Actually, I came back a week ago. It was a rough trip... my wife's back went out, so we spent a lot of time dealing with that. Our day at Disneyland -- my Ancestral Workplace, since my first non-suck job was there -- was especially rough. But we did bring home two suitcases and a box of precious memories from my child & young adulthood, which I plan to hawk on eBay for as much as I can get... my wife's back forced an air change in our travel plans, so I ponied up another $400 in plane fare. It appears that the dog and our trip together are pushing the $3000 envelope, and I was reluctant to ask my dad for a loan since I'm keeping him in reserve for my daughter's Spring 2008 tuition. I've never sold more than $2000 on eBay in a year, and that was when I sold my copy of Apple ][ Ultima for $600. So we'll see how things go.
Speaking of eBay (and we were), my part sold for a cool $21 to a guy down under, so I ordered four more -- one for me and three for the other interested bidders. The guy who sold the first one relisted, but he doesn't sell to other countries, so I'm charging a dollar more than him and yoinking up the international market. We'll see how it goes.
There were two pinball-related incidents while in California. My daughter wanted to go to the beach, so we headed for the Santa Monica Pier (that's not its precise location... Google Maps is a little off), where (along with UCLA and Westwood) I cut my teeth on arcade gaming. There they had a bunch of games: South Park, Star Wars Ep 1, Jurassic Park, World Poker Tour, Austin Powers, Elvis, the new Harley Davidson, The Getaway, the Most Popular Pinball Machine of All Time, and Terminator 3 (*phew!*). They were all in the 75 cents a game neighborhood, as well as uniformly filthy and rundown... just like arcades are supposed to be! I played World Poker Tour because I had never played it, and it was in OK shape, maybe a little slow, and coated in Dust. I have to admit I was distracted by the woman's boobs on the backglass. ^_^; Next up was Elvis, which I've only played once. The left flipper was weak and the jailhouse rock flipper (or whatever) could just barely flip. Addams Family had weak flippers, but for some reason I shot a bunch of the loops on the left through the bumpers, which I usually can't make. When I played Terminator 3, I discovered that the playfield lights were out, so I had to guess where to shoot thing. There were also no RPG balls in it, so that kind of sucked. Overall, it was worse than a trip to Crab Towne USA (btw also a bad location in the GooMap), if you can believe that.
The next day we went to Disneyland, which as I mentioned was not as fun as it could have been. I was pleasantly surprised to find that since my last visit in September that pinball had returned to the Starcade in Tomorrowland! They had a Pirates of the Caribbean (duh!) and a Monster Bash.
I fully expected the Disney techs to keep the games in tip top condition, and I was not disappointed with POTR. It played like it was brand new, which for all I knew it was. And I gave it a thrashing it won't soon forget, making the #1 high score, though not grand champion, :( . With my plethora of free games, I played a round against my daughter. Unfortunately, she was ready to move on after that and I still wanted to play Monster Bash, so after some fussing they went off and rode Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (sadly not a ride friendly to my wife's back) while I played. MB was disappointing, because the flippers were weak, which made hitting Frankenstein, the Bride, and Dracula tough. In spite of that I did spank out a good game, completing the monsters and getting one of those Monster Bashes I've heard tell of. Sadly, though, I used up any potential pinball credit with my family... as my daughter and I were doing a post-fireworks pre-closing scamper through as many rides as possible, while running between Splash Mountain and Space Mountain I finally saw the Indiana Jones Pinball Adventure in the corner of the shop in Adventureland... I had read about it, but didn't find it last time I was there because... I was digging in the wrong place! Actually, I was looking in the wrong shop... I looked in the one near the Tiki Room, and the game is in the one near the Dr. Jones ride. Anyway, we had 10 minutes before the park closed, so there was no way my daughter was going to let me play a game. Next time I will build time into the schedule for that.One more encouraging thing before I go... while we were driving around through Westwood, I saw an arcade where Westworld (the place besides the pier and UCLA where my tooth cutting was done) used to be. There had been some bogus African art shop there for the longest time since Westworld finally closed about 20 years ago, so I was glad to see an arcade there again. I didn't get a chance to go in, and it's probably filled with DDR and Virtua Street Kombat 5 Xtreme, but it's nice to see. I'll add that to the itinerary for the next trip.
I probably won't be posting as much... Darwin is sucking up what little free time I had to begin with, and it's all I can do to keep the house from being condemned. But I'm going to try to get some pinwork in this weekend... I took down the picture of Doctor Who in my cube and work that's supposed to inspire me to fix it up and put up a pic of Black Knight, since I feel that's really close to working. We'll see...
OK, here's a sad trivia... while doing links for this, I noticed in the Star Wars Ep 1 IPDB entry that Williams announced they were closing their pinball division on my 37th birthday...
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