Brain Dump

Well, that was interesting.

We stopped for lunch near the border at a Cracker Barrel so that could get himself some beans’n'greens. Being trapped up in Boston has apparently deprived him of good Southern cookin’. It was a good meal, and not as expensive as it could have been. We sated ourselves and got back on the road for the border.

We made it up to Niagara (correct spelling this time) with no problems. Paid our $8 to park and walked around the US side. It’s pretty impressive, though I think that seeing it from the top seriously robs it of its sense of scale. Unfortunately, they charge quite a bit if you want to go down and see it from the bottom.

Still, it’s a big waterfall, which is pretty cool.

Of course multiple people had told us that the view from the Canadian side is better, and I’d never been to Canada (or even crossed a land-border before), so it seemed like a cool thing to do. Of course we were totally thinking that the border is pretty easy to get through, what with the good American/Canadian relations. Well…

Two things we totally failed to consider: and I didn’t have our passports, and my only other major form of ID is my temporary driver’s license which is a piece of paper printed on a color laser printer. We also forgot to consider the fact that is pretty clearly of South Asian descent. And he wasn’t born a US citizen.

So the Canadians were totally suspicious of my print-out, and insisted on a car search and a background check. They were very polite about it, but seemed to find it hard to believe that anyone would cross the border just to see Niagara Falls from the Canadian side. Still, they let us through, and we headed over to the Canadian parking area which cost $16.50 (US). Interestingly more expensive.

The view was better, and due to the angle of the sun there was this amazingly cool rainbow (I got pictures). But it was quite a hassle getting over there, probably not worth the effort. We did, however, each purchase something while in Canada, just because we could.

One thing of note was the difference in tourist composition on each side. The US side was mostly Americans and East Asians (there seemed to be quite a few Koreans). The Canadian side had a lot more South Asians and Europeans. The contrast was interesting

It turns out that it’s even harder to get back into the States. They weren’t at all suspicious of my print-out ID, but the fact that we had someone with dark skin who wasn’t born in the US, and who didn’t have a passport with him, was a pretty big deal. We spent significantly more time trying to get our identities verified on the US border than the Canadian one.

There was also a huge line of people waiting to be checked on the US side, while we were the only people being checked on the Canadian side. The US side also seemed more security-conscious and more intentionally imposing. Another interesting contrast.

In the end we did manage to convince them that we weren’t crazy terrorists (and we were assisted by the extremely nice and helpful Officer Castro, who was great, I might write a letter to his boss). We headed south again, skipped around Buffalo, and stopped by a Wal-mart for dinner supplies. We grabbed a loaf of French bread, a block of extra sharp cheddar, a summer sausage. Oh, and some chocolate doughnuts for breakfast.

Then we found Lake Erie State Park, which is appropriately enough right on Lake Erie. The $15 camp-ground fee is great for saving us the moneys. We got the tents out and tossed the frisbee around for a bit, then ate our bread, cheese, and sausage in the setting sun. An excellent meal. We then each had a single doughnut for dessert.

We are now a mere 8.5 hours from Indianapolis. We’re probably going to aim to make it down to a park within an hour of town tomorrow, with a possible brief stop for lunch in Oberlin, OH. That should give us plenty of time to rest and get into town on Wednesday. Should be fun.

*Discussion topics were tighter and more topical today. There was still some obligatory discussion of hot females, but we quickly got down to business. Lots of game design, play, and theory talk. Reward systems, design philosophies, writing, settings, layout. Some actual design work on various games-in-progress. It was productive and fun, and I think it helped cement us together a bit more: we’re all pretty passionate about this stuff, and it’s good to share passions.

Until next time.

Thomas

This entry was posted on Monday, August 7th, 2006 at 08:59 and is filed under life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.