canyonwalker: Mr. Moneybags enjoys his wealth (money)
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.


canyonwalker: My other car is a pair of hiking boots (in beauty I walk)
Blue Ridge Trip '24 #20
Newland, NC - Thu, 5 Sep 2024. 2pm

After hiking at Otter Falls this morning we drove west, around the base of Grandfather Mountain— which we hiked yesterday afternoon. Grandfather's nearly 6,000' peak was shrouded in clouds at noon. It's a good thing we were only looking for lunch. As we ate at a restaurant in nearby Banner Elk the clouds burned off— not just around Grandfather Mountain's summit but those over pretty much everything in the area. We enjoyed a sunnier drive as we headed to our next hiking destination, Waterfalls Park.

Waterfalls Park, Newland NC (Sep 2024)

Otter Falls was in the oddly named town of Seven Devils. This time we're in a blandly named town of Newland (but at least it's not named Bland) at the oddly named Waterfall Park. ...Okay, that's more bland than odd, too. The town has a small set of waterfalls on a creek, and they've nicely made a small park around it. There's also a grave memorial in this park, so possibly the land for the park used to be privately owned but then was donated.

Waterfalls Park, Newland NC (Sep 2024)

A short trail leads up past various small tiers of waterfalls. Signs indicate that Boy Scouts built it and the fire department maintains it.

Waterfalls Park, Newland NC (Sep 2024)

The trails continue farther up the canyon around the stream. We explored them for a bit but realized they were all diverging from the creek, and returned back down to appreciate the falls again.

Waterfalls Park, Newland NC (Sep 2024)

This little park in an out-of-the-way small town had a decent number of visitors this afternoon. There were two other small groups when we arrived, and it looked like 3 more by the time we left. The visitors split into two categories: Those who, like us, were there to see the falls by hiking the trails; and those who were just there to sit at the picnic tables on the grassy lawn below, content to enjoy the falls as background sound. There may come a time in my life when I can't to venture further than the gravel path to a picnic table.... I plan for it not to be anytime soon. In beauty I walk.

canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
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.

canyonwalker: My old '98 M3 convertible (road trip!)
Blue Ridge Trip '24 #12
Afton, VA - Tue, 3 Sep 2024. 4:15pm

I've mentioned the Skyline Drive in my past few blogs. I should describe what it actually is, for those who don't know. The Skyline Drive is a mountaintop road that traces 105 miles through the length of Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. In the north the road starts in Front Royal, VA at highway US-340 a few miles from the junction of I-66 and I-81. In the south it ends in the tiny town of Afton, VA at highway US-250 near the junction with I-64. It traces along the ridge of the Blue Ridge Mountains, generally above 3,000' elevation though it dips lower at a few passes it crosses.

Today we drove the Skyline Drive from its southern end, above the cities of Waynesboro and Charlottesville, about 25 miles north to the trailhead for Doyles River Falls.

A pullout on the Skyline Drive overlooking the Shenandoah Valley (Sep 2024)

The Skyline Drive isn't just a route to get from Point A to Point B, though it does serve that purpose, too. Along its length are some 75 scenic overlooks where motorists can stop to enjoy the vistas. We didn't do much of that on our trip today, as we have a fairly full itinerary with a big hike earlier today and a long drive ahead of us to our next stop in North Carolina tonight. But just driving the road, which itself is scenic with its old-timey construction from the 1930s and the Civilian Conservation Corps, and stopping at lots of the scenic pullouts, can be a vacation in and of itself. I know because that's the first vacation I ever remember having!

I think I was about 8 years old at the time, though I could have been 7 or 9. It was the first actual vacation I remember my parents taking with my younger sister and me. Actual, meaning we didn't just go visit my grandparents' house for a week or a weekend. We stayed at a hotels. Just visiting a hotel was a new experience, and splashing around in the Howard Johnson's kid-friendly swimming pool was practically a vacation unto itself, but on that trip we also drove a good bit of the Skyline Drive out and back. I'd never seen mountains before. Mountains were amazing. That first vacation kindled my interest in the great outdoors, and mountains in particular, something that's never left me in over 40 years since.

My family returned to the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Skyline Drive a few more times during my childhood. The memories are almost all positive. One, though, is bittersweet. I was reminded of that one today, too.

A Bittersweet Stop on Memory Lane

A now-abandoned hilltop hotel and restaurant at the end of the Skyline Drive (Sep 2024)

At the southern end of the Skyline Drive, near Interstate 64, is a hotel on a hilltop. Once upon a time it was a Howard Johnson's hotel. We stayed at a lot of HoJo's hotels (as they were casually known) back in the day. They were family friendly, had a decent standard of quality, and always had a HoJo's restaurant attached, which was also very family friendly.

Today the hotel stands empty and abandoned. I'm not sure what happened here, as it seems like a good place for a hotel. The HoJo's brand did run into difficulties years ago. Part of my childhood experience with them was seeing their quality start to slide downhill. Their once ubiquitous restaurants, with the orange and teal roofs, started to close down.

I have bittersweet memories of this now-abandoned restaurant and hotel from almost 40 years ago (Sep 2024)

What's bittersweet is not just that the HoJo's chain deteriorated and closed, or that this particular HoJo hotel and restaurant are long abandoned and overgrown with weeds. It's also that my memories of staying here are mixed.

We stayed here at part of a short vacation my parents took us on at the last minute. Vacations of any kind were rare enough in my family growing up. This one was also spontaneous. Like, my parents decided on a Friday, "Let's take the kids and go to the mountains this weekend." My parents were never spontaneous.

Car Trouble (Almost 40 Years Ago)

Things were going well on the trip. We checked in to the hotel on top of the hill then drove back down for a meal at the HoJo's restaurant (the one now overgrown) below. But as we piled back into the car after lunch to drive up the hill, the car couldn't make it. It lost power on the hill, and my dad carefully reversed it back to the parking lot.

It was a Saturday afternoon, and in this small town there was no place to get a car fixed until Monday. Actually there was no place to get this car fixed anytime in this small town. The closest shop was down the mountain in Waynesboro. And they weren't open until Monday. So we had a longer-than-planned stay at this mountaintop hotel.

As a kid, the stay was great. Swimming in the pool was fun, having an extra day was fun. Eating dinner at the steakhouse in the hotel was fun— we didn't eat every meal at HoJo's restaurant— especially laughing to myself about why the restaurant found it necessary to post signs on every wall inside telling patrons, "DO NOT ORDER STEAK 'WELL DONE'". Like, that's their usual clientele: braying jackasses who think bellowing, "And make it WELL DONE!!" when ordering a steak shows what sophisticated customers they are. Stay classy, small town America.

As a kid, it was good times. But I wasn't just a kid. I was a teen. I was mature enough to think about situations from other people's perspective. From my parents' perspective this had to be worrisome. Were the kids going to be okay here? How long would it take to get the car fixed? Would my dad miss more than one unexpected day of work? And how much would this all cost? Not just the car repairs, but also the extra hotel night and all the dining out. Money was tight for my parents. That's why our vacations were few and simple compared to many of my schoolmates' families, and why spontaneity wasn't really a thing for us.

The good thing with this star-crossed trip is that the car got fixed quickly on Monday morning. The cost wasn't huge though it was certainly a lot for my parents' already strained budget. And we kids had a good time hanging out at the hotel's pool for an extra day.


canyonwalker: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Travel! (planes trains and automobiles)
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.

Hampton Inn, Lexington VA (Sep 2024)

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!


canyonwalker: My other car is a pair of hiking boots (in beauty I walk)
Blue Ridge Trip '24 #7
Montebello, VA - Mon, 2 Sep 2024. 4pm

This afternoon we hiked Crabtree Falls in the George Washington and Jefferson National Forest in Virginia. It's said to be the tallest waterfall east of the Mississippi, falling over 1,200' in a series of cascades. IMO the cascades are too far apart to really call them one waterfall, but hey, a series of smaller waterfalls? Sign me up!

Crabtree Falls, George Washington National Forest (Sep 2024)

The first viewing platform for Crabtree Falls is a short distance up the trail. The trail is paved to this point so it's relatively easy. It is up, though. Taking pictures at the falls was a good excuse to stop and catch my breath. 😅

The trail to the top of the falls is not that long. It's a 3.6 mile round trip hike from the parking area. It's a climb of over 1,000' feet, though. The trail helpfully has little mileposts every tenth of a mile to let you know how far you've gone— and how much is left. I found these useful for pacing myself as the hike is also over 1,000' of ascent. I was huffing and puffing a lot though managed a better pace than I expected.

A lot of the falls on this stream are hard to see. They're behind heavy tree cover, they're around the corner from rocks, the viewing points are mostly above them, etc. As a result the next spot I really enjoyed stopping was almost at the top.

Crabtree Falls, George Washington National Forest (Sep 2024)

This is the uppermost cascade of Crabtree Falls (above). Well, it's part of it. The water cascades down a fair bit below here. The viewing platform is kind of in the middle, and I can't get all of it in one frame. And it's hard really to see the part of the falls below me, anyway. That's always the problem with hiking up above waterfalls; often enough it's a poor view from above.

Speaking of above, Hawk continued up the trail while I experimented with different vantage points for pictures here. She waved to me from the top of the slickrock. As expected, the view from above wasn't great, she told me when she got back. I mean, there's a good view out across the valley and to the other hills in the area, but not a good view of the falls.

Crabtree Falls, George Washington National Forest (Sep 2024)

On the way back down the trail I poked around at hiking some of the use trails to get closer to the water. The main trail, like I said, often didn't afford great views. But this spot (photo above) was maybe just 20 steps off the trail and didn't involve particularly dangerous terrain to get to. I mean, a person could slip and fall anywhere. This just isn't as dangerous as getting too close to the edge at Yosemite Falls (1,000' straight drop) or hiking in 110° heat with insufficient water.

We're done with the hike now and back in civilization... sort of. There's a general store and post office in the tiny town of Montebello, Virginia, a few miles back up the road. There's no cell signal here; that's how small and remote of a town it is. But it's a good place to buy an ice cream bar and sit on the porch to enjoy it.


canyonwalker: My old '98 M3 convertible (road trip!)
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.

Angel Falls in Sierra National Forest (Jun 2024)

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.

canyonwalker: My old '98 M3 convertible (road trip!)
Tonight we're at a hotel in Chowchilla, California. No, not chinchilla. That's a species of rodent native to the Andes Mountains of Chile. Chowchilla. It's a town of approximately 19,000 people in California's Central Valley. By California standards that's basically a highway rest stop, though by New Zealand standards... it's twice the size of the towns of Clinton and Gore, combined.

Chinchillas
(image from Wikipedia article)
Why Chowchilla? It's Friday Night Halfway. We're headed to a couple of hikes in the Sierra National Forest tomorrow. Today's drive of 128 miles knocks out a few hours of travel, leaving us a drive of just 56 miles, about 1 hour 15 minutes, to our first hiking trail tomorrow.

We got stuck in some traffic driving to Chowchilla this evening. Normally it'd be a drive of just over 2 hours. Leaving at 4:45pm— which, yes, was less than 24 hours after I got home from a business trip 🥵— we caught a bit of early rush hour traffic driving south to Gilroy on US-101. We stopped for dinner in Gilroy wondering if maybe the traffic east through the Pacheco Pass might clear a bit but, alas, it didn't. We were stuck in the usual Friday Night Escape misery on CA-152. We'd lost almost an hour to traffic delays by the time we got to Los Banos. We stopped there for a bathroom break, leg stretch, and ice cream cones. Oof, I really needed the leg stretch. And the ice cream was good, too. 😂

Continuing east from Los Banos it was smooth sailing the last leg of the trip to Chowchilla. We arrived at our hotel at 8:45pm, for a trip of 4 hours including traffic and food stops.

What's in Chowchilla, other than approximately 19,000 people? Well, first of all, that 19,000 figure apparently includes the inmates in two area prisons. How many are free to leave their rooms in the morning like we will, I don't know. 😂

Chowchilla really is a highway rest-stop type of town. I mean, people do live here. We passed by many houses and a few apartment buildings on the drive in. It's an agricultural town. People who live here presumably work the farms in this area and the businesses that support them. And staff the two prisons. 😂 But the businesses in town are mostly gas stations and a few fast food restaurants clustered near highway 99.

Update: You know what happens after Friday Night Halfway, right? It's Saturday Morning the Rest of the Way!

canyonwalker: Sullivan, a male golden eagle at UC Davis Raptor Center (Golden Eagle)
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.


canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
Alaska Travelog #16
At the hotel - Mon, 17 Jun 2024, 10am

The way it's light so late at night here in Alaska is kind of disorienting. Don't get me wrong; it was nice having twilight until 1am when we landed in Anchorage and drove to our hotel. And it's nice not worrying about about finishing our daytime activities outdoors before dark. We'll almost certainly run out of energy before the day runs out of daylight. But the sun not even starting to set until after 10pm throws off my sense of time. It's interesting to learn how many things are aligned to a kind of circadian rhythm. Like, I forget to eat dinner.

I forget to eat dinner. That's certainly not a sentence I ever thought I'd write! While some people I know easily forget to eat, when I haven't eaten in a while my body reminds me approximately every 3 minutes that food is delicious and would fill a void in my stomach. But here with sun not even dropping behind the mountains until 10pm, I've been like, "Woah, it's after 8pm already, I should get dinner!"

Unfortunately the choices for dinner in this small town of Seward are few. There are a handful of restaurants at the low end of the spectrum, dive-y type places serving small-town America staples like burgers, pizza, and chicken fingers with your choice of barbecue sauce or ranch. Then there are high end, or at least high end-looking places with steak and seafood and prices that promise a tab of $50-70 per person after adding a drink, tax, and tip. We're not the spendy-dinner type of people, especially when traveling in small towns where all the food looks kind of suspect, so we've eaten at the dive-y joints. And that— not being disoriented by the sun— is why I've had pizza 4x in 36 hours.

No, I didn't buy pizza 4 times in 36 hours. I bought it two nights in a row for dinner. But each time there were leftovers. And since I have a thrifty streak from childhood I can't quite outgrow (and also the pizza wasn't disgusting) I ate the leftovers for breakfast both yesterday and today.

But hey, back to the midnight sun thing. You'd think that the flip side of midnight sun would be early morning sun. Like, blazing sun preventing sleep at 4am. Well, here in Seward, there's been morning fog. So yay being able to sleep in 'til a morning hour. But boo not being able to get out and enjoy the daylight right away.

Today we're planning to hike up to Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park. Just like yesterday's cruise in the fjords started out with hours of heavy fog that left me uncertain we'd get to see anything, so too does today's fog make me reluctant to head into the park until I see evidence the clouds are starting to burn off. And here it is 10am already... which means the sun's been up— not that we can see it— for almost 6 hours! Well, it's a good thing there's another 13 hours of daylight left for us to go hiking later today. 🤣

canyonwalker: Roll to hit! (d&d)
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.

Home where Gary Gygax created Dungeons & Dragons (Jun 2024)

"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.

canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
When we visited Lake Geneva, Wisconsin on Sunday to see the birthplace of role-playing games we also got an unexpected encounter with wildlife: Cicadas. Cicadas were out in force in the leafy old small town.

We first noticed something different when we parked an climbed out of the car. There was a warbling sound filling the air. "Sounds like a car alarm a block or two away," one of the group quipped. "Sounds like multiple car alarms at the same time," another said. "Wait, no, it's cicadas," we all realized moments later. The four of us adults had all heard cicadas before, though not in many years. And the tone of their sound was slightly different from what I, at least, remember from 37-ish years ago.

Close-up view of a cicada (Jun 2024)

One of the group spotted a cicada in the tree next to us. We all whipped out our phones to start taking pictures. Then we saw another in the tree. And another. Then another in the grass. Then they got bold enough to start flying around us. They started landing on our shirts, our heads, our legs.

Horror Movie Tropes

This encounter with nature happened at the time we were trying to visit the Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum and realized it was closed for another 45 minutes. Visiting Gary Gygax's old house, where he lived when he co-created roleplaying games, D&D, and TSR, was also on our agenda. And it was just a few blocks away, meaning we could walk. Except half the group's phones weren't working right for some reason. One showed our location and claimed to have signal but couldn't load any data (i.e., it had "fake bars"), another showed our location as 40 miles away. At this point my brother-in-law and I quipped that we were clearly characters in a horror movie as we were hitting nearly every horror movie trope:

  1. We arrived in an area with an unexpected threat— hordes of cicadas.

  2. We initially misread the signs of threat, thinking it was something mundane— in this case, the sound of a car alarm.

  3. Having noticed the threat we then greatly underestimated its magnitude, deeming it more a cute curiosity than something threatening.

  4. We then decided to walk— walkdeeper into the threat zone.

  5. And then our cell phones mysteriously stopped working.

#5 is an amusing trope of modern horror movies. Nearly all horror movies ever would be spoiled if the characters just had cell phones. They could call for help, look up information, and communicate with each other even if they are split up.

Classic horror movies didn't have to deal with this suspense-killing reality because there were no cell phones— or they weren't common yet. By the late 90s and early 00s most adults had cell phones, but movie makers often didn't acknowledge their existence since they'd destroy the plot. That's when "Why does nobody in this movie have a cellphone?" started to become a trope.

By the 2010s moviemakers generally had to acknowledge that phones existed and could help protagonists make short work of mysteries— so then they'd come up with sometimes-flimsy reasons why cell phones stopped working. That's a related trope, "Suddenly cellphones stop working." And occasionally they still revert to the older trope of "Surprisingly nobody here owns a cellphone" because they (the writers) are that lazy.

Keep reading
We continue headlong into more cicadas!


canyonwalker: Roll to hit! (d&d)
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.

Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin (Jun 2024)

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.

Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin (Jun 2024)

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.

Home where Gary Gygax created Dungeons & Dragons (Jun 2024)

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!



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.

canyonwalker: My other car is a pair of hiking boots (in beauty I walk)
On Sunday this weekend we started off taking it easy. We were pretty wrecked— but in a good way— from our epic hike at Zim Zim Falls a day earlier. We spent the morning taking it easy, went out for lunch and to run a bunch of shopping errands, then came back home before deciding what to do next. "Spend the afternoon laying around the pool" was seriously entertained as an idea... but then we agreed getting out for a short hike in the area would be better. We could always come back to the pool afterward. 😂

"Where to go hiking?" was the next challenge. For that I suggested Alviso Marina County Park. It's nearby... almost deceptively so, because going to Alviso is almost like going to another planet.

Alviso is a scruffy town in the shadow of Silicon Valley (May 2024)

First, Alviso is like the land that time and Silicon Valley forgot. It's an old time-y, down-on-its-luck little burg in the shadow of Silicon Valley. It was a bustling local port some 120 years ago. In the mid 20th century it was a heavy manufacturing town. Now all that remains of those industries are the empty shells of buildings that haven't actually been torn down. Ah, but there's something different I noticed compared to our previous visit here, in August 2023. There's no longer a wrecked ship in that grassy field in the scene above. It had only been there for, like, fifty years. For 50 years nobody cared to take it away, and nobody cared that nobody cared.

Alviso is also like a gateway to another world in its gateway to the great outdoors.

Alviso Marina County Park offers a gateway seemingly to another world (May 2024)

Go through these gates and it's not just rushes at the foot of the San Francisco Bay you're walking into. The South Bay is full of salt ponds.

What's so special about salt ponds?

Salt ponds at Alviso Marina County Park (May 2024)

This. This is what's special about salt ponds. It's like the surface of Mars, but it's water.

Salt ponds at Alviso Marina County Park (May 2024)

With a beach made entirely of salt.

Salt ponds at Alviso Marina County Park (May 2024)

Salt ponds here are a naturally occurring phenomenon. The Ohlone people native to this area harvest salt for centuries. When Americans settled here in the1800s they commercialized salt production. There's still parts of the South Bay shorelines that are used for the salt business, though this area was sold back to the public for restoration as a natural habitat. So this orange water and salt beach (and the salt islands in the photo above) are natural.

canyonwalker: Let's Get the Party Started! (let's get the party started)
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.

canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
I forgot to mention on the way to hiking Susan Falls on Monday we stopped to fill gas in our car. As an American that's normally a non-event, a basic thing of life I've been doing since before age 16. Except this was in Oregon. It's one of the two states in the US that ban self-serve gas. A 1951 law cites the reasons as youth employment and life-threatening dangers. Yes, it cites those two arguments in consecutive sentences. Pumping gas is so dangerous, let's make kids do it for menial wages! 🙄

...Actually Oregon only partly bans self-serve gas. Diesel has always been self-serve, and starting several years ago Oregon amended its laws to allow self service for gasoline in rural counties. When we stopped at a Shell station umpteen miles outside Roseburg I thought we were in one of those rural areas. Drivers of a few other vehicles at the pumps were operating the pumps themselves, and no staff were on hand to pump the gas for us. I started up the pump as Hawk went inside to buy a snack.

Hawk came back out and told me the the cashier inside was aghast that we started pumping our gas. It turns out we were not in a self-serve area. "OMG, do you need any help with that??" the cashier asked, belatedly.

"No, we're from California," Hawk said.

What Hawk should have said was, "No, we're from the 48½ states in the US where this is normal."

canyonwalker: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Travel! (planes trains and automobiles)
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.

canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
North Las Vegas Travelog #1
North Las Vegas, NV - Fri, 17 Feb 2023, 6pm

Friday 2/17 was a day of shifting gears in Las Vegas. First, I stayed up too late into the wee hours of Friday morning, celebrating my President's Club win with other winners and a few well-wishers. I didn't get to bed until after 2. And I had 1-2 more drinks than optimal.

I felt the pain of those two choices Friday morning at 6:45am with my usual weekday alarm. I sat bolt upright in bed when the alarm rang, my head aching and my stomach roiling. I set a second alarm for 8 and tried going back to sleep, but it was no use. The sun was streaming through the gap I'd purposefully left in the curtains. I was wide awake.

I began the morning slowly, nibbling on a protein bar and drinking a few cups of water before taking a long (for me— more than 5 minutes) shower. I opened my work computer to catch up on email and Slack I'd purposefully let slide during SKO. Fortunately there was't much backlogged as almost everyone I work with was at SKO, too.

I had a meeting at 8:30 with one of my sales colleagues. She was at the hotel, too, but we agreed it was more convenient to meet via teleconference than try to find a quiet place to sit together. It was just as well because we were reviewing a list of her accounts. I had the spreadsheet up on my screen and I was giving feedback on various opportunities. She was listening and answering questions while slowly packing her bags to leave.

Speaking of leaving, Friday was also my day to leave... but in leaving Las Vegas I only went as far as North Las Vegas. Yes, that's a city, BTW. A quick look at Google Maps tells me North Las Vegas has a population over 250,000 and is the fourth largest city in Nevada!

I checked out of my room at the Wynn, got lunch at Grimaldi's (a pizzeria) across the street at the Palazzo, then Lyfted to the airport car rental center and picked up my rental car to drive out to North LV. Hawk and I are staying out here for the next 3 nights.

...Yes, Hawk is joining me this evening. She's flying in from SJC after a full workday. I'll pick her up at the airport around 9:30pm.

But as for this place out in North Las Vegas... wow, this is really on the edge of town. I picked it because the price was good, the amenities were what we wanted, and we don't care about being near any of the casinos or gaudy glitz of Las Vegas— in fact the farther away the better! But wow, this is out where the quiet housing subdivisions give way to miles and miles of warehouses and truck yards. We're out where the sidewalk literally ends.


canyonwalker: Sullivan, a male golden eagle at UC Davis Raptor Center (Golden Eagle)
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.
canyonwalker: My other car is a pair of hiking boots (in beauty I walk)
Colorado Travelog #32
Hays Creek Falls, CO - Thursday, 7 Jul 2022, 8pm

We left the north rim of Black Canyon of the Gunnison after finishing up our hike to Exclamation Point and put the pedal to the metal. It was already a full day; yet we still had a few hours of driving to get to Glenwood Springs, our stop for the night. We wanted to be able to eat dinner at a reasonable hour and get to bed not too late— as we have another full day tomorrow, starting with a hiking reservation for Hanging Lake at 8:30am.

Driving from the remote north rim of Black Canyon to Glenwood Springs took us through a remote area of Colorado. In the valleys and mesas out here are a handful of small towns, all rural agricultural and mining towns. We looked for eats to see if we could at least have dinner before 10pm... but one Crawford had basically no restaurants, Hotchkiss had a few that were mostly closed, and Paonia was mostly wineries (that were also closed). I ate a protein bar to stave off hunger. It was my third bar of the day; basically the only food I've eaten!

We pressed on through the valleys and up over a high pass, aiming to reach Glenwood Springs as early as possible. It seemed we'd make it before 9— early enough still to get dinner and early enough to settle down for the night afterward at a reasonable hour. We were making good time as we climbed over the McClure Pass at 9,000'... then after dropping back down the other side we saw something that stopped us in our tracks. A waterfall. 😂

Hays Creek Falls is one we've actually been to before. I thought the stretch of road looked familiar when we passed the junction with State Route 3. Spotting these falls while zooming past at 55mph confirmed it. We visited these falls (briefly) when we were driving in the opposite direction to the almost-ghost town of Crystal, CO on a trip 4 years ago.

Of course, we didn't just blast past the falls at 55mph. I hit the brakes, pulled off on a wide spot in the road, made a quick U-turn, and drove back to the small parking pull-out in front of the falls.

Hays Creek Falls near Redstone, CO (Jul 2022)

From the road you can partly see the falls; that's how I knew where we were & that it was worth stopping. From the small parking area a walk of just a few tens of meters brings you up to the rock apron at the base of the falls where I snapped the photo above.

The entire stop took only about 10 minutes. Thus it wasn't really a setback in our timing to get to Glenwood Springs. But even if it had taken 30 minutes it would've been worth it. I guess I could always have a fourth protein bar for dinner if need be. 🤢

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