Cave outside of Highlands, North Carolina

35.053421
-83.196685

Our weekend in the mountains started with all the trappings of a slasher flick. Ominous thunderstorms, a wrong turn onto desolate country highways, gas stations where you didn’t dare ask for directions. The movie poster tagline would have said something like:

They went into the mountains to game… but they were gaming with DEATH.
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La Brea Tar Pits
Los Angeles
California

34.06306731482197
-118.35539102554321

I grew up in Los Angeles, and ultimately, I moved away because the the phrase “Consumptive Goo” is a metaphorically accurate description in so, so many ways. At the Page Museum’s La Brea Tar Pits, the metaphor becomes unnecessary, as the entire complex is built on a bazillion-year-old mass of primordial sludge, beneath which are the remains of several thousand prehistoric species, including, no shit, Dire Wolves. Read More »

El Morro Fort
Old San Juan
Puerto Rico

37.0625
-95.677068

Seen through the lens of history, it seems inevitable that the mindset of medieval fortification would end in the muzzle flash of the black powder age. Yet we forget that between Mehmed II’s Hungarian-made bombards reducing the walls of Constantinople to Byzantine flavored rubble and our modern age of invisible insurgencies, worrying about the effect of PowerPoint on our command structure , Microwave ‘Pain’ Rays and communist stealth paint lay a half-millennia of elegant and imposing physical defenses. Read More »

A marble plaque on Fortazela St. marks the location of a now-defunct hotel that claims to have invented the Pina Colada in 1968 – the drink became the official beverage of Puerto Rico 10 years later.

A forward-thinking invention indeed, the can’t-taste-the-alcohol perfection of pineapple, coconut and Bacardi leaves you staring with bleary happiness into an empty glass and posing the eternal and pressing question: why, o why, is the rum gone?

The Quest Rules: Drink exactly one Pina Colada and play precisely one game of MtG in each of 4 Old San Juan get-drunkeries. Decks are chosen at random from the deck box. The same player can’t play the same deck twice.

Pina Coladas are graded on an entirely arbitrary 1-10 scale of personal opinion, and ranked according to standard “how buzzed we’re feeling right now” factors. Read More »

Wyndam Rio Mar Beach Resort
Puerto Rico

33.380999
-80.457001

The thing is that no one cares about a sunset they didn’t see. Talking to people about natural beauty is like talking about that weird dream you had where the ceiling was tiled with rat heads and your cousin was floating upside down in this giant … yeah, see what I did thar? You have to pay good money for that kind of listening.

Alternately, you can take to the internet and bore people indiscriminately, but the fact is that the brilliant Bant Panorama sunsets are about all the Wyndam Rio Mar resort in Puerto Rico has going for it. Read More »