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 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.
Day 3 (7/13) breakfast from the bin (cereal, bagels, etc.) and then some failed stops. No one wanted to walk the half-mile from the parking lot to see the Port Orford lighthouse, so we skipped it. We intended to stop at the Vines Art Glass gallery, but it was closed. We did pull over at “Something Awesome” but it gave off the vibe that someone with 5 teeth might come out and point a shotgun at you. It’s supposed to be a wood mill with sculptures. There were some sculptures visible, they didn’t seem to be in good repair.
So we continued on until we passed through Bandon and took a break at the Coquille River Lighthouse. The girls spent some time watching the waves crash over the rocks and then we walked along the beach a bit.
Lunch was further along in Coos Bay at a DQ Grill & Chill. This was when we discovered Oregon’s obsession with one-way streets. I expect to find one-way streets in cities, but Oregon seems to use them everywhere. In this case we were leaving the DQ and I made a right turn to head the direction we came from back towards 101, but on a different street than we had entered the parking lot. Neither the parking lot nor the road itself has any indication that the road is one way when entering it from the parking lot. So, I was going the wrong way. Thankfully there was no traffic for several blocks and it was immediately obvious I was on the wrong side and was able to turn around. If you’re going to use one-way streets you gotta keep them clearly labeled at all entrance points. So that was fun.
Continuing on, our next stop was the Darlingtonia State Natural Site. This is a prime home of Darlingtonia Californica, also known as Cobra Lilies, one of the few carnivorous plants. They’re pretty unique. They’re a pitcher-plant style trap in which insects get stuck in the digestive juices at the base. I managed to snap a picture of a wasp being lured into one. Following along with imitating the dinosaurs at Prehistoric Gardens, the girls gave me their best imitation of the Cobra Lilies.
7 minutes up the road from the Cobra Lilies is Sea Lion Caves (this is all just north of Florence, Oregon). They claim to be the largest sea cave in the United States and it’s home to sea lions. Take the elevator ride down to the viewing room and check them out.
Our stop for the night was Seagrass Oceanfront Inn in Newport, Oregon. We first headed for Oregon Coast Glassworks, but they were locking up early just as we pulled into the parking lot. So another glass-art facility missed. We checked into the hotel and then walked up the street to Yummy Bowl. It was delicious Chinese food with way-too-large portions. Even anticipating this and ordering only 2 entrees to share we had to leave a meal’s worth of food behind.
Day 2 (7/12) Started with breakfast at the Blue Ox Cafe before packing up the van and crossing the street to Trees of Mystery. Benefit of sleeping across the street: it wasn’t busy / crowded yet.
Trees of Mystery is a patch of redwoods with trails, a gondola ride, a skywalk, and an obsession with Paul Bunyan. Take a picture with Paul and Babe out front; enjoy the peaceful quiet of the towering trees.
Our walkabout through the redwoods came to an end with the requisite exit through the gift shop. I decided I liked this wooden owl; he now watches over the family room from his perch on top of the bookshelf in the corner.
Now began our long drive up the coast on highway 101. We passed through a foggy section and I stopped so we could enjoy the ocean for a bit. Shortly after we said, “Goodbye” to California and crossed into Oregon.
Next stop, the Thomas Creek Bridge–the highest bridge in Oregon at 345 feet. There is a parking lot and some trails near the bridge, but there’s not really anywhere you can get a good picture, but I tried. We followed the trail down to an overlook of an isolated strip of coast as well. Turns out there is a lot of empty coastline from northern California up through Washington.
At some point along the drive we stopped for lunch at McDonald’s and we passed a myrtlewood gallery and took a look around, but didn’t buy anything.
Another ~30 miles up the coast we stopped at Prehistoric Gardens. This features life-size dinosaur sculptures along a trail through the forest. The girls enjoyed imitating the dinosaurs. To properly set the mood I played the theme from Jurassic Park on my phone when we started our walk.
Our home for the night was the Sea Crest Motel on the southern outskirts of Port Orford. Port Orford really didn’t have anything to offer in terms of dinner, so I took the girls to the provincially-named “Ray’s Food Place” grocery store and we bought some things to eat at the hotel, augmented it with the supplies from the van, and called it dinner. This included the world’s saddest “baguette.” It was soft, lightly baked, and inconsistently shaped with a consistency of sandwich bread. It would have made a French baker cry.
