall from our unit. The laundry machines took credit cards instead of quarters, which was handy (except that the machines seemed to expect to receive the signal from the credit card reader at exactly the right moment in a poorly-documented sequence, so I had to try several times to get the drier going). I needed quarters (from the ski locker room) to get laundry detergent, so I had to visit all of the locations mentioned on the sign posted in the laundry room. This felt like a quest in a puzzle-adventure game where I had just entered a new location on the map and now I had to find the places it referenced in order to unlock the rest of the level.

Clues for a quest at the Zephyr Mountain Lodge

I double-checked arrangements for skiing the next day, and made sure I knew where we were supposed to go and when to get the kids into their rentals and lessons. I did not stay up until midnight (local time) to witness the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026.

To get there we drove, which meant picking up our rental car from the hotel's valet parking. When the car arrived the valet pointed out the low-pressure warning on the dashboard and pulled out a portable tire pump, powered by the car's DC power jack. (I had seen the warning and watched the tire pressure gradually decrease as we drove through the snow to get to Kansas City, but I didn't do anything about it.) They pumped up the tire and sent us on our way, more than justifying the tip I was already planning on giving them.

Theater marquee inside Atlas 9

The setup was that Atlas 9 was a movie theater in the 1990s where some unknown event had occurred that resulted in locations from the movie being materialized in the real world. (The wall next to the theater marquee had real 1990s movie posters intermixed with the fake movies that they had created for the experience.) We were assigned the role of paranormal investigators at a shadowy organization that had been sent in to uncover what had really happened. We did this by scanning the rfid tags in our wristbands at readers throughout the building. (Calvin is still wearing his wristband in this picture.) Some of the readers just gave us credit for scanning them. Others we had to perform some puzzle to complete the event. Once we hit all of the stations in a particular story line in the correct order we could scan the last one and unlock the ending. In order to see the frog king in the room based on a charming animated fairy tale about a tribe of children who collect trash I had to collect a key (by scanning the key token hidden around the corner) and collect a map (upstairs in another room) and one more thing whose identity escapes me. (I didn't realize until later that evening that the QR code on the wristband would let us track our progress, which would have been easier than finding the small number of stations inside the building to do that.)

Frog king

Each room was elaborately decorated, but even the normal rooms were a bit off-kilter. The movie theater's break room kitchen fridge had been taken over by sentient chewing gum. One of the rooms had a giant birthday party room table (I crawled under it to see if there was anything interesting to see, but there was not) and giant reproductions of movie theater snacks. The theater manager's office had a moving file cabinet with a murderboard concealed behind it, with clues we might need elsewhere. There were computers we could log into and read emails uncovering the story, and watch videos of a projectionist's attempts at harnessing energy from movie magic. (This experiment went wrong, and brought the movies into the real world for us to explore.)

Clues on a murderboard at Atlas 9

One of the gimmicks was movie posters that injected our own photos into the fake movies created for the exhibition (probably AI-generated, because the fingers and guitar don't look right).

Some rooms where just art projects: there was nothing to scan, no story to uncover, just a hall of mirrors or a music-producing podium in a dead-end room. Everything looked hand-crafted, one-off; clearly a lot of time and effort had gone into everything and I began to wonder how much it had cost to pay the writers and artists (though I'm thinking in terms of Bay Area wages and costs so it's certainly less in the middle of the country).

And then I wondered about the audience: How big is the addressable market for a place like this? It didn't seem like there would be much replay value: once I uncovered the story, would I want to go through the whole thing again? Would they replace parts of the story to attract repeat customers? (Would they have to replace pieces that wore out?) I saw reviews comparing Atlas 9 in Kansas City to Meow Wolf in Las Vegas; but Las Vegas has a constant stream of new visitors and a tourist-driven culture that encourages experiences. (I haven't been to Meow Wolf so I can't compare it myself.)

A couple of weeks after my visit I got a partial answer, in the form of an email telling me about older movies screening at Atlas 9, including The Matrix in May. The list of movies appeared to be specifically chosen to hit the 1980s/1990s nostalgia that the entire experience was based on. If I were anywhere near Atlas 9 I would go back to see The Matrix on the big screen again, surrounded by fans riding the same wave of nostalgia that I was.

We spent all afternoon at Atlas 9. (I took a break to get movie-theater refreshments in the lobby.) As the afternoon progressed it grew more crowded, making it harder to get to the places where I had to complete a puzzle to get credit. In the end I found all of the points to scan, in the right order, to unlock all of the stories and learn the true fate of the theater.

We wrapped up the day back at Bethany's apartment, then returned to our hotel to pack to head to Colorado for the third part of our Christmas vacation.

Kiesa, Julian, and Calvin walk into the WWI Museum

The storm that rolled through the day before, bringing wind and blowing snow, had passed; leaving in its wake bright sun and bitter cold. The forecast high was 25 degrees, so I wore a winter hat (a beanie from Apple from about four years ago, which I never wear back home because we don't have real seasons) as I tried to convince my kids to bundle up against the cold.

Tower at the WWI Museum

The museum was originally built in the 1920s, in the immediate aftermath of the war, while the memory of the war was still fresh and returning veterans wanted to a museum to memorialize it. The museum is built on top of a grassy hill forming a park in the city, overlooking the train station. The building descends underground at the top of the hill, as if it were a fortified bunker, with a long trench dug into the top of the hill forming the access to the main entrance. The plaza on the top of the building, and the Art Deco tower at the center of the plaza, were closed for our visit due to the cold.

British 5-inch heavy field gun, Mark I

Inside the museum a bridge led over a field of poppies to the galleries. The galleries were laid out in two big sections, forming a U: Before 1917 on the left (before the United States entered the war), and after 1917 on the right. Most of the historical context was placed in a big wall of text along the inner walls, describing the chronology of the war in detail. I found this hard to read and mostly skipped it; there was so much text to read and so many people trying to read it all at once that I gave up on reading it. Instead I looked at the artifacts in the display cases opposite: field guns (the explanatory text said this one was originally intended to be pulled by horse, but that proved unwieldy in the muddy French battlefields so they converted it to be pulled by a tractor), guns, trench knives, mess kits, "hate belts" where soldiers collected trinkets from enemy uniforms, and other relics of industrialized war. The artifacts were interesting, and were described in detail; but they were museum-grade artifacts removed from their context and it was difficult to feel the scope of a global war and the cost in human life and suffering that it imposed. The only exhibit that got close to depicting the miserable conditions in the trenches on the Western Front was a diorama depicting a French trench, with a mannequin wearing a French uniform charging to defend his trench against an enemy attack. Somehow the static display felt cold and wet and slimy; I thought I could feel the gooey mud underfoot and the sense of dread oozing down the walls of the trench.

Recreation of a French trench

One of the artifacts was a set of German plate trench armor, which I immediately recognized from a Halloween costume I helped Calvin make a year or two ago. (We used EVA foam for the costume, rather than plate steel, which made it much lighter and easier to wear.)

German trench armor

The second gallery covered the war after 1917, when the United States entered the war after being pulled out of its isolationism. The first exhibits covered American manufacturing of war material: every soldier needed to be equipped with a uniform and all their equipment, the sort of thing an emerging industrial power could do if it put its mind to it. There was a display case filled with jackets worn by veterans who brought their uniforms home.

Visitors in the galleries at the WWI Museum

The gallery opened up with more space to show more artifacts: more guns and mortars on the floor; more uniforms and rifles and machine guns and knives in display cases. There was an exhibit that recreated the effect of walking into a 20-foot crater formed by a large explosive shell hitting the remains of a farmhouse. And finally an example of the super-weapon that turned the tide of war after years of brutal trench warfare resulting in effective stalemate: the tank, depicted here by a tiny French model with a crew of two, which served in both the French army as well as the American Expeditionary Forces.

French Renault FT17 tank

The museum closed with a short video discussing the armistice that ended the war; but also foreshadowing the next war twenty years later.

I left the main galleries and nipped downstairs to the open archives where the museum keeps more of its collection that it doesn't have room for on display. There were stacks of rifles and pistols; uniforms and bayonettes; and elaborate pieces of art carved out of spent casing for large shells. Nothing was labeled, but it began to give me the impression of the sheer volume of artifacts in this particular museum's collection, which represent a fraction of the total amount of equipment produced for the war.

Open archives at the WWI Museum

I dropped by the gift shop on my way out, still worried about the capacity of my luggage to handle any additional artifacts for the week remaining in my trip. I picked up a copy of The Guns of August, because this seemed like the ideal place to buy it; and because I wanted to learn more about the events leading up to the war.

Kiesa, Julian, and Calvin walk towards Kansas City Union Station

We spent most of the afternoon at the museum; we emerged, slightly dazed by everything we had seen, into the bright chilly late afternoon sun. We headed down the hill to Union Station in search of a snack and found a coffee shop with a reasonable selection of pastries. Properly fortified we looked around the station, which was still decorated for Christmas, along with a couple of permanent displays including service china from the passenger rail lines that traveled through Kansas City in the last century.

Inside Kansas City Union Station

We thought that we should try to get Julian a winter scarf, which he might wear more readily than a hat, so we crossed the enclosed sky bridge to the Westin across the street (complete with a large atrium with a waterfall and tropical plants) and then to the adjoining mall, which was packed with people but didn't seem to have anything we actually wanted to buy. We headed back across the sky bridge to the streetcar back to Bethany's apartment for supper, then returned to our hotel for the night.

In the evening we made apple strudel, following my mother's recipe (handed down from her own mother and grandmother). The last time we made apple strudel was two years ago at Christmas in Walla Walla, with a different set of people.

On Sunday we drove from Lincoln to Kansas City; my sister Bethany just had a baby and didn't want to travel but we figured it was close enough to drive to Kansas City for Christmas part two. This was the day the weather turned, with a winter storm descending upon the region. In Lincoln it was cold and windy with snow flurries; the snow dusted the streets giving a hint of winter. The forecast implied that Lincoln would get snow until just after noon then subside, so I wasn't anxious about leaving. The drive to Kansas City was supposed to be about three hours so I figured we could leave in early afternoon and there with plenty of time for supper.

Snow-dusted street in Lincoln

We left as I planned in early afternoon, while the snow was still flurrying and the wind was beginning to pick up. Even though I grew up and learned to drive in Boulder, I haven't spent a lot of time driving in snow recently (or with this particular rental car) so I drove carefully out of Lincoln and onto state highway two heading east of the city, through gently-rolling hills covered with fields left fallow for the winter. I could feel the wind as we drove, but there wasn't much snow for it to blow around.

Our route crossed the Missouri river into Iowa, where we joined I-29 and followed it south for a few miles into Missouri. Soon after crossing the state line the conditions changed: the wind was now blowing snow across the highway, obstructing visibility to the point where I felt like I needed to slow down because I couldn't see far enough ahead of me. Not all of the traffic on the road agreed; some sped by in the left lane (or tailgated me in the right lane) even though visibility was poor. The weirdest part was that some traffic was driving with their hazard blinkers on and their headlights off, apparently in an attempt to make themselves more visible to other vehicles on the road. Neither Kiesa nor I had seen quite as many cars drive like this, so she looked it up while I drove, and learned that it's perfectly legal to do that in Missouri but explicitly illegal in neighboring Kansas. (In states where we've held drivers licenses, including California, it's discouraged to drive with hazard blinkers on outside of truly exceptional circumstances.)

While we were still an hour away from Kansas City traffic slowed to a crawl until we passed what looked like a single-car collision involving a pickup truck on a bridge; it looked like the pickup had encountered ice on the bridge and spun out.

After the collision the road conditions stabilized and we drove the rest of the way to Kansas City without further incident.

Bethany lives in an apartment building in downtown Kansas City, so we stayed nearby in the refurbished historic Hotel Kansas City. It was no longer snowing when we arrived, and the buildings downtown shielded us from whatever wind might have been blowing across the plains, but it was still quite cold. The hotel had thick curtains hanging across the door to try to retain heat in the hotel lobby. We got cozy adjoining rooms on the seventh floor so the kids could get their own beds. This worked well enough, but it appeared that the connecting doors would latch when closed and could only be opened from inside each room, so we ended up propping the doors open with a small suitcase.

Hotel Kansas City

We headed out into the cold to visit Bethany and her new baby Logan in their fancy new apartment building a few blocks away. I remembered how to dress for the cold and brought a hat and gloves (but I think I decided it wasn't quite cold or windy enough that I needed a scarf). The kids were less interested in dressing for the cold, and it wasn't clear how cold they really were. (Julian looked miserable out on the street, but maybe that's just his resting face.) We met Bethany in her lobby and went up to her ninth-floor apartment, overlooking a chunk of downtown Kansas City and serving as a landing point after she moved from New York City earlier in the year. We met her new baby Logan, my third nibbling to date, who was just two weeks old (and he was smaller than my kids were when they were born; but my kids were big babies and Logan is a normal-sized baby).

Kiesa rummaged around Bethany's kitchen to make supper, as part of the arrangement to help out a parent with a new baby. Logan remained chill for the evening. After eating we hung out for a bit then headed back to our hotel for the night.

The day dawned bright and sunny, leaving me to conclude that today was the actual day of the unconquered sun this year, since Christmas Day was overcast.

SR-71 Blackbird at the SAC Museum

It turns out that I had already visited this museum this year, when I came to visit Willy in Lincoln at the beginning of the summer, but I neglected to post any of my pictures. (I figured my kids would appreciate the aircraft in the museum so I could justify a second visit within a year.) Some of the aircraft had moved, but most were in the same place, including the SR-71 Blackbird in the entry atrium, posed dramatically to give us a good view of the record-holding plane from above.

F-117A at the SAC Museum

Since my last visit the F-117A had been moved out of the restoration hangar into the main hangar, displacing a few other aircraft to make room for it. We could walk all the way around the plane and see the features that were supposed to reduce the plane's radar signature, including the irregular angles on all of the ports and a radar-reducing matte black covering (that made the plane hard to photograph in the darkened hangar).

B-52B

In the middle of the hangar was one plane still in service: the B-52. My impression from my last visit, from looking at dates on the various planes in the main hangar, was that the Air Force banged out a new bomber just about every year after the end of the Second World War, trying new technologies as they evolved (from piston-powered propellers to jet engines) until they got to the B-52 then they declared victory and stopped. Under the bomber's wing was a two-seat cockpit trainer; I happened by the trainer at just the right moment to see Calvin and Julian sitting inside as if to prepare their plane for takeoff.

Calvin operates the B-52 cockpit trainer with Julian

Some of the controls were obvious: the control yoke and the eight separate throttle levers for the eight jet engines mounted in pods under the wings. There was a big grid of dials reporting information from each of the eight engines in the middle of the cockpit between the pilots. But most of the cockpit was inscrutable to me. I kind of wanted an interactive trainer that would walk me through an engine start and takeoff, highlighting each control as I needed to use it to power up this hulking Cold War relic.

Julian flies the B-52 cockpit trainer with Calvin

The other large bomber in the main hangar, positioned just behind the B-52, was a B-36. This was a weird hybrid bomber, with six massive propellers pushing from behind the wing and four extra jet engines mounted in pods of two under each wing, as if it were the evolutionary missing link between propeller and jet aircraft.

Planes packed into Hangar A at the SAC Museum

One of the interesting design features of the B-36 was a tube connecting the forward cabin (including the cockpit) to the aft cabin (including a crew rest area and tail gun). This tube passed along the side of the main bomb bay; and because the aircraft would fly at high altitude the tube was pressurized and the bomb bay was not. The plane's bomb bays were open so we could walk under and look into the bays that would have rained down death and destruction and see the tube nestled along the side of the fuselage. The museum had replicated the tube on the ground, using plastic pipe two feet in diameter with a sled on wheels running the length of the tube. Museum visitors could lie down on the tube and pull themselves through using the rope mounted to the top of the tube. The last time I visited this exhibit was mobbed by children attending the museum's summer camp; but this time I got the chance to try it out. I laid on my back on the sled and pulled myself through the tube to the other end. It was weird but also fun.

The far side of the hangar had an exhibit on nuclear ICBMs (the second leg of the nuclear triad, along with the B-52 in the middle of the hangar). A mezzanine above the hangar had a desk from an Undisclosed Location (when the president headed to Offutt Air Force Base on September 11) and an exhibit on U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers getting shot down over the Soviet Union, complete with a U2 hanging from the ceiling of the hangar as if in flight.

U-2C suspended above other aircraft in Hangar A

We stopped for lunch at the museum cafe and headed into the smaller Hangar B, with a more eclectic selection of aircraft. There was a B-29 and a diorama showing the layout of wartime factories building B-29s in Omaha, showing the planes starting with the construction of the main fuselage then attaching wings and engines and tail and finally rolling out the open doors of the factory onto the runway.

Aircraft on display in Hangar B at the SAC Museum

I was fascinated by the fully restored (but with its wings removed, so it would actually fit inside the hangar) EC-135 Looking Glass, intended as an airborne command post to maintain continuity in the event of a nuclear attack. These aircraft stayed aloft during the Cold War, just in case they were needed. This particular plane sat outside for years before being towed inside and restored.

EC-135 Looking Glass

In between a C-47 and an exhibit about the Berlin Airlift was a small display case showing artifacts owned by Ed Mauser, an Airborne soldier and one of the Band of Brothers who lived in Omaha. The plaque commemorated the 101st Airborne's defense of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge and included the quote "Nuts!"

Ed Mauser display case

From Hangar B we could look into the restoration hangar and see a Vulcan, donated to the museum by the UK government ("Years in SAC service: None" noted the sign); it looked like the plane was getting its paint stripped to prepare it to find its place elsewhere in the museum.

Vulcan in the restoration hangar

Calvin posed in front of a MiG-23 sticking out of the restoration hangar. This aircraft was missing a sign or any interpretive information; I only identified the model of the plane using the museum map. It wasn't clear how this plane came to be in the museum's collection.

Calvin with a MiG-23

We made the obligatory exit via the gift shop (but I was too worried about my luggage to buy anything). I noticed the selection of plastic model kits and realized my children have not had the experience assembling a model kit, so I need to rectify this. Then I saw a hat and other schwag with the slogan "Peace is our Profession" and this gave me the chance to point this out to my kids and to have a discussion about what this really meant: everything we saw today was designed to strike first, or retaliate with nuclear weapons in a devastating war. In theory this was about strategic deterrence; but this depended heavily on everyone agreeing to the same game theory grid indicating that a first strike would be futile. I guess it worked out in our timeline but at no point was that guaranteed.

Atlas ICBM guards the SAC Museum

We walked out past an Atlas ICBM after four hours steeping in Cold War history, through the lens of the Strategic Air Command and its paradoxical mission to enforce peace by preparing for war.