Alum Retreat
May. 27th, 2003 02:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dmazeWent off to upstate (?) New York with a bunch of ET alums for the long weekend. The drive out was long; we took the scenic route, and so things like fog in Florida slowed us down. We had two full days out there, driving out on Friday and back on Monday. Saturday we went to the "Secret Caverns" near Cobleskill. It was incredibly hokey (a lot of the underground lighting was with colored incandescent bulbs), but certainly worth the entertainment value. Sunday I mostly sat around and dealt with dinner; other people went hiking. (And the people making dinner astonishingly failed to kill themselves. Don't pour a cup of lighter fluid on to a burning fire, no, really!)
The country was pretty, at least. The main road through the area was a two-lane hilly road that hit a small town every few miles. One of the alums from the area tried to explain New York governance to me, and sort of failed, but I gathered that the large amount of dirt roads were cheaper to maintain and were by and large maintained by towns rather than counties or the state; also, that the counties had enough money and towns had enough influence in the county government that any road actually worth paving was probably county-maintained.
There wasn't really a whole lot of gaming. On Sunday night a group of us played a horribly unbalanced game of Cities and Knights (Settlers of Catan expansion, for the uninitiated). There was also a game of Trans America, which was much saner. There also seemed to be a never-ending bridge game going on, which I mostly avoided. Some ET-variant fantan, some hearts. But none of, say, the three copies of Iron Dragon that appeared there got played at all.
All in all, it was fun. It would have been nice to have had a little more energy on Sunday to go with the huge hiking mob. And I vaguely wanted to drive more; I just got one (30-mile) round trip to the grocery store. Still, it was good to get away with people for a weekend.
The country was pretty, at least. The main road through the area was a two-lane hilly road that hit a small town every few miles. One of the alums from the area tried to explain New York governance to me, and sort of failed, but I gathered that the large amount of dirt roads were cheaper to maintain and were by and large maintained by towns rather than counties or the state; also, that the counties had enough money and towns had enough influence in the county government that any road actually worth paving was probably county-maintained.
There wasn't really a whole lot of gaming. On Sunday night a group of us played a horribly unbalanced game of Cities and Knights (Settlers of Catan expansion, for the uninitiated). There was also a game of Trans America, which was much saner. There also seemed to be a never-ending bridge game going on, which I mostly avoided. Some ET-variant fantan, some hearts. But none of, say, the three copies of Iron Dragon that appeared there got played at all.
All in all, it was fun. It would have been nice to have had a little more energy on Sunday to go with the huge hiking mob. And I vaguely wanted to drive more; I just got one (30-mile) round trip to the grocery store. Still, it was good to get away with people for a weekend.
