After a wonderful morning of relaxing in a warm bathtub, I was surprised by Nicholas asking me if I were ready for some unspecified activity. I figured I was as ready as I’d ever be and soon after we were off in his car to meet up with the rest of his co-conspirators at Adventure Landing for a throwback Father’s Day fairly reminiscent of occasional larking about during my teenage years.
Today was a lovely day for it with one of the rare days when it’s not hotter than fire in the pits of hell with a nice breeze.
First up was a trip round the mini-golf course where the course is a vintage Putt-Putt style with the red metal rails containing the holes. Thankfully no one did a Happy Gilmore on the ball as close to the car park as this course lies and none of the shots ended up taking a bath! Other than the occasional diabolical hole, everyone was doing a pretty good getting the ball to its home. Julia and I were pretty much neck and neck throughout the game which really made it exciting toward the end as even the slightest mistake might well decide it.
Once we were done with the course, Julia and the kids took off for a bit of laser-tag which looked to be far more of a workout and sauna session than the golf was which was pretty impressive!
Whilst they were shooting each other, I had a chance to check out the arcade scene and it’s amazing how much it has changed from when I was growing up!
The arcades I remember fondly had a wall of pinball machines where a line of quarters along the bottom of the machine served as the queue for playing. One of my favourite machines of all time was “High Speed” by Williams (!) and the ones that inhabited the two Putt-Putt locations in Fayetteville had dodgy tilt sensors that were so annoying that management had given up on repairing and just removed them which was very handy if you needed to slide the machine a bit with your foot to save the ball heading straight between the flippers. But the really cool thing about that machine was that racking up free replays by repeatedly clocking the “special” meant that after about an hour, I’d have the machine maxed out on replays and then spend the next few hours selling them off whilst playing as one of the four players that machine could accommodate. The one quarter I dropped on playing pinball starting round noon regularly would turn into a nice pile of cash by the time I left late in the evening.
By the time I was finished remembering the ancient times when pinball machines ruled the arcade, a very sweaty crew had finished with laser tag and now it’s off to sample the arcade’s wares.
That’s when the next difference became quite apparent…even when the machines have coin slots, they’ve been replaced by a magnetic card reader where the average machine costs 5.4 or some other random number of “credits” to play.
I’ll admit that I’m definitely giving away my age when I say that the first time I stepped into an arcade and played pinball, it was 10 cents per play on the ancient machines and the new-fangled ones would set you back a quarter. And it started out with actual coins before the changeover to custom tokens to defeat the cheapskates who would drill a quarter or a similar-sized metal slug and put a thread through the hole to drop it in the slot and flip the lever a few times to rack up some credits before fishing it back up through the coin slot.
Not that I’d know anyone who’d actually do that.
Now that our party was armed with the card, it was time to head over to the combo Ms Pac Man/Galaga machine for some vintage 80’s video game action.
Or at least we would have had the magnetic reader hadn’t been buggered and refused to read the card. Darn it! I was so looking forward to rocking the “challenging stages” and blasting some bee-shaped alien ships and secretly imagining I’m David Lightman skiving off from being at school!
Of course, the new-fangled “Space Invaders” game has two seats with a laser cannon and it does an amazing job of emulating the eight-bit sprite graphics look in colour. It’s not the easiest thing to see where you’re shooting in all the frenetic action and should the aliens get in the lower-third of the screen you are screwed because they hit the warp drive to blow your base into atoms. But it’s definitely fun!
We would wander round for more games until we exhausted the card. Nick and Katie rocked “Connect 4”, Nick and I took a couple of turns on a driving game with a severe amount of oversteer and steering that could use some serious tightening, Alex showed off his dance moves on a machine similar to the one featured in “Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen”, some skee-balls were tossed, and Nick totally humiliated me at air hockey which was a game that I could count on one hand actually losing in over 40 years of playing.
I remember the first time I discovered air hockey was at the youth recreation centre at Ft Leavenworth in the fall of 1978. It didn’t take long to get the hang of the angles and being somewhat ambidextrous would invariably throw off my opponents when I’d switch hands on them right the in middle of the play…sometimes more than once. It got to the point that when I showed up and put my quarter on the table, everyone else knew I was going to be playing until I got bored and/or popped out to the pool for a swim.
Ah. Those were the days of fast reflexes and eyesight that didn’t suck. 🙂
Another feature of the magnetic cards is that the machines generally don’t spit a bunch of tickets at you for the prize counter…it’s all maintained on the card. Now *THAT* is welcome news for anyone who hated spending any amount of time at the ticket muncher at Chuck E. Cheese…or for those of us old enough to remember the competitor they eventually merged with…Showbiz.
The fly in the ointment is that there are often more people redeeming tickets than people to actually service them. Julia’s choice after some random kid cut in front of her was between one worker who bore a striking resemblance to Urkel and another one who seemed somewhat disinterested and so over her assigned duties. As it turned out, they only have one computer where they manage the prize inventory and ticket redemption with a breathtaking amount of accounting controls far in excess of a prize inventory that’s rarely over $100-200 at cost for an entire month. So it didn’t matter if you got nerd or Miss Over It Already, redemption was not going to be a quick process. 😉
The last stop was the go-kart track where Julia and the kids got to enjoy the joys of go-karts that needed to be retired years ago (and the emissions from them!). Whilst they were whizzing about the track, I got to play the part of Crofty commentating on the motoring madness which included more than a few ding-dongs and argy bargy in spite of the warning of dire consequences should you be caught bumping or putting the PIT manoeuvre on your opponents (which actually did happen but they kept driving after the kid straightened out their cars). These go-karts also featured more than a little oversteer (that’s when the front turns so hard that the back end drifts through the turn).
Even though our adventures on Capital Blvd were over (if you discount the joy of getting out of the car park onto the madness that is Capital Blvd!), there were games to be played and a wonderful treat of schweinschnitzel (pork schnitzel) with a delightful jaeger sauce for dinner to be had.
Normally schnitzel is done with veal but as that’s not an option, you can do it with chicken or pork and it was truly delicious! Actual Germans would have a hard time telling the difference… 🙂
That my friends was a very delightful Father’s Day.
By the time Nick and I got back home so he could be up early in the morning to head off to work at Leith Toyota (and I could be up about as early to get two other kids and a Mistletoe), the choice for the too few hours remaining before those activities was clear.
Of course I turned on the coverage of the Formula 1 grand prix at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal I was going to watch before I was delightfully shanghai’d. 🙂
