Steph had a nice group of friends over for her birthday dinner, and it turned into a proper feast. Yutong brought way too much food as she tends to do, and it was all delicious. We also had some great wine that George brought over. We also had some of the Port that we had brought back, and that was pretty tasty as well. We didn’t really do much in the way of games, and overall had great discussions of what we were planning for London and the future. I did the cleaning, which wasn’t all that bad since we used a lot of disposable plates and cutlery.
Steph joined me for a work trip to NYC. We were there for a team meeting for one of the teams I’m a part of, but I was also able to meet with other members of other teams I work with while I was there. It was a little strange to be there as the only design representation was myself and my manager, and my manager was in other meetings for most of her time, leaving just me.
Outside of the work event we had a good time going to the PunchDrunk production Sleep No More. Much like the production in London it was amazing and immersive and another world. It is hard to describe the feeling that being immersed in a production like that creates, but it is something I look forward to doing again once we’ve moved to London.
We also, of course, went out to some really nice restaurants. Steph found some amazing vegetarian and vegan places. Plus we had to do the NYC staples, like good floppy pizza, bagels, and other baked goods.
We walked the more notable parts of the city like Times Square, Central Park, and Broadway. We had a nice night on the rooftop bar, and had some good conversations over drinks as we figured out the next few years of our lives.
After London I joined Steph in Porto for an evening before we took the morning train to Vigo, Spain. We walked around the waterfront and the nice park near the train station. It was a really nice park, and the waterfront was also lovely. It was immediately noticeable how the Spanish lifestyle is slower, with most businesses only being open for very select hours. The restaurants also had limited hours, with even more limited kitchen hours. So we had a hard time knowing where and when we could go to places for lunches and dinners. We would look up their times online and head down, and they would be open, but not serving food. Vigo is also a very heavy meat and seafood area. Several places had zero options that didn’t involve meat and seafood, which made Steph’s options very limited. We did find some amazing places, at amazing prices. There was a very nice restaurant that would have been $50 to $60 per person in SF and it was $11 per person for us. My vocabulary in Spanish isn’t great, so one of the areas I struggled was in knowing all the different foods that were on menus, or more often spoken as the daily special. We never got something that was wildly different than expected, but I did order the daily menu of eggplant for Steph by accident (She doesn’t like eggplant).
I was pleasantly surprised by how well my Spanish worked for getting around. Only 4 people that we interacted with had better English than I had Spanish. This is both my Spanish was better than expected and the prevalence of English there isn’t great. I also think I ran into two people that mainly spoke Galician.
There was an interesting mix of international influences, but not very international people. We could find restaurants that were listed as Indian, Japanese, Mexican, or American, but the people there were all Spanish. Steph also found a vegan restaurant, but we only ended up eating there once.
Steph got an AirBnB up by the castle, which is on top of a significant hill. When our check in time came around, we started walking up there, and ran across the escalators that will take you most of the way up. It was really nice with the big bag, and we made it to the apartment with no issue. The apartment had a great view. We walked up to the castle first thing and it was a hot day (34C). The castle park was lovely, and free. We enjoyed the manicured gardens, but at the same time the area had a overgrown ruin feel that I greatly enjoyed. We headed down to the waterfront, which was only a 15 minute walk, and very nice. We passed through their high street , which was a lovely area with lots of interesting shops. We made it to the water and found the statue of Jules Verne. Vigo is the city where Nimo has his sunken treasure galleon.
Parts of Vigo were very industrial, but the area we were in was isolated from that. There are also a lot of shellfish farms in the river there. There is also the city across the river, and at one point they were firing off cannons. We could hear them and see the flash and smoke plumes.
The second day we had a morning of doing move research, then walked around the city some more. We had a massage at a place that was styled as a Thai massage, but mainly did Swedish massages. We went to the grocery store for bread and cheese and then went to the apartment for more work on the moving plans.
We made it to train back to Porto in the morning without any issues.
Despite being a longer stay in London there is much less for me to write about for this trip compared to the last one. I’ve focussed much more on work this time.
I did get to do a few interesting things. Firstly I made it to the V&A, which was the one major museum that I wanted to and didn’t get to last time. They had a very eclectic collection of the most random items. I enjoyed going from the teapot gallery, to the wrought iron gallery, then to the middle easter rugs.
I also got to go to two different strange shows. The first was Future Cargo, which was a show performed in the back of a Semi with a clear side, that had a conveyor belt which the performers would dance on. It was interesting how they setup the performance. They had it in an open plaza, and the tickets got you a headset so you could hear the music they were dancing to. I tried taking the headsets off for a minute to see what it was like without the music and it was way worse without the audio to go with it. I enjoyed the performance, but it was very strange.
I also went to a unique style of performance put on by PunchDrunk. They are an immersive theater company that have done several productions. This one was called The Burnt City, and focussed on the sacking of Troy.
It was different. It was like wandering a cyberpunk city from stray, but so more real. And the characters were telling a story, but also something else. They had to tell the full narrative but also the full character. There wasn’t really a stage for them to be on or off, just the full set to be in. All the stories being told at once, coming together and splitting off. I missed so much and it would take another three or four visits to catch all the major scenes and a dozen to see it all. I want to go back to experience it again. For some reason I don’t want to go back, because it would ruin it. I was truly transported to another universe in there.
If there were a VR version of that it would be too immersive. I think the under was trying for that but it lost something in trying to be too friendly. I think this is what The Under Presents was going for, but they didn’t get it.
Other than those two outings I worked pretty much the rest of the time. I did get to walk around the Coal Drop Yards a lot as that is close to the office. It is a really nice area.
Steph and I joined two others, Madz and Ahmad, at Lover’s Point for a nice dive through some of the little remaining kelp forest along Monterey. They showed up late and took a while to get ready, but I was prepared for that, so it wasn’t too bad. I had a great dive. We saw otters and harbor seals as we were setting up our gear, although we didn’t see them underwater. During the dive we saw a ton of sea lemons, some massive sea stars, lots of types of crabs, and some urchin barrens surrounding the kelp. I think the otters must have been keeping the kelp area clear, because there were no urchins in the kelp area.
I’ve been organizing active Tuesdays with a decently large group of friends. We’ve done a lot of pickleball, and over the last two weeks I’ve also organized other activities. Two weeks ago we went kayaking in the canals around Foster City. This past week we had a ‘field day’ where we hung out in a field, had a picnic, and played some games. I had never played spike ball before and I was amazingly bad at it. I was amused that Clarissa refused to move, but she had amazing reflexes and accuracy, so she was actually surprisingly good. We threw the frisbees around, and had two going at the same time really quickly and it was a lot of fun to keep an eye out for each one. We had a few good catches at the same time, and I managed to get one decent double throw to two different people at the same time. We had 12.5 people show up (with Alexander counting as the 0.5). I had a great time, and we’ll have to do it again.
Steph and I took Russel out for fishing in Half Moon Bay. We found a place where the beach was walkable a long way out along the jetty at low tide. We got two rockfish and one big monkeyface eel. We also got a smaller monkeyface, but we threw it back. There were a ton of people there when we arrived going for clams. In the food picture that is the prepared eel, plus some tomatoes and blackberries from our garden. Afterwards we met Elaine at Drakes in San Carlos for a nice lunch.
I got into Cancun without major issues. The bags took nearly 45 minutes to come out, but that didn’t matter much as Steph was delayed in coming to pick me up at the gas station. She was nice enough to come and get me, which I really appreciated. Puerto Aventuras, where we were staying, is about an hour drive from the airport. She had been diving that day, so I didn’t impact he schedule too much.
I worked Wednesday, and then on Thursday I had a free diving class. We did classroom and pool work that led to me doing a 3:30 static breath hold to pass the class. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was manageable. I’m pretty sure I could have made it a minute or so longer, but it is pretty uncomfortable.
The next day we went to Cenote Maravilla, which has a small opening, but is a single huge open cavern underneath. at about 40m there is a strong hydrogen sulfide layer that is opaque more than cloudy. I was able to get to 20m, which is the deepest they can go in the first class. Rodrigo was a great guide and teacher. He loves talking and was able to demonstrate everything clearly.
We had dinner with Rory and were able to talk Survey Down as well as general diving things that are in the area.
Saturday we did a guided cavern dive with Martin, who is one of the old guard of the are for cave divers. He talked about all the history of cave diving in the area, and how he took a step back when his child was born. We did the Barbie and bat cave lines in Dos Ojos. I’ve done those before, but they are great lines, and open enough for me to be comfortable since it has been a while since I’ve been in an overhead environment while diving. I could tell I was pretty rusty as the tips of my fins were tapping the walls in a few spots. I think a lot of that is that I rest with my legs slightly apart.
Sunday we slept in a bit and then headed to the ruins in Tulum. We walked around the ruins, which were more open and hot than we were expecting. After an hour or so there we headed to Burrito Amor which is a place that has unique burritos and smoothies. They had a lot of the same ingredients in their smoothies as I have, but they added a lot more sweet to make the more palatable to most people.
After the burrito we headed to the very southern tip of Tulum, where we met with Rick who guided us in the mangroves. We started by snorkeling. The area had lots of dead plan material, which would get bubbles from the decomposition and float up until the bubbles popped and it float back down. There were a lot of fish in the lagoon, and I got to do a little freediving again. I used the techniques and was able to stay under for about a minute without any issues.
We then went a little further south into the nature preserve and had a quick picnic before kayaking around the reserve. There were a lot of pretty birds: Blue Herron, Ibis, Magnificent Frigate, Redwing Blackbird, Brown Pelicans, and Cormorants. We kayaked around the mangroves until sunset, and then headed back to the dock before the light went completely. It was a long drive back, and I appreciate all the driving that Steph has been doing on all these small rough roads.
I took Monday to myself while Steph did more diving. I didn’t do all that much, and it was nice to just relax.
Tuesday and Wednesday morning were dedicated to work, but Tuesday evening we did get a dinner with Lexi, which was nice. She is one of the people in the Bay Area that goes to cave dive.
We made it back on Wednesday evening with pretty much no issues, and the kitties were so happy to see us. Irene was great at taking care of them.
Friday we had a number of people showing up. I got up and made some amazing french toast from the left over brioche hamburger buns. They were way better than they had any right to be. We had a pretty relaxed morning, and waited for Tim and Hannah, then Michelle and Michael to show up before heading off on a hike. We just went out the back of the house like we did with the first weekend crew, but started the other direction and did a shorter loop. I think we could have done the longer loop and it would have turned out just fine.
When we got back to the house we started prepping for the tea time. As people rolled in over the evening we had lots of finger foods for them to try. We ran out of bread, but were able to improvise a pretty good set of dishes. It was all delicious.
Adam, Tim, and I played some Tapestry. It was a pretty fun round, with Adam taking the victory.
That evening we broke out Drawful and then Just One for some of the social party games.
Saturday morning I dropped Adam off at the Truckee airport, but it was too bad for him to fly. He managed to make it back with commercial flights and car rentals.
We then had breakfast and headed to the water to get in. Unfortunately the rental places weren’t renting because the weather was pretty questionable. Steph, Tina, and I put together out craft, but as Tina was getting in the pin for her paddle broke. Steph and I decided to make it a very short paddle and took about 20 minutes to go a little ways along the West side of the lake. Then we turned around and the wind carried us back to the put in spot.
We then went to a state park to do a short hike. We found a number of different mushrooms, and when we were most of the way back to the car, I spotted a morel mushroom poking up through the pine needles about 30 feet off the trail. I got everyone’s attention and they all spread out to find a pretty good haul of morels.
We then went to the Magic Carpet Mini Golf course. We chose to do the Dinosaur course since it was the most empty. George took it seriously and ended up winning by one stroke over Paul, who beat Michael by 2. The course had some great holes, one with a cannon, and another with a spinning disk that had the hole. There were also some really annoying ones where the hole was up on a plateau or in the middle of a slope that the ball wouldn’t stop on.
George was nice enough to set up his karaoke system, and I embarrassed myself quite a few times. I was having trouble hitting the high notes more than I had in the past, which just went to show that it had been a long time since we’d done any singing.
More games were had that evening, with a very late game of Mars to cap the evening. The Mars game was an especially interesting one. Tim and Tina had powerful engines, and tons of cards. Myself and Yutong/Paul didn’t play as many cards, but got a lot more points. I needed one more points per Jovian card to win, as I ended with 8 Jovians. I also had a microbe card with 25 microbes, which was fun.
Sunday we walked down to the water to see if they were renting or had a pin to fix Tina’s paddle, but no to both. We had a breakfast then a round of games before lunch. Right after lunch we did the miracle fruit tasting. Clarissa said that it didn’t do anything for her, and Paul said it got rid of all his taste. The rest had the typical reaction of it making sour into sweet. We did another round of games, including some VR.
We then went to the East side of the lake to watch the sunset over the lake. It was gorgeous and I made a fool of myself scrambling over the rocks. We shuffled the cars around a few times because of the 20 minute parking limits, but didn’t end up having any issues there. We watched the sunset then went back to the house. I got people to play some Acron, then we had an intense game of Spirit Island with level 5 Prussians plus defending the heart of the island. I was feeding all of the others with energy, as I had two cards that did that. I was also able to get a set of inexpensive cards that let me activate my ultimate and do 2 damage to each invader in a single land. That plus the ability to push invaders around made it a powerful nuke. The others were also able to do large plays based on all the energy I was feeding them. I think we had a lot of things go just right, as that combo is supposed to be one of the hardest to play.
Monday we all grabbed what we could. Lost of left overs were split or thrown out, and we finished with about 30 minutes to spare before checkout time.
I had a fantastic time, and will likely do something like this again for my 40th.
It's an Exciting World 