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.

First Fall Color on the UNH Campus

Sarah from the Office of Conduct and Management (where I work, casually known as the OCM) told me I needed to see the fall color early when the first leaves started to turn, then again at the peak of the season. I had wanted to hike up Mount Major near Lake Winnipesaukee to check out the trees and the views of the lake, but unfortunately, the homework load didn't let us. Instead, Ashley and I drove down to campus, which he hadn't had time to really check out yet.

It was family weekend, which meant a ton of parents and little kids, and an inordinate number of students out and about for a Saturday afternoon, but it was still nice. We wandered through the trails and looked for the College Woods, but could not find them. We guessed that they were the little woodsy breaks between clusters of buildings on campus and wrote off the grandeur of the name College Woods to the tiny New England scale of things ("Guys, this mountain is huge!"), but a quick Google search proves us wrong. We actually drove through part of them on the way home, to avoid the family weekend traffic; it's a big 250 acre nature preserve that the campus shoulders up against, with plenty of hiking and biking trails. Another time, College Woods, maybe deeper into fall or after the first snow.

Anyway, here's pictures from around campus.

We've got wicked oak trees here.

The camera doesn't really capture how vivid these red leaves were. Some of the trees look like they're on fire.

These little dudes are all over campus, and love to run under the feet of passersby, stand paralyzed with fear for a second, then run back under the bush they came from.

Hitchcock Hall, on the upper quad, where I work.

Groundhog! Woodchuck1 Whistle Pig! Land Beaver!

The backside of Thompson Hall, which is the cool old building they like to show people on the website.

Defacing signs is big here.