Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Blue Ridge Trip '24 #29
Back at the hotel in Boone, NC - Fri, 6 Sep 2024. 8pm

We enjoyed a taking-it-easy afternoon in our hotel room today, just kind of vegging on the sofa and bed after getting back from Green Mountain Falls. It's not that that hike was difficult— I mean, Green Mountain Falls wasn't even a hike, it was a drive-to spot— or that our hike this morning at Glen Burney was that tough. Glen Burney was a legit hike, it just wasn't tough. Or at least it shouldn't have been. What's really kicked our butts is the cumulative effect of all the hiking we've done the past few days.

As it started to get dark this evening we decided we should get dinner. We weren't sure we deserved a full meal after a big lunch after hiking Glen Burney and then taking it easy the rest of the afternoon. So we decided we could order light, like I'd get a small burger and share fries with Hawk, at the Come Back Shack.

While dining out the past few nights in Boone I've been struck by how cheap prices are. We don't have spendy tastes in dining to start with. We've eaten twice at a burger shack and once at a diner the past three nights. But even so we've been pleasantly surprised how the bill has come in well under what we're accustomed to from living in California.

Gas is cheap, too. We've filled up the past few days at $3.09/gal. Some places we drove past in less touristy areas 3 nights ago were as low as $2.89. Back home the cheapest gas is $3.99/gal, and that's at Costco. Conventional discount gas stations are probably $4.39 and name-brand stations likely around $4.79.

Blue Ridge Trip '24 #14
Blowing Rock, NC - Wed, 4 Sep 2024. 12pm

We're taking a take-it-easy day on our vacation today. "Wait," you might ask, "Isn't ‘taking it easy’ what vacations are supposed to be about?" Haha, not ours. Ours are typically go-go-go with activity. And we've been go-go-go for the past 4 days, starting with leaving home well before dawn on Saturday up through driving hundreds of miles last night after going on a full hike in the mountains.

So, today we're hundreds of miles away from where we were yesterday. We're staying at a hotel in Boone, NC now for last night and the next 4 nights.

"Boone?" you might ask. "Is that like ‘In the boonies’ or the boondocks?" Yes, because it's a town of about 20,000— small by my California standards— in the Blue Ridge mountains. But also no, because it's named for famed American pioneer Daniel Boone. And despite its smaller official population the town punches above its weight because it's a college town. Appalachian State University, part of the UNC system, is there and enrolls almost 20,000 students.

This morning we slept in a bit after a late night and long day yesterday. That's part of why today has become a taking-it-easy day. The other part is that we didn't do enough planning ahead of time on exactly what to do once we're in Boone. Oh, we know we want to go hiking in the mountains. At waterfalls. And there are plenty of them here. And we even researched lots of hiking trails. But we didn't cue up a list of them like we did for the previous few days in Virginia. So this morning we started doing that. And along the way we realized we don't really have the energy for another aggressive day of hiking today.

Our plan so far for the day has been simple: Get lunch. 😅 We drove to the town of Blowing Rock, about 7 miles from Boone, as there's a canyon hike starting right here in town we could do after we eat lunch. We thought that maybe lunch would help us perk up. Haha, no. We're still feeling fatigued. And now we've got a bit of food coma, too. 😂

Blowing Rock, NC is a small tourist town named for a striking rock ridge on the edge of town. The town itself is perched atop this mountain ridge, at elev. 3,500-3,600'. Below the ridge the land drops away 1,500' into a river valley. Because of the shape and orientation of the ridge, wind currents blow into the ridge and create strong updrafts. Light objects thrown off the ridge may fly back up. Native legend says that when a young man was told he'd have to leave his lover because their two tribes were going to fight, he was distraught and threw himself off the cliff. She prayed for him to be brought back to her, and the gods answered her prayer with a gust of wind that blew him back up the cliff before he could die from the fall.

Blue Ridge Trip '24 #9
Lexington, VA - Mon, 2 Sep 2024. 10:30pm

We're back at the Hampton Inn & Manorhouse in Lexington, VA tonight. Except as I noted last night, we're not in the manorhouse but rather in the walk-out basement level of the institutional building behind it.



One real drag about being down here on the ground level, especially after a couple of humid days in the summer, is that nothing in this room gets dry. Our swim suits are still soaked from using the hot tub last night. Clothes that we wore when it rained on us on the Cascade Falls hike almost 36 hours ago are still damp. Running the AC in the room doesn't help. In fact the AC just seems to hurt our lungs and sinuses. This evening we'll just leave the window open a crack— because 3 inches is all it opens— overnight for fresh air.

This evening we ate dinner at a pizza and sub restaurant next door. It was one of few restaurants open in Lexington on Labor Day. This town is home to two universities— Washington and Lee, and the Virginia Military Institute— but this weekend it's a ghost town. Last night we ate at a Mexican restaurant that was actually Tex-Mex. The food was... tolerable. Tonight's food was also... tolerable. Barely. It was bland. Like, imagine Italian cooking with neither onions nor garlic.

After dinner this evening we enjoyed a soak in the hot tub again, like last night. It's nice that this hotel has a hot tub. And it's outdoors! ...Not that most houses built in 1827 (and renovated in the 1920s) had indoor hot tubs. The weather in the evening has been perfect for enjoying a soak outdoors. It should even be cool enough to provide a nice fresh breeze through the 3-inch gap permitted by our basement window!

What comes after Friday Night Halfway? Well, Saturday Morning the Rest of the Way, of course! After we drove to Chowchilla on Friday night we finished up the drive to our true destination Saturday morning. The first of our true destinations, that is. Angel Falls.



This is just the first of many waterfalls at Angel Falls, a view we enjoyed seemingly just steps after starting the hike. More to come soon!

Getting to Angel Falls was easy this morning by virtual of having done our "Friday Night Halfway" thing. We intended to get up early, perhaps even at 6:30am, but set an alarm for 7 instead and then swatted the snooze button until almost 8. But that was okay because we didn't have hours to drive. We rolled from the hotel at 8:30am after pooh-pooing the crummy breakfast offered there.

We arrived in the town of Oakhurst about 75 minutes later. It was 48 miles of driving through the Central Valley at the Sierra foothills, plus a stop for gas in Coarsegold, where gas was ridiculously cheap (by California levels).

I mentioned last night that Chowchilla is small (by California levels) at 19,000 population. Oakhurst is even smaller, at about 13,000. But Oakhurst is a gateway town. Gateway towns are kind of like gateway drugs, except they're generally good for your health, not destructive. They're gateways to outdoor adventure!

In Oakhurst we stopped for breakfast at Jack in the Box. ...Yeah, it's low-brow, but Jack in Oakhurst is kind of a ritual for us. We also visited a knickknack shop in town but didn't buy anything because it was all junk. (Eating crummy food and shopping crummy junk stores are typical gateway-town activities, BTW.) After that we made the easy 15 minute drive up past Bass Lake to the trailhead for Angel Falls. We started the hike at 11am.

Alaska Travelog #20
At breakfast at a gas station - Tue, 18 Jun 2024, 11am

Today has been another foggy morning in Seward. Instead of lazing around the room all morning waiting for it to lift, though, we got going around 9am. So just a bit of lazing. We figure it'll be clearer up in the mountains away from the bay.

Speaking of lazing, yesterday evening was lazy, too. We got back from our amazing hike to Exit Glacier and went straight to dinner. Since  it was early-ish (only about 7pm) we had our choice of restaurants open. But at the dining choices in Seward are weak, we decided our best bet was a highly rated hamburger stand. Reader, they had a 4.5 star rating on Yelp yet served cooked-from-frozen hamburger patties. That tells you how weak the choices in this town are. Well, at least we improved upon the evening by going to an ice cream parlor afterwards. The ice cream was really good. And it was funny waiting in a line out the door in 55° weather to get ice cream.

This morning we had our usual in-room breakfast. I microwaved a couple of Hot Pockets I bought at Safeway last night, Hawk ate crackers and cheese. I tell you, if this room had an oven— like was common at small motels in New Zealand— we'd have bought better eats at the grocery store and skipped playing restaurant roulette simply to cook here.

We did a bit of gift-shopping in town before heading out for a day of hiking. Gift shops are mostly tourist traps, so we didn't expect to buy much. We were there to see if anything caught our fancy. ...Which means mostly rocks and rock art for Hawk, and commemorative stuffed animals for both of us. We bought an eagle! I'll share a photo later as I'm composing this blog at a gas station.

Yes, I'm sitting at a gas station right now. For breakfast. Well, second breakfast. ...Okay, more like brunch.

We were hungry for more eats before heading out hiking for the day, but it was before 11am so few of the town's restaurants were open yet, and they all suck anyway. (Except ice cream. But 10:45am is too early for ice cream.) So we headed to a gas station with a convenience store and ready-to-eat hot food.

The first gas station didn't have the eats we were looking for, but the second one, right next door to it, did. Fortunately Seward is just big enough to support two gas stations! 😂 I've chowed down on a beef-and-cheese burrito rolled by some guy in the back.  It was... passable... especially in a place where "South of the Border" means British Columbia, Canada. 🤣

Now it's time to get rolling toward today's adventure.

On Sunday we drove out to the bucolic small town of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, about 45 minutes from my sister's house. Our plan for the day was to see things related to the history of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) and role-playing games (RPGs) in general.

"What does any of that have to do with a small midwestern town?" you might wonder. Well, if you're a D&D player or RPGer from way back, you know. You know Lake Geneva as the headquarters of TSR, Inc., the pioneering RPG publisher, the first location of Gen Con, the biggest boardgame convention in the US, and the home of Gary Gygax— co-creator of the concept of RPGs, co-author of D&D, founder of Gen Con, and co-founder of TSR, Inc.

The four of us adults in the group are all D&D players from way back. My sister and I first played D&D in 1982, and my spouse and I still play D&D. Visiting some of the D&D related sites in Lake Geneva was like a pilgrimage for us. Plus, it was an opportunity for a pleasant walk on nice summer afternoon in Wisconsin.

Our first stop on the day's itinerary was the Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum. Coincidentally it's in the building where TSR's headquarters was for several years. Unfortunately it wasn't open yet for the day when we arrived. (Its hours changed recently and were not well advertised aside from the small, hand-written sign in the window. 😅) Thus we proceeded to the next stop on our itinerary: visiting the house where Gary Gygax lived when he created D&D.



"OMG, you visited a guy's house," you might wonder, "That he hasn't lived in for decades. Isn't that kind of obsessive/creepy?"

The answer is No/No. It wasn't our main purpose for the trip. The main things for us were to visit the museum and to see the other thing Lake Geneva is known for, the beautiful lake. Gygax's old house is merely something that came up when we were searching for other things to do in town to help fill out a day's activities. And it was pretty much on the route for walking from the museum to the lake shore next to downtown Lake Geneva.

Learning about the Man behind the Game

I always find it insightful to learn about where and how a notable person lived. That's because people are partly the product of their environment. In addition, the things people create are also partly the product of the environment in which they're created. And sometimes the things we assume about a creator from the creation are inaccurate.

For example, when I was an adolescent D&D player in the mid 1980s I imagined Gary Gygax as being in his early 30s at the time. That image came from noting that D&D dated to 1978^* and me figuring that Gygax had created it with his buddies from college while they were in their early 20s. I made that assumption based on the types of people I saw playing D&D. Nearly none of them I'd met were older than college/grad student age. Plus, the dedication to this kind of fantasy creation just seemed like something post-college hangers-on would have the interest— and, frankly, the time— to create.

I first learned that my image of Gygax was wrong just a few years later. Friends and I saw a TV interview clip with him in the late 1980s, maybe 1988. "OMG, he's 50?!!?" we all marveled. It was revelatory that a middle-aged man could be so into RPGs. Virtually nobody over 30 in my orbit could even understand RPGs, even when it was patiently explained to them. And it wasn't just Gygax's age. In that brief TV clip we saw he was a jovial, smiling, well-spoken man; not some dweeb with a creepy laugh and poor personal hygiene— things which were dominant stereotypes of RPG players at the time.

Walking a mile in Gygax's hometown further changed my understanding of him and the environment from which he came. Gygax was not some kid dwelling in his parents' basement long after he should have moved out on his own, nor was he a college hanger-on living in a seedy apartment with empty pizza boxes stacked on the floor and posters of hard rock bands dressed in leather, spikes, and face paint to look satanic covering the walls. (More dominant stereotypes of D&D and RPG players for years.)

Instead Gygax lived in his own house, a house he moved into in 1966, in a charming small-town America spot that looks little different today from what it likely did in 1966. He raised 5 kids there with his wife. (Gygax later had a sixth child, after he remarried following his first wife's death.) Oh, and they were all active in their Christian faith in this midwestern small town— quite a contrast with the pervasive stereotype throughout the 1980s that D&D and those who played it were, at best, un-Christian and at worst satan-worshippers.

The ideas of D&D predate its first publication in 1978 as "D&D" by many years. Gygax was a table-top war gamer since the 1960s. The idea for role-playing grew out of wargaming.... It's often credited to Dave Arneson, a friend and colleague of Gygax's, who suggested, "What if instead of simulating the movements of whole armies in a battle we play out the actions of individual heroes?" (Heavily paraphrased.) That, combined with Gygax's early work on extending wargaming to medieval settings via the Chainmail game he published in 1971, led to a dungeon-delving game called Castle Greyhawk he created and ran on his dining room table in 1973. The first players were his wife and older kids.

Something I gained appreciation of Gygax for from this walk through his hometown, aside from how ridiculously middle-American the setting is, is how determined Gygax had to be to maintain all the connections with other creative people. He did not live in a big city. There would've been no local club full of fellow gamers from nearby he could find inspiration at. And with the technology of the 1960s and 70s there was obviously no Internet to stay connected with. He had to travel around to different cities, finding out about conventions and meeting other people, and they stay in touch with all those people via phone— and more likely snailmail letters as well.

We'd been casting around quite a bit for things to do on Sunday while visiting my sister and her family in southern Wisconsin. We mulled ideas from driving to the Wisconsin Dells for the day, to driving/riding the train to Chicago, to visiting Six Flags, to spending time at Lake Michigan, to going to a zoo. Then late Saturday evening as we were enjoying ice cream together after my niece's graduation we chanced on an idea that stuck: The Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum in Lake Geneva.



What's so significant about the Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum? Well, we old-timer role players know Lake Geneva, Wisconsin is where roleplaying games started. It's where RPG pioneer Gary Gygax lived and where he founded TSR, the publisher of the original Dungeons & Dragons game.

Lake Geneva is also where Gen Con, the biggest convention for tabletop games in the US, got its start— and its name. (Partly.¹) The con moved locations in subsequent years, ultimately landing in Indianapolis, Indiana, to make it easier for attendees from far away to get there. ...Because Lake Geneva is far away from almost everything. It's a small town, pop. 8,500 or so, an hour southwest of Milwaukee. But that meant it was only a 45 minute drive for us. Thus the four of us adults, all D&D players from back in the day— my oldest sister and I first played D&D in 1982— decided we'd take a trip to the place where it all started... and to visit the home of Gary Gygax, Creator of Worlds.



The museum occupies a building of historical significance to gaming. It was the first headquarters TSR had outside of Gary Gygax's home. And when we arrived at around 11:15am the museum was closed. A website updated a few weeks ago said it opened at 11am on Sunday, but the paper sign in the door had been taped over with news hours of 12-6. We gave brief consideration to just hanging out near the museum for 45 minutes, but it's at the corner of a residential street in postcard-perfect small town Americana. We decided not to weird out the neighbors. Instead we decided to embark on a self-guided walking tour.



I mentioned the museum is a different building from Gary Gygax's home. Well, his old home is just a few blocks away, at 330 Center Street. We walked there, along the quiet, tree-lined streets of bucolic small-town Lake Geneva.

For anyone reading this and thinking, "Oh, I'll go see Gary Gygax's home, too!" know three things. One, Gygax moved away in 1976, so this is not his home anymore. Two, the people who live here now have no connection to him— so don't ring the doorbell asking for a tour. Three, the owners do understand the curiosity of well-wishers. They permit respectful visitors to snap photos from the street and ascend the steps to the porch to read a historical placard placed inside one of the front windows.

More to read!

• We get surrounded by cicadas
• Even more cicadas
• Learning More about Gary Gygax
• The Gary Gygax Memorial Bench and Brick... plus more cicadas 🤣

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1. Gen Con started as the Lake Geneva Wargames Convention in 1968. The name Gen Con is both a shortening of that name and a deliberate play on words of The Geneva Conventions (Wikipedia link), the famous international treaties establishing protocols for humanitarian conduct in war.

West Virginia Travelog #15
Beckley, WV - Mon, 18 Sep 2023. 10:30pm

It's late evening on Monday and we're back at our hotel in Beckley, WV, after a long day of driving and hike. We visited, like, six waterfalls and logged 386 miles in the car. By way of comparison that's more than the 324 we drove coming up here from Charlotte (and round-tripping to the national park) on Saturday.

After our last hiking stop, at Douglas, Kennedy, and Albert Falls, we knew we'd be getting back to Beckley too late for dinner. We started looking for eats in small towns along the way. The choices in small-town Appalachia aren't great. We settled on a pizza-and-pasta restaurant, but after we sat down there we found that service was running really slowly. We bounced out and tried a Mexican restaurant next door (yes, we stopped in, like, the one small town with a Mexican restaurant) but it was closed for the next several days.

Dejected and about to get back in the car, I spotted a Chinese buffet restaurant across the parking lot. Hawk was reluctant at first, but I suggested we could look at the food on the buffet and bounce again if it looked disgusting. It looked... surprisingly good, for small-town Appalachian Chinese. When we walked in we were the only customers there, but apparently us breaking the seal on the doors let everyone in town know that cosmopolitan urbanites thought it was edible, and soon there were six other tables of people dining with us.

We got back to the hotel just in time to slip into the hot tub for a soak. Now we're feeling more relaxed and ready for bed. We have a lot planned for tomorrow— t's our last day in West Virginia! How how time flies.

Mississippi Travelog #3
Columbia, MS - Wednesday, 25 Apr 2023, 8am

After hiking a few waterfalls at Clark Creek Natural Area yesterday we drove east to Columbia, MS. If you've never heard of the town, you're not alone. It's home to fewer than 6,000 people today. When it was incorporated over 200 years ago it was named because some of the influential settlers had moved from Columbia, SC, and... well, one thing we know about settlers in the US is that they are rarely original with place names.

But why are we here? We're here because a) it's an overnight between two places we're visiting, b) it has a hot tub, and c) it's close to the one we're visiting later this morning, Red Bluff. Unfortunately, (b) the hot tub is not working. After I called the hotel a few nights ago to double-check. Grr. I'm starting to feel like hot tubs are the McDonald's shake machines of the hotel industry.

Last night we ate at a local Mexican restaurant. Surprisingly there are several Mexican restaurants in this little town nowhere near the border. The food wasn't very good, though. And the wait staff were almost comical in their southern yokel pronunciation of items on the menu named in Spanish. But it was food, and we were hungry.

After dinner we headed back to the hotel. I almost didn't mind the hot tub being busted as I was tired and happy just to go to bed. I think I was more cheesed that the room was so small. Like, seriously, it took careful arrangement to position our bags and still be able to move around. But once I cleared a path to the bed and a space to lie down, I did, and I fell asleep.

So, as for today. Red Bluff. You probably haven't heard of that, either... of if you have, you might be thinking of Red Bluff, California. Red Bluff here is also known as the Grand Canyon of Mississippi. It's a hillside of colorful rock and dirt that has been eroded by a river, leaving gaping canyons of bright hues. It's about 20 minutes outside of town, and we'll drive over there after having breakfast and packing our bags.

5 Days in the Desert travelog #9
Barstow, CA - Sun, 25 Dec 2022, 7:15am

Okay, I'm running behind on getting pictures from this trip ready to blog— as always. I'm going to pull this entry forward since it's topical to Christmas and I don't want to leave it in the queue until the 27th or whenever.

Let me start by saying Christmas isn't a big deal to either me or Hawk. Hawk is Jewish, so she never celebrated Christmas. I grew up in a Christian family but have been atheist for... decades now. As part of my atheism I have no interest in celebrating Christian holy days... of which Christmas is one, despite modern American society's efforts to redefine it as a weeks-long secular holiday all about having parties, drinking, and exchanging gifts. ...Which is basically what the ancient Roman celebration of Saturnalia was, BTW.

So we don't celebrate Christmas. We do other things with our time off from work instead. Like, travel! That's why we're doing this 5 Days in the Desert thing. Traveling over Christmas means, though, that lots of stuff we might otherwise depend on shuts down for a day or two. We don't begrudge businesses shutting down to let their employees enjoy the day off. We just plan around it.

For example, we shopped for groceries ahead of time to stash in our hotel room so that we could eat dinner on Christmas Eve and all day on Christmas out of our own supply rather than depend on finding restaurants that are open. Not everything is closed, though. As we drove back to Barstow from a beautiful hike at Hole-in-the-Wall and the Rings Loop (links to come when I publish these entries!) Hawk phoned ahead to several restaurants to find out if anyone's open. Mostly she called Chinese restaurants. It's a Jewish tradition from her upbringing to eat Chinese food on Christmas Eve.

Chinese food is not exactly plentiful in desert towns. It's also not exactly good. We did find one Chinese restaurant open... and as you might expect from the category of "Chinese restaurant in a desert town" it was basically pan-Asian food cuisine plus burgers, steaks, and fries. And it was... edible.

This morning for breakfast we ate in the room. Hawk had leftover chow fun from last night. I didn't bring home my leftovers because they were... no better than "edible". I ate some sliced meat, cheese, and crackers from what I stashed in the room's fridge. As a plus, eating in the room means breakfast has been fast. We're looking to hit the road by 7:30am so we can get in a full day with at least two hikes before dusk.