The group completed quests 12 and 13 of our Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall story. Both completed victoriously. Quest 13 was clearly set up as a major battle, but with fortune on our side and complementary decks we were able to deal out 80 damage across the enemy team with just 3 attacks and then mop up the remnants from there.
At a board game meetup I jumped into the tail end of the silly game Hot Streak. The players are compulsive gamblers betting on the outcome of a race of sports team mascots as well as various propositional bets along the way. I lost.
After Hot Streak, we played a game of 7 Wonders. I lost that too.
And closing out that night was a game of the rather odd Frenemy Pastry Party. In this game the only way to earn points is to either bake a cake or help someone else bake a cake. Baking a cake alone is suboptimal as it uses up your own ingredients. Contribute ingredients to someone else’s cake earns you points, but they will earn more points for the cake than you will for the ingredients. So the goal is to try to get all the other players to evenly contribute to your own cakes so the points for ingredients are diffused across the other players and cake points are concentrated on yourself. But once every figures this out cooperation is likely to deteriorate. I lost by a point once another player realized what I was doing and rallied the rest of the table to prevent me from winning.
An exploration of a future in which an artificial intelligence singularity has occurred (sentient AI systems self-developing beyond human comprehension). It starts off way too over-the-top cyberpunk, but settles down.
Uses the evolving singularity as an explanation for the Fermi Paradox.
Livesuit by James S. A. Corey
A novella set in the Captive’s War universe in between books 1 and 2. Humanity has a new weapon in their interstellar battle, bionic humans who are faster, stronger, and more resilient, but at what cost?
Kind of a parallel exploration of the Spartan units in the Halo universe.
All Systems Red by Martha Wells
Speaking of bionic humans…this novella explores a bionic, human-based security “drone” which evades its governor module and begins exploring its own free will. “Human based” in that it’s mostly robotic, but uses a human brain to provide the intelligence to the system (the details aren’t fully described in the book).
It wants to protect the people it was hired to protect, but it also mostly just wants to be left alone to watch TV shows.
Wings of Fire books 1-5
During our Pacific-northwest roadtrip we listened to audiobooks of the Wings of Fire series. We got through books 1 through 4 and partly through 5 (which I finished in paper form once we returned home).
It actually lined up oddly well with our trip. We listened to book 2, taking place mainly in the sea kingdom, as we drove up the coast. Book 3, taking place mainly in the rain forest, as we visited Hoh Rain Forest. And book 4, taking place mainly within a volcano, as we visited the Cascade Volcanic Arc including Mt. St. Helens and Crater Lake.
Books 1-5 make up a unified story arc of the “Dragonet Prophecy.” Five dragonets destined to end the Sandwing war of succession and bring peace to the continent of Pyrrhia.
Day 6 (7/16) – Another breakfast from the bin. Good thing we packed that or every morning would have been spent trying to figure out where and what to eat with no easy answers.
The day’s first stop was the Hoh Rain Forest. An appropriately rainy drive on our way in and a ~30-minute wait at the entrance station. But by the time we parked at the visitor center the rain had let up. We listened to the tail end of a ranger talk, looked around the visitor center, and then walked the 1.2 mile Spruce Nature Trail which takes you out to the bank of the Hoh River.
Next to the river there was a deer and fawn wandering about. We spent 30 minutes or so hanging out by the river, skipping rocks, and watching the clouds drift among the hillside trees.
Lunch was from the bin plus gas-station snacks as we made our way to Port Angeles to catch the ferry to Victoria. Once situated in the standby line we killed time by walking through the shops on the wharf and had some New Zealand style ice cream which is kind of made-to-order soft serve featuring fresh fruit. It was cool and rainy so I found a cafe to get some hot chocolate to drink while waiting for the ferry–which was late. But we managed to get on. Two more cars after us and the closed the doors. Packed in very tight (though, since they didn’t end up squeezing in anyone behind us, we didn’t need to be packed so tight). Once parked you have to leave the vehicle deck for the 90-minute trip across the Salish Sea, so getting out was a bit of a squeeze. Jess had to climb in back to get out using the sliding doors (sliding doors are practically the perfect door design for a ferry-carried vehicle).
Off the ferry on the other side we waited in line for customs for a while before proceeding to our hotel, the Royal Scot Hotel. Settled at the hotel we took a walk through the primary tourist strip in Victoria headed towards the Irish Times Pub for dinner (recommended to us by friends). Sadly, by the time we arrived it was a quarter to 9 and the pub kicks out all minors at 9 so we couldn’t eat there. Instead we found a by-the-slice pizza place, Pizza Garden, and Corinne had chicken nuggets and fries from a Burger King across the street. For dessert we looked in about 6 different ice-cream shops (I’m pretty sure there was one on every block on each side of the street) before settling on gelato and cheesecake-on-a-stick. Then, finally, back to the hotel to crash for the night.
Day 5 (7/15) – Breakfast from the bin of supplies. Having breakfast from the bin at least makes the morning faster. Pick a cereal, have a bowl, get moving.
Our first destination of the day was the Dragonfire Gallery (glass art) in Cannon Beach–partly because of the name. But before arriving, as we took the cloverleaf off the highway there was a herd of elk in the cloverleaf and then crossing the road in front of us blocking traffic. Apparently no one got any pictures of them though.
We looked through the gallery and then walked up and down the main tourist strip. There was a crepe shop along the way, but it was closed. So back in the van and on we went.
Our next stop was Fort Clatsop, one of the Lewis and Clark National Historic Parks. This was where the expedition spent the winter of 1805-1806 (the site is a recreation). It was busier than I expected and road repaving made things a little challenging.
Lunch was our last stop in Oregon–the Pig ‘N Pancake in Astoria. Heather was happy. The parking lot had a good view of the Astoria-Megler Bridge, known to me as the Short Circuit bridge (off of which Johnny 5 careens in the first act of the movie). The movie doesn’t have a good image of him parachuting down with the bridge well-framed behind him, but they show his view, in which we can see the location of the Pig ‘N Pancake, and a later shot shows the bridge in the background.
With lunch completed we crossed into Washington and stopped just on the other side of the river to visit Cape Disappointment. Because, with a name like that, how could you not? We hiked up to the lighthouse and I took some pictures from the cliffside. More pelicans and some rather brown gulls. The clouds were doing something crazy that I thought looked really neat.
Dinner at the Grizzly Den (a diner with shakes) in Hoquiam, WA. Then a bit of a slog up to Forks, WA (setting of the Twilight series, for those who care) and our hotel, the creatively named Town Motel.
Day 4 (7/14) was breakfast from the bin again (none of these coastal hotels seem to offer any kind of breakfast). Low-tide was just passing in the morning and the beach outside the hotel was really shallow so the water was retreated much further than I am used to.
Van packed again, it was up to Depoe Bay for our whale-watching trip. The little Zodiac took us out the harbor past the seals to a navigational buoy with some sea lions before heading on towards the whales. The expedition group we used is part of a research team led by a marine biologist who’s been studying this pod of whales for over 20 years. Her work started by definitively proving what the whales are eating that allows them to stay off the Oregon coast all summer instead of continuing up to Alaska with the rest of the whales–it’s a type of shrimp.
On this trip a mother and calf were hanging out, much closer to the shoreline than I would have expected, doing their constant diving for food to fatten up for winter. While the boat was moving Heather and I were fine, but while “stopped” and just kind of slowly rotating in place we both got a little queasy. For me it seemed to primarily be when the waves came rolling in from behind and couldn’t be predicted. The boat captain got us moving again and that helped a lot. But I stopped taking pictures about halfway through because trying to sight through the telephoto lens was definitely making it worse.
We got to watch while a research team attempted to drop a tracking beacon onto one of the whales using a drone. They missed a couple times and then a pair of seagulls decided they didn’t much care for this thing in their space and started diving at it. It was amusing.
We saw a lot of spouts from the whales’ blowholes, some “sharking” (when the edge of their fluke is visible and looks like a shark fin), and a couple of clear views of their flukes. No breaching though.
Back to land, a little walking around to resettle my stomach, and we were heading north once more. Next stop was the Lincoln City Glass Center (finally managed to catch a glass-arts facility open). Would have been fun to sign up for a hands-on tutorial, but not being able to predict when we’d be anywhere very precisely we hadn’t done that. We looked at the gallery, bought a magnet, and took a picture with this mural nearby.
Lunch was at the Lincoln City Pig ‘N Pancake. The girls had more crepes than they could eat and Heather was now obsessed with the restaurant–which is a chain, so this would not be our last Pig ‘N Pancake visit.
The next point of interest on our map was the Tillamook Creamery, but the plan had been to be there around dinner time and eat dinner at their cafe. However, we’d only just eaten lunch and it was only an hour away. So we looked for some way to kill time and ended up at the Connie Hansen Garden Conservancy (also in Lincoln City). Connie had created and tended this garden lot throughout her life and after she died the community organized to continue in her memory and maintain the garden. It’s freely open to the public all day. So we meandered about. Found a bed for Heather and Corinne was distressed by the size of these leaves.
Then Tillamook Creamery for self-guided tours, samples, dinner at the cafe, and obligatory ice cream. Since we were still somewhat full from Pig ‘N Pancake we had a light “dinner.” Fried cheese curds, fries, and Heather and I split a grilled cheese sandwich. You could get a scoop of ice cream for $4 or this flight of 3 scoops of ice cream for $9 (they were not smaller scoops). So the girls and I split a flight and everyone got to pick a flavor (chocolate peanut butter for me, orange & cream for Heather, mint chocolate chip for Corinne) and Jess got a scoop of her own (caramel swirl).
Our destination for the evening was the Surfside Inn at Rockaway Beach.
