Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Not so many updates...

Hello there,

I know I have not had many updates in the last week. No real reason other than I have been busy with work lately. I still have quite some pictures and topics to cover, and I will get them up here at some point.

In the meantime, here is a photo of Liam standing in front of a castle where we stopped for sandwiches on the way home from Geneva last trip.

Shorts weather feels like a distant memory at this point.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Gaming in Genf - Shadows Over Camelot

As usual, our trip down to Geneva gave us the chance to enjoy some fun evenings of board games. I used this opportunity to finally bring out the Game that Bernhard had given me last Christmas. Shadows Over Camelot.

Shadows is a cooperative game where each player plays a knight of the round table. You work together to complete quests like the search for the holy grail and excalibur while fending off invading armies and evil.

It effectively works like a series of mini-games that are going on at the same time, and you just have to juggle what everyone is doing. We tried the first game on Friday knight and it resulted in a near loss to the forces of evil, but we took it as a learning experience and went for it again on Saturday.

The ladies were of course excited to try out a new game where we all worked together, it was a nice change of pace to try something where we could all win together. Claudia was Sir Gawaine and Doris Sir Galahad.
Ryan was the bold sir Tristan, a knight he liked based on his ability to get some extra free moves. Ryan likes the guys who can go fast...
I was brave King Arthur. I took him as I was the person who had read the rules and had to teach the game while playing for the first time. King Arthur was a character best suited to sit quite still and support the other knights while they are out on quests. I thought that would be easiest for me to handle. Also, King Arthur is red and I wore a red T-shit special that day.
We got off to a great start, winning the quest for Excalibur on the second turn, we made sure that Ryan finished off that one and had the sword so he could use his speedy knight to zip around the board and help out the others with fights as needed.

Next we amazingly got through the Holy Grail quest, with Claudia hanging on to the cup, we were 7 white swords (good points) up with no black swords (bad points) very early in the game. To secure victory, we just needed to get all 12 swords on the table before the evil armies represented by catapults overtook us.
Here is where we ran into trouble, it seemed very hard to get quests to move ahead for better or worse now, and the catapults were starting to add up. It was starting to look grim, but then thanks to a great move by Claudia, we managed to win the game in the last moments. With Ryan beating the Black Knight to fill up the round table with the 11h and 12th needed swords.
Happy days in Camelot, there was my rejoicing and feasting. Well, cookies and tea anyway.

Friday, September 19, 2008

Fun Land Part 3 - some more fun

Just to finish off the look at fun land... After the rides, there were also some other little fun activities to consider.

First up was the ball pit. Kids all love these and they had a very nice one housed in this little gazebo like structure.
As you can see here, Liam jumped right in and had a great time. We could not get him to leave actually. I even offered him ice cream and he rejected it in favour of more ball pit time.
Claudia then spotted something next to the pit that was even more enticing... a big digger you could actually operate. Diggers (Baggers) are Liam's greatest love in the world. He was transfixed by this and we let him have a go sitting on my lap.

It was harder to operate than you would think, but I think I could have just made the arm go back and forth the whole time and Liam would have been a happy dude. Given enough coins, I think we could have easily just left him there for about a week or so.
One more ride popped up for Liam and Claudia, one of those carousel rides with chairs hanging on swings. They gave that one a go.
The last thing that I thought was awesome was an ice cream vending machine. It looked like a polar bear, and you put in a euro and were then treated to the excitement of machine prepared soft ice cream.
I liked this so much I made a little film of it. I was singing this little ice cream song to myself for a long time afterwards.

And there you have it, the conclusion of the fun land posts. I hope to go back there for even more fun another time.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Fun Land Part 2 - the rides

Well, after seeing all the fairy tale displays, we moved on to the main attraction of the park... rides.

There was a good variety of rides for little folks, I would say from 3 up to about 10 should have been able to have quite a good time here.

Our first stop were the cars. These are just your typical fun park cars... on rails so you don't steer them, they just putter around the track past more fairy tale type things.
Right next to these ones were even smaller cars that Liam was able to ride by himself. He liked those a lot too.
Next up was a ride that looked like a hot air balloon. That was another one for Claudia to ride with him. When the ride stopped, he jumped off and ran away in some fit of excitement and the girl operating the ride needed to send him back in the right direction to us...

Just down the path from this was the ferris wheel. I have a pretty significant fear of heights, but I figured what the heck, I may as well go on. Claudia was very keen to go on this, she likes this sort of ride quite a lot.
Interestingly, I thought that this ride seemed to lack some of the safety features I was used to from North American fun parks. The pod we were sitting in had no safety restraints of any kind, it was totally open to the air and you could even spin it around with a wheel in the middle. I am sure that in North America some fool would have jumped out then sued.

Good views down on the park from up there though...
We had the inevitable train ride that Liam insisted on riding. This was a pretty boring ride, very short and did not really see much. However it is a train so we had to ride it about 4 times.
From here we found something similar to the train but a little more exciting. A tiny roller coaster. Liam did not know what to make of it at first, but once we told him it was a caterpillar train, he was all for it. It just went in a circle, but was moderately fast and quite exciting for a tiny person.
Right next door to that was a slightly bigger roller coaster, he got to ride that one with mummy.
There you go... a summary of the rides. There were a few more there but I think I have painted a pretty good picture of what Traumland had to offer. I had a good time and I think it is safe to say that it was a success with Liam.

Monday, September 15, 2008

A trip to fun land part 1

Back on my vacation, we made a little outing to an amusement park that is specifically for little people. This is a place about an hours drive from our home and it specifically caters to kids around Liam's age, so we thought it was worth having a look.

First of all, I have to say that it was very reasonably priced, I think it was about 8 Euro per person to get in, which included all the rides. Much cheaper than a North American equivalent as far as I recall, oh, and Parking was free. The entrance to the park looked like a little castle.
The first part of the park is a "fairy tale forest" which is a place where there are displays and sound/puppet shows about some of the more famous fairy tales. We have been to similar places in the past and Liam always likes to look at the munchkins.

Here was the entrance to the forest:
The first display was for Snow white, there was a little cottage that Liam found very interesting. It is unusual for him to find a building that is the right size for someone like him.
Right next door to the cottage was the cave where the 7 Dwarfs were mining. I love a good garden gnome and the ones they used for the dwarfs were pretty darn good. It was again Liam-sized, so I had to squish myself down pretty small to fit in there.
Next up was the story of the 7 little goats. not one I had heard of, but Liam really liked seeing some goats doing people things in a little house.
Just down the path from the goats was the Hansel and Gretel gingerbread house.
There were a few more dispalys; The Frog Prince, Rapunzel, and some more that I don't recall. All in all, the fairy tale forest was a pretty good one, lots of variety and all the kids seemed to really like looking at the munchkins.

It was all just an appetizer to the main part of the park though.... rides. I will cover them in the next post.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Hiking adventure in Chamonix

While visiting the Joneses for a couple of days on my time off, Ryan and I left the ladies and Liam at home and drove an hour down the road into the French Alps for some hiking fun. Chamonix is pretty much as good as it gets as far as hiking goes. We quickly got some directions from the tourist office and then headed over to a lift to bring us up to the start of the hiking trail.
The ride up lasted a few minutes, but let us have a nice view of the valley and town. It was not the best weather that day and the top of Mont Blanc was sadly covered in clouds. Here is a shot from the start of the hike looking back down on Chamonix.
We set off on the path, with the "Lac Blanc" glacial lake as our destination. It was a "medium" difficulty hike with moderate height change and a fair bit of bumpy ground. I certainly would not have been able to do it with Liam on my back.

Here is a shot a little ways down the path, it is looking back on the lift station/restaurant where we were dropped off. It is the red building in the lower right. As with all the images, click on them for a larger version.
After a ways, we saw the first splash of water. This was just some run off that accumulated in an indent, but I thought it was nice. It was quite a few degrees cooler up there than down on the ground.
We had been walking up for about 30-45 minutes when we stopped for our first break. Time for a drink and a realization that we should have brought some snacks.... our lunch of (yummy) soup suddenly seemed like it could have used some extra supplemental snacks.
After the rest, we continued on, saw more rocks and lichen, but not much else. There were surprisingly few other people hiking the trail. I think most people were taking the lift up to the second higher station then hiking down, as the manly men we are, we got off at the bottom and hiked up. After some more time, we arrived at this sign, telling us we made it.
Just beyond this sign, was a very impressive, broken down disused shack.Beyond the shack was a bridge across some run off to the expected coffee and cake restaurant. It seems all hikers in Europe love cake. It is always there, no matter where you go.The actual lake is split into two parts, a smaller "Lower" lake, seen here with the amazing shack.
Then just above it is the larger, "upper" lake, seen here with a certain very handsome hiker. The water is really an interesting shade of milky white-blue. I think this is because there is still quite a bit of ice at the bottom. It looks really great though and Ryan and I can confirm that it was much much to cold to consider swimming.
After relaxing at the lake a little while, we continued on for another hour or two (I forget) to hike up to the "Index" chair lift. We were going to consider extending the hike farther at that spot, but just as we reached the lift, it started to rain. Since we were tired out of shape hikers, that was a great excuse to hop on the lift and head back down to town for a well deserved snack.Overall a very fine hike that Ryan and I enjoyed very much. We used to go hiking quite a lot when the Joneses were living in Rosenheim, which was both near the mountains and closer to us for visits. Once Liam is old enough to join in the fun I hope we can start up some hiking once again. For the moment, I think it is still something that is more enjoyable with just the adults.

Besides, sometimes it is nice for just the men-folk to get off and do something on our own, we don't do that very often.