Romantic Pinball Road Trip

For my birthday in October, the lovely and talented Frauline Entropy gave me the gift of pinball: A weekend driving around with her playing pinball. After some strategizing and research, I opted for the following itinerary for the weekend of December 4th:

Friday: Drive to New Jersey, stay in a Bed & Breakfast
Saturday: Spend the day at the Silver Ball Museum in Asbury Park, NJ
Sunday: Drive to Castle Video in Branchville, NJ

We also had some other alternate locations for Sunday in case something didn't pan out.

Our B&B was the Lillagaard, a late Victorian affair in nearby Ocean Grove. It was a couple of houses from the beach -- not that the beach in December was such a draw -- and about a mile from the SBM. It being the off season, we were one of only two couples there, the other being a grumpy gus and his wife who seemed to spend most of their time watching Fox News in the common room. The B&B was a lot of fun... kind of creaky, a lot of exposed pipes, kind of shoddy remodeling workmanship coupled with some nice flourishes, a coffin-like shower, and I was able to steal unsecured wifi sporadically from a nearby house. Friday we arrive after dark and ate dinner in an old drug store turned sandwich place a few blocks away. It was rainy and windy on Saturday, but that was no problem since we planned to spend the day inside playing games. The SBM was pretty cool... it was in the basement of a hipster clothing and record shop, and had about a hundred games set up, mostly EMs, a few early solid state games, and an Attack & Revenge from Mars for the kids with short attention spans. There were also a few random arcade games, like puck bowlers and putting games. Admission was $20, the games were mostly in good condition, and a lot of them had toppers with a blurb about the game. We pretty much spent most of the day there, though my wife goofed around in the town for a while. I did get a couple of high scores, which was cool. And the most amazing thing of all was that Mrs. Entropy had a good time... and no one was more surprised than she was. She really enjoyed the puck bowler, but ended up spending a lot of time with the from Mars brothers. At some point she even admitted that she wouldn't mind having them in the house! So now all I need to do is find an unused $6000 and 20 sq feet of floorspace and we'll be in good shape. We ate lunch at a surprisingly tasteless organic food coffee shop, and after I finally conked out we browsed a paranormal bookstore that was doing holiday photos with an abominable snowman, then ate dinner at a much better place than the organic place.

Sunday was a sunny but cold day, so we goofed around along the boardwalk for a bit. Then we drove about 2 hours to get to Castle Video, which is part of a mini-fiefdom consisting of storage, movie rental, and what looks like a couple of other small businesses. But the guy likes pinball, so he had about 15 games set up, mostly Williams and a few DE/Sega games. Again, my wife had a lot of fun, though she got spanked hard by a couple of games so she gravitated to the more accommodating games, like Whodunnit. I again put up a few high scores, most notably on Fish Tales where I scored a massive (for me) 300 million. I like to imagine the chagrin on the faces of the pinball league that meets at Castle Video when they wonder who that Joe guy is on a bunch of the machines. After that it was too late to go to any of the other stops, so we just headed home. All in all we had a pretty good time, and who knows? Maybe Mrs. Entropy will even accompany me to a show some time. This year the Saturday of Allentown falls on our anniversary... perfect for another Romantic Pinball Road Trip!

And speaking of gifts, for Christmas my wife got me an extremely cool baseball jersey from the Pacific Pinball Museum. I love PPM's art... I bought a copy of their Art Nouveau-style poster for the PP Expo a few years ago, and this year they posted the poster as a pdf for free. I printed it at 11x17 on one of the nice color printers at work, framed it, and hung it downstairs in the pinball area. Sweet!!!