Thursday 09/29/2022
Watered the plants, had breakfast in the dining room, and at 9am joined Jan in the garage. Briefly familiarized myself with his 2021 Prius Prime and off we went. It’s a long damn drive, but a nice one. US 101 has been repaved from Ukiah on north fairly recently and it’s just a pleasant drive. I took the first 2 hours, up past Santa Rosa. We stopped for a coffee, then Jan drove a couple of hours. He’s 87, although still in pretty decent shape. Lunch in Ukiah? I think? And on to the finish, arriving just when the GPS had been saying we would for at least three hours, at 4:10.
(I am not as much a fan of the Prius Prime as I expected to be. The car itself is ok, somewhat bigger and maybe a little nicer on the freeway than my 2012. It has a huge screen but the user interface is … not friendly. A real mess for the driver to get anything done. Not great for the passenger, either, but at least the passenger can look at it long enough to figure out what it’s doing.)
Got checked in to our rooms and took a break. Then at 5:30 we went out to wait for the supposed festival shuttle. The hotel has its own limo and the driver was just hanging around the desk. She didn’t think the shuttle was running yet (turned out, it was) but volunteered to drive us to the first venue, a big community center on the waterfront. Got our festival wrist-bands which we have to wear all weekend.
The first band to play when they started at 6:30 was a rockabilly trio that Jan didn’t care for, nor me very much. So we got on the shuttle, which was operating, and rode around to the only other Thursday venue, the Red Lion hotel. There was a fairly amateurish dixieland group. We listened to them for a few numbers, then walked up the street to an Indian restaurant and had quite a decent supper. Walked back to the Red Lion and listened to a rather better dixieland group for a while and decided to call it a night. Shuttle back to the hotel and that’s it.
Codgerville 