Road-tripping With my Dog

Failing at throwback Thursday again.

Here I am in May of 2008, at a monument marking the 45th parallel, halfway between the Equator and the North Pole.

My dog, Kuma the Wonder Akita, and I took a road trip all by ourselves from Kenosha up to the Keweenaw Peninsula for a weekend. We slept in our car, ate cold Spaghetti-O's out of a can (well, I did; dog food for him), and stopped every damn place that caught my interest. Heavens, I miss trips like this.





My pictures from back then are so interesting to me. There are a few gems, but most of them make me think of all the things I'd do differently now. Some of them would benefit from cropping and reframing too, but if I start doing that, they're never going to get posted!

I'll probably give a bit more attention to shots of old rusting mining equipment and other ruins. That's mostly what I go up there to photograph.

( A couple more behind the cut. )

Midwinter Gaming in Milwaukee

Danae and I went to Midwinter Gaming Convention in Milwaukee this weekend. We'd been there a few years back, and the giant game library (provided by MilCoG) and lots of board-gaming space made it a great time. We were hoping for a similar experience again.

The convention has changed hotels. Previously it had been a newer facility with a more open floorplan. This year, it was in the 1927-built Hilton Milwaukee City Center. The hotel is gorgeous. Coincidentally, it was also one of the hotels that my parents, friends, and I had stayed in when Gen Con was still in Milwaukee and they used to run the games library. The hotel and some of the area around it brought back flashes of memory from back then.

Anyway, the board game area was a bit smaller and more closed off. The floorplan was more closed off, and the single room devoted to board-gaming was crowded and loud during peak times. Some of the people I talked to agreed with my suspicion that the convention is starting to focus more on LARPers, primarily World of Darkness stuff, at the expense of things like board games and tabletop RPGs. As well, MilCoG, for reasons unclear, seems to have pulled out leaving some of the other planners to pull together a library of board games on short notice that was much, much smaller. So that was a little disappointing.

But that's definitely not to say we didn't have fun. In fact, I think we both had a great time. We played a number of new games from a cross-section of genres. A Study in Emerald, based on the Neil Gaiman Sherlock Holmes / Cthulhu crossover story, was quite good. I'd be interested in a copy, but it was a Kickstarter project, is out of print, and is selling for $160 and up. I'm not *that* interested in it. Others included a sort of choose-your-own-adventure-esque game called Arabian Knights, and a couple of worker placement games, Stone Age and Alien Frontier. I won't bore you with reviews. They were all worthwhile and we got to meet some new people while we played them.

We decided to stay in the hotel Friday night; there was still an open room on the convention room block so it was a good deal. Not having to drive back to Kenosha helped make it feel like a mini-vacation.

The dealer's room was fun. I looked at some clothing and costuming stuff; one vendor with kilts and boots, one with vintage suits and suit-jackets, and one selling lots of furry garb like ears and tails. All I ended up buying, though, were expansions for Coup and Gloom with a buy one get one half off deal. There was a large selection of board games on a buy one get one table too, but out of the hundred or so, I only recognized a handful. Probably part of why they were on discount.

Once we got back to Kenosha, we kept on in the same vein. We interspersed some productive work with games with my mother and brothers. Just a bit earlier today, my brother and Danae and I finished up the first complete game of Wizards I think I've ever played. It's an early cooperative game, copyright 1982 by Avalon Hill. When I was little, I was fascinated with concept of building the game map yourself out of hexagonal tiles that the players lay out as part of game setup. I really hadn't realized how long it runs though. I thought it would take a couple hours; instead it took about 6 or seven! It's a really fun game, but I don't know that it's fun enough to merit that kind of investment.

Anyway, now that the weekend is done, I'm feeling a little down. I guess it's post-con drop. Oh well; back to the real world tomorrow. I need to make a dental appointment and I can't find my Badgercare card, so that's one of the first things on my agenda....