Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

I'm checking in how I'm using— and not using— my frequent flyer/hotel points for travel in June 2024. As usual, our trips use a mix of points and cash. That's because while points rates are almost always available for bookings in modern airline/hotel programs, they are often poor values for the high number of points required relative to the cash price. Thus I check both rates and do a bit of arbitrage in choosing which currency to pay with, cash or points. (Of course you've got to know what the points are worth to make this arbitrage.)

On our trip to Wisconsin earlier this week:

• I booked our hotel room with Marriott points. Cash prices weren't that high, as there was a discount for a 5 night stay. But there's also a points discount for a 5 night stay: pay points for 4 nights, get the 5th night free. It's a standard Marriott policy. That helped the points rate beat out the cash price.


• For our flights on Southwest Airlines, the cash-vs-points tradeoff was also close to being equal. The numbers tipping slightly in favor of cash on the way out and points on the way home, so I booked it as a split itinerary.


• The Avis rental car I paid cash for. I wish there were a decent way to use points on rental cars since they've gotten so pricey— even with the worst of the post-pandemic price surge past us, rental cars are still routinely double what they cost in early 2020— but the rental car loyalty programs have all gone to shit so it's not worth chasing the points.

On our trip to Alaska this weekend and into next week:

• I booked tonight's hotel in Anchorage with Hilton points. Cash and points rates were all absurdly high, so as a matter of arbitrage I decided I'd rather get gouged for points than hard cash.


• For the remainder of the trip there are no chain hotels in the small town where we're staying, so there's no choice but to pay cash there.


• For our flights on United, I found a great points rate on the way home, so I booked those tickets with points. On the way out tonight, cash prices were high and points prices were absurd so (arbitrage again) I picked cash. But paying cash made us eligible for an upgrade— and we've already been upgraded for our flight tonight. We're looking forward to relaxing in first class on tonight's flight from San Francisco to Anchorage.


• Rental cars in Alaska are even stupid-er expensive than elsewhere, but there continued to be no reasonable points alternative that I see, so stupid-er amounts of cash it is. Alaska's too big to uber around.

MDW Airport - Wed, 12 Jun 2024, 5pm

It's Wednesday late afternoon and I'm quickly typing out a few notes at MDW airport. Yes, I'm skipping ahead more than 48 hours since the topic of my previous blog. Not a lot blog-worthy happened in those 48+ hours. 🤣

We left our hotel in Wisconsin Wednesday at 2pm. Yay, late checkout. I needed that to finish a cluster of meetings early this afternoon as part of working remotely from the hotel. Working remotely didn't end there, though. Upon arriving at the airport I quickly dove into another string of 3 meetings.

Our flight home this evening on Southwest is delayed, predictably.



In fact the delay was so predictable Southwest marked the flight delayed as of last night! You know something's wrong when they can tell you a day ahead of time that they'll be late. I believe what's wrong in this case is that Southwest has overscheduled flights in the early evening hour at MDW and is allowed to get away with covering that lie with "Oops, this flight is delayed" every day. 🙄

Last Sunday we drove from my sister's house to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin to visit the Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum. That was the main item on our agenda, though when we arrived around 11:15am it was closed. We temporized by skipping ahead to everything else on our list: seeing Gary Gygax's home and searching for the Gary Gygax Memorial Bench and Memorial Brick. Oh, and along the way we acted like characters in a horror movie— or would that be foolish adventurers in a D&D adventure— ignoring the peril of a monster swarm around us.

After all that we came back to the Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum. We kind of had to, as our car was parked there. 🤣 Fortunately the museum was open by then.



The museum inhabits a building, a converted old house, that was the first headquarters of TSR after Gary Gygax moved it out of his house, a few blocks aways. We dropped a ten-spot to cover the $2 admission for the 5 of us and went in.

One of the things we would've done at the museum if we'd been able to visit at the start of the day would've been to buy dice... to bless them by rolling on Gary Gygax's memorial brick!



The museum even has these gumball machines converted to dispense diceright inside the door, apparently to aid diceless travelers in their new quest! Though as my brother-in-law quipped, "For $1 they're not going to be good dice." 🤣

The museum has a lot of D&D memorabilia from back in the day, most of it dating to (in my estimate) the late 1970s and early 1980s. Though a few thngs, like copies of the Chainmail rules book, are older.



This is a "brown box" printing of the Dungeons & Dragons rules, likely printed in 1978. The dice next to are ostensibly the set that came in the box. I'm a bit skeptical about that detail as those dice look a bit too high quality for what was commonly shipped back then. It's before my time as a D&D player, though, so I can't say with certainty. But I know my boxed set from 1982/1983 came with shitty dice. 🤣



These Basic D&D boxed sets are from around the time I entered the world of D&D. The one on the right is likely the one my cousins owned when they introduced me to D&D in 1982. When I bought my own copy months later it was a "red box" similar to those in the middle— though not in Japanese or German like the two examples here.



The thing that made me ache the most with nostalgia was this mailer envelope from the Dungeon Hobby Shop (above). The art is amusing... but it's what came inside that made me the most melancholy for having missed it decades ago. This manila envelope with collectable art on it was used to send a catalog from the Dungeon Hobby Shop.

Here's the flip side of that envelope:



The flip side shows the dragon from the previous scene now under a Charm spell cast by the adventurers.

The Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum we visited is named in honor of this gaming store from decades ago. The museum also has a copy of the catalog that would've come in this, circa 1980. The manager took it out of a glass display case and gently flipped through the many pages to show us. It was beautiful and also painful.

It wasn't seeing the 1980 vintage prices that hurt. The fact that rule books cost, like, $4.95 back then, I'm at peace with. What made me ache was having missed the opportunity to shop such a huge selection. When I was getting into D&D in the early 1980s game books were hard to find in my area. There were none for sale at any store in my suburban town. I know, because my dad in a moment of real empathy, drove me around to, like, a dozen different stores looking for them. We struck out until we went to a hobby store closer in to the big city. And even there was just one shelf of D&D. Oh, what I could have bought with my money saved from delivering a newspaper route starting at age 10!

Sometimes a walk down Memory Lane is not all fond memories. It's not necessarily memories of things that were bad.... It's sadness at being reminded there were amazing things you missed out on.

But hey, enough melancholy.



As I mentioned above, the museum is in the building where TSR's HQ moved to after it moved out of Gary Gygax's living room. I mean, TSR would've been a garage-shop operation at first... except that Gygax didn't have a garage. And since this building is familiar to old-time TSR employees, those who come to visit sign one of the doors in the place. I only recognized one of the names/signatures on the door, that of Larry Elmore. He drew the drag in the upper right of the main panel.

I'll end on a high note. Behold!



Lots of people who worked at TSR back in the day were artistic. One crafted this 3D beholder. I'm not sure this is something I ever would've bought— not that this one-of was ever for sale. Where would I put it? But I would've bought a huge canvas map like the one on the wall behind the shelves. Alas that's also a one-of, hand crafted by one of the TSR employees years ago for her game.

As we walked through a leafy residential neighborhood in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin on Sunday we saw— and heard— cicadas. These insects only come out once every 17 years (or 13; see below), and it had been more than 2x17 years since since we adults in the group had experienced their swarm.

At first we saw just a few cicadas in a tree next to us. As we lingered for a few minutes looking at them, the cicadas seemed to get more bold around us. They started flying around us, bumping into us, and even landing on our clothes and skin. One landed on my brother-in-law's shoulder, for example:



Bugs bouncing off and landing on our bodies was disorienting at first. I mean, the natural response when an insect buzzes around your face or lands on your skin is to swat it away. But the cicadas were kind of mellow. They weren't trying to bite us; it's like they were just resting. Or maybe exploring. Or maybe looking for a ride. Plus, swatting at them was kind of... ick... because they're so big they'd make a big splat if we squished them. 🤢

As we walked toward the house where roleplaying games and D&D were created the cicadas got thicker. Here's a quick video showing the swarm growing around us:



Prior to this spot my brother-in-law and I were already joking that we were exercising every horror movie trope, walking into danger with a swarm about to devour us. In the video you can hear me joking that I can practically hear the scary horror movie soundtrack rising around us. ...And BTW, the sound you actually hear in the video is the drone of literally thousands, maybe literally tens of thousands, of cicadas around us. 😨

Cicada Facts

If you're wondering why we're seeing cicadas in 2024 when you saw them last year or a few years ago, the reason is that there are a number of different regional broods that emerge in different years. There are a number of articles and diagrams about this you can find online. Here's a map I found in an Encyclopaedia Britannica article:



A similar chart is in this article on Vox.com from May 2024.

We're in southern Wisconsin, in the dark brown region of this map. The area is part of Brood XIII, which was predicted to emerge this year (2024). You can see from the map coloring and legend that other broods emerge in different years. Most broods are on a 17 year cycle, though a few emerge every 13 years.

Curiously the map shows a square in the very southeastern corner of Wisconsin with no cicada brood. That aligns to our observations as that's where my sister and her family live, and there are no cicadas in their town or nearby towns.

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.

Today we're in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin. We arrived late last night. This morning we slept in a bit then around 10 drove over to visit with my sister at her house a few miles away.



It was just me, Hawk and my sister B. for a while at the house. B.'s daughter was going to a friend's party in a town park, and her husband was dropping her off.

B. gave us a quick tour of their home. They've lived there for several years, though it's our first time visiting.

It's an old home, over 100 years old. It was one of the first two houses in town, she explained. The one next door was originally the general store, and this house was built by the station master for the train station when the railroad came through. The home is small but has been added onto a few times over its history. That much is obvious from the front room, where the floor is sunken because there's no foundation beneath it— "They enclosed the front porch," I suggested— plus the whole second floor seems added on as the stairway is steep and crooked. Oh, and speaking of crooked, there pretty much isn't a plumb line anywhere in the house. Every window frame is crooked. Many of the doors don't close. Some of the walls are visibly leaning. None of the floors are level. And I don't just mean slightly off level; you can see where the floors dip and rise by inches across the width of a room!

While hanging out at the house we felt a sudden shake in the floor accompanied by a loud "THUNK!" sound.

"Whoa, was that an earthquake?" I asked. "In Wisconsin??"

"I think something exploded!" my sister responded. "We need to leave the house!"

"No, it's not an explosion," I assured her. "With an explosion there'd be more sounds and smoke and fire." (Yes, I know, I'm so reassuring. 🤣)

"I felt the floor under me drop one or two inches," Hawk noted.

The three of us agreed whatever it was, it came from underneath the house. "My guess is a support beam cracked," I suggested. We agreed to go down to the basement to check.

"I'm still scared of an explosion," B. said as we peered into the darkness down the steep stairs that looked like a set from the opening scenes of The Wizard of Oz.

"If something exploded down there, we'd see light from the fire and smoke coming out," I helpfully reassured her again.

Downstairs I found something similar to what I had guessed 30 seconds earlier. A metal support jack that was supporting a floor joist had rusted out and fallen over. The loss of the support created the sudden drop in the floor we felt. The "THUNK!" sound was a combination of the wood beams settling and the 6' tall steel jack hitting the concrete floor.

B. is fortunate that she and her family are renting— so it's not their problem to fix, it's the landlord's. Furthermore, they're lucky the landlord lives next door— and is an engineer. She called him on her cell phone. He came over a minute later, walking through the hedge in the back yard. And once he saw the busted support jack he was like, "Yeah, I've got a spare." I figured his house needs them, too. He probably bought a three-pack last time he needed one. 😅

Flying at 38,000' - Fri 7 Jun 2024, 4pm

This afternoon we're off to Wisconsin. We're on a flight from San Jose to Chicago, where we'll rent a car and drive the rest of the way up to Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin.

What's in Pleasant Prairie? you might ask. Is that where Andy Griffith and Barney Fife lived? No, you're thinking of Mayberry, a fictional town based on Mount Airy, North Carolina. Pleasant Prairie is where my oldest sister and her family live, and we're traveling there to celebrate their daughter's high school graduation.