Robot Claw – Page 183 – “Life In The So-Called Space Age”

Laconia

August 4, 2021

Yesterday we drove to Laconia, New Hampshire. We chose this place due to the mega-arcade Funspot, one of my favourite locations (and one I’ve shown on this blog several times before).

Yesterday we only ate there, as well as played a few games and ticket machines. The plan was to return today and spend much more time enjoying the games.

But first, this morning, we went on the mail cruise once again! The weather was wonderful and we sat out on the deck and enjoyed the breeze and the views as the boat made the mail deliveries. I may have even sent a few postcards from one of America’s only floating post offices…

Then we went back to Funspot to spend the afternoon playing games and ticket machines. It’s been a few years since we last visited and it was nice to see the place had updated with quite a few new games (the focus is still on the classic era, up to the mid 80s). I played dozens including many I’ve never seen or even heard of before, and it was a real treat seeing (and playing!) original cabinets of some very rare arcade games. The art on some of the machines was fantastic, such as this example of the bezel art on Lady Bug:

I could just go on and on about Funspot, and truly wished it was closer to where we lived so I could visit whenever I wished.

I love seeing and playing all the games, and just being surrounded by the lights and sounds. The nostalgia is sky-high at Funspot, and I wish you could all visit.

Oh and the ticket machines? We invested about $30 in them and won just over 2000 tickets. This was enough to get an LED light strip with an MSRP of about $25, which isn’t bad at all given most the machines themselves are fun to play! I’d say it was a big success 🙂

Tomorrow we head home, which means this is the last post from this trip. We’ve had a great time and these posts have only partially described what we saw and done. There’s more on postcards, of which I sent over 100! Most of you will receive several, some will receive too many. Please look forward to them 🙂

Bangor

August 3, 2021

There’s a place just outside of Bangor called Bangor Forest that contains about a dozen miles of hiking trails. One of them leads to something quite special: the Orono Bog Boardwalk.

This is a floating one-mile boardwalk through a peat bog! It starts in dense swampy forest – the ground here is very wet with lots of standing water – and after a few hundred feet emerges into a very different type of landscape.

This is the peat bog, where only very hardy plants can survive and the ground is covered in moss. To our great surprise one of the more common plants here is the carnivorous pitcher plant, and the ground was covered in them:

It takes about an hour to walk the entire boardwalk, and despite not seeing any of the animals mentioned on the information boards – such as snowshoe rabbits, cougars or leopard frogs! – we found the experience fascinating and even spent about 15 (unsuccessful) minutes trying to spot a sundew plant 🙂

Afterwards we went to a ‘museum of land transportation’, which was a giant warehouse filled with an insanely large collection of vehicles and paraphernalia from the last 120 or so years of American life. From roller skates to trains, this place had it all.

You could spend days here reading all the info sheets just for the vehicles alone, but the museum has so much more including rooms of WW2 artifacts and an encyclopedic history of road shipping in Maine. It’s the work of one man (who owned a trucking company) and is one of the most impressive private museums I’ve ever visited.

Shortly after we left it started raining, which was somewhat appropriate since we then (after a visit to a casino where I won $23!) went to visit Stephen King!

Yes that’s his home, but no he no longer lives there. As Bangor’s most famous resident his house has become a tourist attraction, and while it’s gated and doesn’t do tours, there’s an endless stream of people stopping briefly for a quick photo. One lady we saw yesterday had a red balloon with her as well, an obvious nod to King’s novel It 🙂

I write this from our final destination on this trip… but you’ll have to wait for the next post to see where that is!

Portland

August 1, 2021

To break up the drive north, we spent a night in Portland. On the way we stopped at New Hampshire’s beach resort Hampton Beach, which was way better than we expected.

We spent a few hours there in the boardwalk shops and arcades before continuing on to our Portland hotel. The rest of the day was shopping (including in a great comic shop) and lazing around like sloths.

The next morning we visited two lighthouses. The first was the over-200-year-old Portland Head Light, which was breathtaking!

The area around the park is now parkland, and has a lovely cliff walk that provides great views of the lighthouse (which is still functioning) from several angles.

It was a beautiful morning and the sound of the waves on the rocks was occasionally broken by a bell from a buoy or the engine noise of a fishing boat going out for the day. Standing on the cliff and looking out over the water was mesmerizing.

Next we drove a few miles north to a second (active) lighthouse built at the end of a jetty like the one I crossed in Provincetown.

Once again KLS waited on the shore (these rocks weren’t trivial to negotiate) and I sprinted out for a close look.

It was bigger than expected and seemed to be occupied! It was also well fortified with trapdoors limited access and preventing trespassing – probably a good thing since it’s built right next to a university campus!

While quite different, both of these lighthouses were great to see especially up close! If you’re ever traveling and have a chance to visit a lighthouse, I recommend it!

The other thing we did today was visited a fort in the Maine capital of Augusta. We took an excellent guided tour that covered the history of the fort as well as what life in those days (>200 years ago) was like. It was definitely worth the stop. Unfortunately I didn’t take a single photo so the one above I borrowed from the internet 🙂

Oh yes we’re in Maine, which is famous for moose. We’ve seen signs warning of them, but haven’t seen any yet. The closest we’ve got was this life-sized statue at a rest stop:

Imagine running into one of them in the wild!!