Category: Galleries

Snow and Rain in Tahoe

Leave a comment

After far too many dry warm weeks, we finally got a big snow storm across the Sierra in mid-February and Darlene and I dashed up to Tahoe with the cats just ahead of it to enjoy the snow for a couple of weeks.  Resi and Aiden joined us for the first week and we got a couple of days in at Northstar before and after the big dump.  Later in the week, I met up with Troy and Aiden at Homewood for three days as more snow piled up.  Unfortunately, Darlene wasn’t feeling well and missed out on the fresh powder.

We then joined Jon, Stan, Bill, Jim and Lewis for our annual ski week, getting a day in at Palisades before the rain came in for a couple of days to wreck all that fresh powder.  So we had a couple of board game days together before venturing back out at NorthStar and Palisades Alpine.  Over the first weekend in March, Jon and Roland joined us for more gaming and we got in another day at Alpine before eventually packing up and heading home.

A short video montage of our skiing over a couple of weeks.

Click through for the full gallery:

  

And There Was Much Gaming

Leave a comment

Another year of board gaming topped off with a gathering for New Year’s Day:

This gallery is from February 2025 through New Year’s Day of 2026 and includes SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Gentes, On the Underground: London/Berlin, Age of Rail: South Africa, Cloud Age, Arcs, Hollywood: 1947, Galactic Cruise, Bomb Busters, Gutenberg, Nucleum, Green Team Wins, Shackleton Base, Rings & Things, Dead by Daylight, Thunder Road: Vendetta, Heat: Pedal to the Metal, Andromeda’s Edge, Polynesia, Steam Power, Revive, Ecos, Merchant of Venus, Endeavor: Deep Sea, Wildcatters, Photosynthesis, Smartphone, Inc., Cosmic Encounter, Clank! Catacombs, Artemis Odyssey, Panamax, Flip Toons, Hot Streak, 1930 – The Golden Age of Airlines, Dead Reckoning, First Flight, Skate Summer, Rocketmen, The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship, Speakeasy, Slide 5, FaeKin, Magical Athlete, Cosmic Encounter, Deck Chairs on the Titanic, Pandemic: Iberia

Click through for the full gallery:

The Sphere in Las Vegas

Leave a comment
The Sphere in Las Vegas

Darlene and I just made a short trip to Las Vegas midweek to see The Wizard of Oz @ The Sphere.  They chopped the heck out of the original movie to make this production (and scale down the runtime) but the whole immersive experience is pretty wild and amazing – from tornado wind effects and flying debris to falling snow and apples.  It’s definitely fun and worthwhile.

This video highlights some of what went into producing this experience and it was clearly quite the effort but I was also amused to see all the funny compromises needed to fill out the massive spherical display from the original 85-year old movie.  In particular, you can see how they had to cut and paste various background characters to fill out the now expansive view – many are looking off in odd directions or stuck in little loops of motion or unnaturally still or even sized disproportionately.  There are missing shadows and other compositing difficulties and all of the dialog echoes like sound in a stadium (because I guess that’s how big the space is) but it doesn’t matter – it’s still a fantastic spectacle!  And yes, section 306 is the prime viewing area as others have reported – not too low, not too high and everything viewed straight on.

Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas

We stayed two nights at The Venetian to have a view of the outside of The Sphere.  (We suspect now that the rooms at the Pallazzo have a more direct view than what we had in the North Tower but it was fine.) We spent the first half of the day at Meow Wolf’s Las Vegas installation (“Omega Mart”) – an interactive, immersive experience located in the Area 15 complex of attractions.  It was fun and the amount of detail they put into everything is impressive – from the props to the backstory.  You can engage with and digest the material to various degrees from just casually walking around to poring over the materials and interacting with the various terminals to solve the mystery or complete a sort of intensive scavenger hunt.  We spent a middle ground of three hours just checking things out and completing the objectives associated with the optional employee “boop” card.

After lunch we spent a little time exploring some of the other attractions in Area 15 and then we headed back to our hotel ahead of the Wizard of Oz show by way of a free demo ride in a Zoox vehicle – a unique looking autonomous vehicle.

Click through for the full gallery:

Cats in the House Again

Leave a comment
 

Yay! We have cats in the house again! We adopted Sabik and Nyx from the local animal shelter in late October.  They’re brothers and they were eight months old and very skittish when we adopted them but they’ve quickly grown quite comfortable with us and their new home.  They’re both very sweet and affectionate but still have some strong phobias about being picked up or held that we’re slowly working through.

Jinx is the tabby and the rambunctious one, tearing around the house and making a ruckus.  Sabik is more calm but still very playful.  They’re strongly bonded together and get along well, though Jinx tends to be overly aggressive in their play brawls.  Sabik is learning to fight back though.

Click through for the full gallery:

   

Mt. Rainier National Park

Leave a comment
Mt. Rainier just before sunset

On our way home from Canada, we decided to swing over to Mt. Rainier National Park and squeeze in a couple of days exploring the south side of the park.  We were arriving late so we found a wild campsite outside of the park boundary and then claimed an available campground site in the park the next day.

We got up to the trailhead at Paradise fairly early and hiked the full Skyline Trail loop.  There happened to be a black bear and her two cubs near the lodge and we saw yet another black bear while on the trail as well as a mountain goat and a bunch of very tame marmots.  We could also see Mt. Adams and Mt. St. Helens in the distance.

A three-minute video of our visit to Mt. Rainier

The following day I did an out-and-back hike alone to Comet Falls on the Van Trump Trail because Darlene wasn’t feeling up for more hiking.  We also visited a bunch of roadside points like the Longmire Museum, Christine Falls, Narada Falls, Box Canyon and Silver Falls.  We couldn’t easily check out the east or north side of the park due to road closures so after two days, we headed out and home south.

 

Click through for the full gallery:

   

Our Great Western Canada Road Trip

Leave a comment

On July 26th, Darlene and I set out in the camper van for a two-month journey across western Canada with the possibility of going all the way to Alaska.  The goal was to visit a bunch of their national parks like Banff and Jasper without any particular time constraints.  We didn’t have any camping reservations because we didn’t want to have to decide in advance how long we would want to spend in any given area.  Of course we expected that would be a bit of a challenge in the more popular parks where the campgrounds tend to fill up and you can’t just camp anywhere in the wild, but somehow we’d manage!

We ended up getting as far as the southwest corner of the Yukon territory before we had to make our way back by the end of September. Two months and 7,658 miles!  It was a great trip and we saw a lot of gorgeous scenery and we didn’t get mauled by a grizzly even once!

I’ve broken up the trip into separate posts and galleries for each of the national parks and other major travel sections but I created one video montage of the whole trip:

📍 Kootenay National Park
📍 Banff National Park
📍 Yoho National Park
📍 Jasper National Park
📍 Chicken Races at Fort St. James		 📍 Northbound to the Yukon
📍 Skagway, Alaska
📍 Kluane National Park and Reserve
📍 A Spectacular Aurora in the Yukon
📍 Southbound from the Yukon
A seven-minute video montage of our two-month trip
Map of our overall route

Southbound from the Yukon

Leave a comment

By mid-September it was clear we needed to start our return journey.  Since we had come up via the Stewart-Cassiar highway, we chose to return via the part of the Alaska (Alcan) Highway we had yet to see, from Watson Lake on south.

In Watson Lake, we spent a little time browsing the tens of thousands of signs making up the Signpost Forest and Darlene bought something to add to the collection. We also enjoyed the very interesting presentation on auroras at the Northern Lights Centre in Watson Lake.  This is where we learned that what we had experienced a few nights ago in Kluane National Park was a full on aurora outbreak.

Other stops along our Alaska Highway return trip were to visit Smith River Falls and have a soak in the Liard River Hot Springs.  One favorite stop was the town of Chetwynd which hosts an international chainsaw carving championship and there are many dozens of these fantastic carvings spread all around town.

 

We stayed overnight again in Prince George and took the opportunity to do an oil change and tire rotation – it takes a lot of miles to travel up and down across Canada. Continuing south we eventually joined highway 99 (“The Sea to Sky Highway”), stopping off in Marble Canyon, Lillooet, Nairn Falls, Whistler and Brandywine Falls.  We found and stayed at a couple of different overnight sites near Squamish as we checked out the town and the local sights like Shannon Falls and the Britannia Mine tour.

As we reached the end of the Sea to Sky Highway we hit really heavy traffic before we could even get across the harbor so we gave up and found a restaurant and hotel in West Vancouver for the night.  And so after two wonderful months traveling around western Canada, we crossed back into the US from Vancouver.