Fun Spot is the Spot for Fun

I'm so sorry that this is so late. I visited Funspot two Sundays ago, and I'm just now getting to blog about it. Life and school have both been kind of kicking my ass, but right now I'm just too burnt out to do serious writing, so I'm blogging instead.

Laconia, NH is a weird little tourist spot on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee, full of water slides, rock walls, and minigolf courses. It also has Funspot, the largest arcade in the world. No kidding. The largest arcade in the world is in some little shitty rundown lakeside resort town in New Hampshire. Who knew? It's got around 250 arcade games. It's several stories. It's huge, and it's my own little nerd heaven.

But Funspot isn't just full of games, it's full of old games. It's home to the American Classic Arcade Museum, a group dedicated to preserving old machines from the 70s and 80s. It is also the setting for the second half of the fantastic documentary King of Kong, a film about two men (one from Redmond, WA!) vying for the top score in Donkey Kong--if you haven't seen this, you have to. It's amazing.

We spent hours at Funspot and I feel like I barely scratched the surface. There are so many more games I want to play, and some I want to beat (looking at you TMNT and Simpsons). Here are some pics.

Did I mention they have a bar with cheap Stella Artois?

Ashley playing Donkey Kong on the machine that set the world record.

NERD HEAVEN.

Gabe used to talk about this game all the time. Finally played it in the arcades. I have to say, the laserdisc technology is pretty impressive for the early '80s, but the game itself sucks.

This is Computer Space, the world's first arcade game. Sadly, it was being repaired.

This game was also shut down for repairs. If anybody can tell me what it is about just by looking at the cabinet, I will give you fifty dollars.

The Kanc Picture Dump

Yesterday Ashley and I drove into the White Mountains to tour the famous Kancamagus Highway. It's a huge fall foliage spot, a thirty-four mile drive through the mountains and forests. There were lots of tourists, and the traffic to get there was pretty bad, but it was worth it. The leaves here are amazing!

Getting out and looking at nature and mountains made both Ashley and I very homesick. I couldn't help but compare the Kanc to Chuckanut Drive, and Chuckanut wins. Yeah, the fall foliage is amazing, and Washington just doesn't get leaves the way New England does, but give me the rugged Pacific coast and evergreens any day. Here's a bunch of pictures, in no particular order.

Blustery New England Morning

The view from my balcony

BONUS PICTURE: Ashley dressed me as a hipster and I don't know what to think.

I look like freaking Chelsea.

Fall Traditions

Every fall, as Halloween approaches, my teeth begin to ache and I salivate more than usual. It's time for candy corn.


I gorge myself on this stuff every October. It's a new thing. I never touched it as a kid, not even in high school or early college. But then when I lived with Seamus and Ashley, in the fall of '06, I got really sick and spent a week on the couch, playing Final Fantasy XII, watching movies, sweating, dying, and eating nothing but candy corn and loaves of french bread. Ever since then, candy corn is fall comfort food. I bought a tub at Hannaford's yesterday.

I also need to accompany it with a video game, so I started back in on Link to the Past. What a fantastic game. I played it until I could eat no more candy corn and felt guilty about not doing homework, then I stopped. Also, if you haven't noticed by now, my secret goal here at thisisnolongertheroadtrip is to write about video games until I have driven everybody I know into a state of coma-like boredom.

Ashley and I also bought a scented candle, which is SOP for me in autumn as well. It's my favorite season. School is really, really time-consuming, so I haven't had a lot of time to get out and do things that are actually fun/worth writing about. Ashley and I did, however, buy our plane tickets home. We're getting out of here on the 11th of December and spending almost six weeks in Washington! Get ready Bellingham, friends who still live in the area, and Gabe and Amanda and Kaylee. I also got a second job, working as an online tutor for Smarthinking. I'm going through their training program right now and getting pretty excited about it. I'll have students again, sort of! I really miss teaching, and this will bring a bit of it back to me. The training manual is full of funny composition neologisms. I am an e-structor who focuses on HOCs before I focus on LOCs when I am writing an asynchronous tutorial. They also won't me to know that "although you can't see your students, you can still touch them."

I will, however, refrain from touching them.