We wasted no time making it to Trillium Brewing after I landed here in Boston.
Where should we begin our upcoming roadtrip?
For many years, we’ve been trying to get on the Behind the Fence tour at Los Alamos for our Manhattan Project quest. We’ve visited the publicly-accessible areas, but really want to do this special tour, which is only offered for a few tours, twice a year, to 16 people per tour. We were hopeful each year, at least until the movie Oppenheimer was released, when suddenly everyone else wanted to go too. In what has become a biannual tradition, we were not selected in the lottery again this spring and were moved to the supposed waitlist.
A few weeks later, Jen received an email that her name had been pulled from the list, and she was offered the chance to attend (and bring one guest—sure hope she chooses me! 🤞😆). I’m excited—we’re finally going to mark this as done!
The timing isn’t great for optimizing PTO, as the available tours are only on Tuesday or Wednesday morning. So our original plan was for me to start driving towards Albuquerque in the morning with our stuff, then Jen would catch a cheap flight over right after work, where I’d pick her up at the airport and drive us up to a hotel in Los Alamos. We’d do the four-hour tour the next morning, then drive back and she’d fly home, while I camped in the mountains on my way back home. That would only require a single day of vacation time, and we’d save money on a second flight and a rental car.
Alas, a bit more thinking has us considering taking both Monday and Tuesday off, combining it with the prior Fri-Sat-Sun that she has off and making it a five day weekend instead. Jen would still fly out of ABQ after the tour and I would still drive. But the question now is: where does she fly into?
There seem to be four primary options. First is just sticking with Albuquerque. We still have a number of things on our to-do list between there and the Colorado border. But that’s also an easy long weekend trip for us. With five days off, we should go further afield or at least plan a longer drive.
We haven’t been to a few counties in eastern New Mexico, so another option would be flying into El Paso, then looping up around eastern New Mexico and circling back to Los Alamos. That’d finish the state for both of us. But again, it’s still three day weekend territory for us.
Two more distant options would be Lubbock and Denver, both of which would require an overnight stay on the way there. Lubbock would allow us to mark off a bunch of the Texas panhandle, plus probably grab those New Mexico counties, too. But the flight time is less than ideal, and it happens to be the most expensive of the flight options, too.
Denver, on the other hand, is the cheapest flight, though also the longest drive for me. We could either head south through the mountains, maybe even raft on the Arkansas or Rio Grande on the way down (perhaps a bit early in the season though), though none of it would be new territory for us.
Or, we could swing out to southwestern Kansas and catch a slice of Oklahoma and Texas before making our way west to Los Alamos. That’d catch a bunch of new counties for us (it’s one of the largest holes in my travel map) and might fit pretty well into the four days before the tour. It seems like the leading candidate at the moment.
We’ve already booked the tour (that’s definitely the priority!), and the flight home, so now it’s just about deciding what the initial starting point will be. Decisions, decisions…
Is there anyone more entitled than an Uber Eats driver parking in a handicap space or simply parking wherever the fuck they want because they are picking up an order like it’s an emergency or rules magically don’t apply to them due to their oh-so-important job?
Jen was looking through her photo library and ran across these screenshot gems that I must have posted back in 2020… 🤣
Huzzah! I reached the 6000 unique beer mark tonight. 🍻
Along with visiting 611 craft breweries, I’ve now officially completed my 600/6000 Craft Beer quest!
My quest to eat at Phoenix's Sketchiest Chinese Restaurants
16 years ago today, my buddy Wayne and I began a new quest: to eat lunch at each of the Sketchiest Chinese Restaurants in Downtown Phoenix.
The original idea was to eat at every windowless Chinese restaurant, which seemed like an easy way to determine general sketchiness. But alas, our first target was a place that was only a window. In fact, the regulars we spoke to simply refer to the place as “The Window.”
“Why are we doing this again?”
Huh, it’s never a good sign when the Office of the Medical Examiner shows up at your lunch spot and starts talking to the staff.
Exactly what you’d expect for take-out numbers. (Also note the menu item tucked into the corner: “P5 Pork with vegetable.”
We developed our own hybrid rating system, which combined food quality with general sketchiness of the location1. After eliminating some candidate restaurants as not sketchy enough, or slightly outside the geographic scope (the I-10/I-17 box, though the sketchiest restaurants were all in the warehouse district south of downtown), and missing out on one or two that closed down before we could eat there, we ended up visiting six total sketchy Chinese restaurants.
It took us until August to complete the quest, mostly due to scheduling issues—specifically, we both needed to have zero plans for that evening or the following day, just in case we got food poisoning. Luckily, we never did get sick, though we definitely gave up on at least one meal after just a bite or two.
All in all, it was a fun quest. I got to visit a few parts of the city that I had never been to before (cough for good reason cough), and that was interesting. As was locating possible restaurants, whether by asking our friends (“wait, you’re doing what?!”), zooming around on Google Street View, or even taking the long way home to scout out a possible objective.
But mostly, it was fun just because it was such a goofy goal to pursue. I’m a big fan of using structured quests, like visiting all the (insert topic), and this was a great demonstration that it almost doesn’t mater what that (insert topic) is. You can have fun pursuing any quest; the fun is simply in pursuing novel experiences. In fact, I still use this example all the time when explaining questing to someone.
And since I know I’ll get this question: “The Window” earned a 2D on our rating scale.
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Quality of food: rated 5 down to 1 (worst) Sketchiness of restaurant: rated A down to F (worst) ↩︎
I have a custom phone number with a 520 area code and every 6 months or so I get a bunch of calls from a hospital in Tucson about upcoming procedures or pending prescriptions. There seems to be nothing I can do about it (I’ve tried), but I sure wish this person would fix their contact info.
Grabbing a quick beverage at Fuzzbot so Jen can finally mark the brewery off her list. Brought our laptops to get some trip planning done too.
I had hoped to get my Maps plugin in order this week, but alas, I’ve been distracted by a big data center that’s now under construction in our neighborhood. Do I know anyone who has worked on these types of issues? I’m trying to get a better handle on strategy and available support resources.
I’m slowly closing in on the 6000 unique craft beer mark…
It’s Spellbinder Day at Wren Südhalle! We’re here celebrating our fav flagship beer of our fav brewery at our fav brewery location. Cheers! 🍻
Big day at my local brewery tomorrow.
Here’s a live preview of the four map plugins I built for Micro.blog:
- Maps
- Tracks
- Travelpath
- Colormaps
Each fills a slightly different need for travelers & adventurers, or anyone who wants to add some fun visualization to their posts. Still need to wrap up some loose ends + add documentation.
One my favorite π days was OTD in 2018 when my dad joined Jen and I at OHSO Brewing. They had brewed a special menu of pi(e)-inspired beers, paired with slices of various pies. My dad isn’t a fan of craft beer, so he mostly ate pie and told stories. What a fun afternoon!
Working on yet another micro.blog plugin…this one is called Colormap.
This colormap depicts which states Jen has completed in her quest to camp in each of the 50 states. This is just a screenshot, but the map key is fully interactive.
Colormap is part of a suite of plugins and related tools focused on adding more functionality to MB for travelers/outdoor adventurers. I’m hoping to release some (or all) of them this coming week.
- Maps: interactive maps with markers
- Tracks: interactive maps with gps tracks
- Colormap: color-filled maps for showing travel progress
- Progress: simple way of showing progress towards goal completion
OTD in 2014
📍 Spur Cross Ranch Conservation Area #fb
OTD in 2017.
It was expensive, but we added Tannus Armour tire liners to our ebikes today. Hoping that gives us enough piece of mind to bring them a bit further from home than we have thus far.
The MacBook Neo intrigues me only as a travel computer. Something I can watch a movie on the plane, type out some posts, do some trip journaling, edit a few photos, conduct some trip research—but without the risk of damage/theft of my primary computer/data. Probably not worth the money for me tho.
I just could not get back to sleep last night, but managed to remember there was an eclipse of the moon, so eventually wandered outside to watch it for awhile and snapped this quick pic of the sky.
