The Stephenson Families' Great Californian Adventure

Weirs Beach continued

Back to the story. So, we're all set at the lodge and its been a tiring day. We bought some beers, snacks, and decided to settle for the night after the drive and the adventures we had (I'm skipping most of the painful bits for the most part - but today we spent several hours arranging stuff - mostly to do with fighting with the moving company who still didnt move our stuff from Montreal and have broken their promised delivery date several times now - at the moment we have no idea when it may arive. We also ended up sending emergency faxes all over the place just to get some electricity for when we arrive, tho it remains to be seen if it will happen. Doing this in New Hampshire, which is utterly devoid of contact with the outside world, is excruciatingly difficult I would add!)

Back to matters in hand. Remember a little while ago I said I had a bigger plan, which is why we didnt stop at Woodstock? Well, theres a little something located in Weirs Beach which is rather special. At least, its rather special to old geeky guys such as myself! Since the early 70s theres been a family amusement arcade here, and its still operated to this day. The big draw now, however, is that its home to the biggest classic video game museum in the States, perhaps the world. Its called Funspot, and its about half a mile from our lodge! I'd planned on paying a quick visit the next day, but once Karina was in bed the temptation got the better of me.

So off I go at 8PM for some retro gaming goodness, and boy was I in for a treat! Theres hundreds of games there, perfectly maintained... from the early 70's black and white machines to pseudo classic stuff from the late 80s, and a whole bunch of games I never played back in the day or at least not in their original form. When I walk into the upstairs room at Funspot its like a step back to 1980! The sound of 200 games in attract mode coupled with an 80s jukebox - very cool stuff indeed. But dilemas: what to play first? Funspit works on tokens rather than coins, so I stick $20 in and get too many tokens to count - I think it was around 100 or 150! So the best strategy seemed to be start at one end and work around all the games. Anyway before I knew it the lights were out and it was almost midnight and I was being evicted, not having made it more than a third of the way round and having managed to go through a good bunch of the tokens too (some practice is in order on some of these machines, I'm rusty!) The funny part was - all night there was only a maximum of about 5 people in the retro section and most of the time it was me and one other guy. The following week was to see the world championships at Funspot, an annual event held by Twin Galaxies, so I am guessing the other guy was there for the competition, or purely on a retro-vacation a bit like myself :) I have a feeling I'll be back at the arcade tomorow...

posted by Shaun S @ 11:09 PM