Disclaimer- the words written here are part of the workings of a mind that’s not always the most observant, rationale, logical and may not make sense to everyone, especially if you read his handwriting. Grammatically, it’s up to Microsoft Word to filter out the grammar and spelling errors but beyond that, your guess is as good as mine. This will probably be the least STCCG related of the travel logs so if you’re only interested in high-level, powerful meta-gaming analytical prose with little "color commentary," you’re not going to find it here. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. There is, however, a lovely Russian lady who falls asleep on top of me on the trip that I talk about in great detail. The choice is yours.

Well, I guess I should be writing another travel log, considering that I’m traveling again, this time to the vast recesses of American continental wilderness known as Montana. This was going to be the shortest travel log in history if it wasn’t for Mom. Whether you know it or not (assuming that you care, of course), I haven’t played a game of Trek since Dec. 16^th of last year (see Chase the Can tournament report – North Bend, OR) which to me personally, seems to be an eternity. Since it’s been so long, you can just imagine how difficult it was to even find my cards in my collection to make a deck out of. On the good side, I managed to find all but about 800 cards of my collection. On the bad side, I couldn’t find the anthology that had the vast majority of rares in it. Needless to say, I was panicked on a level akin to a guy whom girlfriend had Lorrena Bobbitt tendencies focused on your most sensitive of places. Just the prospect of getting all those rares back was staggering like being forced to judge the Miss Vidiian Beauty Pageant. So I cancelled my hotel and passed out on the couch (started getting my cards together at 3 am and spent 7 hours looking for cards to make a deck out of), figuring that my choices were just shot.

I wake up to the nudging of Mom and told her what happened and that I wasn’t going. I had already guessed before I passed out on the couch that they were in my travel bag (a black Assonate knock-off which was inside my Eddie Bauer bag which was given to me by my Uncle Bill as it clashed with all of their new luggage after I showed up at the bus station with my stuff from college in a transparent, extra duty garbage bag.) I don’t remember taking it out of the Eddie bag and knowing how natural my sense of laziness is to me, it made sense that they’d be together still. Three minutes later, using the inherent powers that Mom possesses, she finds my bag with rares in my room’s closet. You could (and probably should) ask, "Well, if it’s in your own room, why didn’t you look into the closet?" I don’t live in my room, I’ve rarely slept in the room in the past year, that’s only recently been where my clothes have been located and the fact that other people had been living in there for the past few months is a few good reasons but mainly it’s because that’s not where the computer is located. Call me a computer addict I guess. What I find most ironic is that, Mom can find a bag that hasn’t been touched since Dec. in less time than she can find her purse in the morning.

After packing up my travel cards, books, magazines, the notepad that contains all of the writings of this travel log (well, mostly, did use a few receipts and sticky notes) and of course, clothes, I was all set to go after a shave and haircut. Call it an inherent need to dress up when I travel, call it an inherent need to flirt with women which always happens much more when I travel or just a semi-subconscious effort to belong in society, but I always get haircuts and shave before trips. Go figure.

Mom and I drive up to Portland since that’s where the bus will be leaving from but first, I need to buy shoes. I’ve gone through three pairs of shoes this year alone and in my lifetime, I’ve probably gone through easily thirty or forty pairs of shoes. It’s so bad that I fully expect that one day, I’ll be arrested for crimes against shoekind and be forced to relive all of my former shoes abuse. It’s not like I’m growing more in the feet department, I just walk funny, especially for a guy. To give you some idea of how I walk, picture a guy wearing heels (most people picture Dr. Frankenfurter from Rocky Horror Picture Show), now remove the heel but keep the foot/shoe elevated that way with the heel off the ground and then add the most important ingredient to the equation (not to mention scores of insults growing up), you have to add a bounce with each step. Apparently, the combination of the above acts as the most disastrous form of walking to my shoes as I’ve gone through shoes in as little as a week doing nothing out of the ordinary.

Mom had an errand to run in Portland first though, and that was to the fabric store. Not really the most fun of errands for me so I decided to go to Kinko’s and get directions on mapquest.com for Ontario and then over to Subway to refill my cup. Oddly enough, Subway provided a most surprising and welcomed encounter thus far. Of course, if you knew Lacey or had ever seen Lacey, you’d know exactly why that is. I didn’t immediately recognize her when I came in (my eyes react slowly from sunlight to artificial light) especially in the Subway garb (forest green shirt, black visor, black pants) as I’ve always pictured her in far more flattering attire in my male hormonally charged mind but she’s impossible to forget: Teal-like eyes and a smile that’s just as used to be seductive to sarcasm to genuine joy and always eye catching with a body to match. She’s one of two women whom I wished for when I saw her at work (we used to work together). She’s also one of the few women whom already had someone when I met her so I didn’t feel too terribly bad that I never made a "play" for her affections but I didn’t feel bad about wishing that she were single either. Maybe it was her on/off relationship with her boyfriend or the fact that she moved or perhaps it’s more psychological of reasons on my part but for whatever the reason, I was just better off a flirtatious comedian. We chatted for a bit, just catching up as my surprise at seeing her (not to mention that she seemed happy to see me, pleased me to no end as I’ve always and probably always will be a sucker for attractive women being happy with me.) Only downside was my limited time available with her, the fact that she was working as well as finding out that she won’t be working with me this summer (one of the many asshole acts of the heartless sadist Willie Harvey humanoid creature.) I made the comment that it’d be nice to see her over the summer anyway, if for no other reason than to beautify the scenery, after all there’s so few examples of stunning real women in the world, it’d be a shame to keep it stuck behind a counter of a Subway restaurant all summer. And just like in a Hollywood script, a group of customers got in line before she could respond to I said good-bye but I did get the glimpse of the patented female blush/smile combination that they pull off so well. (I’d supply a picture of her but I said at the time that I’d never post it on a website, even my own.)

After I got to the bus station, I was surprised to see a pair of "hooker stockings" attached to an equally appealing pair of legs sitting underneath a tree outside of the bus station terminal. Hooker stockings are black nylon, mid-thigh pantyhose with the lace around the top. It’s a nickname that I thought was appropriate since the effect on nice-looking legs is certainly invoking the more sinful acts on the brain but was more eye-catching to a street cop who went over to talk to her as they departed shortly there after. Unfortunately, I never got to find out if she was what the label was that appeared in my head.

I went to buy my tickets, placed my bags in a locker and went to Powell’s. For those of you who aren’t aware of the used-bookstore Mecca, it’s the largest single bookstore in the US, over half of which are used and it was only a few blocks from the bus station (Nine if I were keeping track.) I didn’t bother to get my map for the store (it’s over four levels now and takes up who knows how many square feet,) so I just went and browsed around the store, looking in my various interests- travel books, erotica, forensic technological advances, politics and the history thereof, trade comicbooks, US Supreme Court and psychological techniques/studies. Finally, I settled on an X-Men trade on the Extinction Agenda, which I had been looking for quite some time.

Eventually, I got hungry and having decided to gorge on food before getting on the bus, I went to Burger King. I’m not really that much of a gorger but I like to shock my body’s metabolism with large amounts of food before late night bus trips (my bus was going to leave at 10:30 pm) as it tends to lend itself to keep my groggy enough to slip in and out of sleep a lot. Of course, did I expect to get in the middle of a local fetish shop’s dinner break? There’s just something about an attractive woman in leather that, for whatever reason, I feel more comfortable talking to them. So I spent a good half-hour chatting with Raven (she changed her name from Brittany after Ms. Spears' first single came out, although I though my response to that of, "What, Britney Spears can’t have a leather, schoolgirl fetish with S&M tendencies with Hit me Baby One More Time?" was pretty damn funny.) All good things must come to an end though and she went back to work and I walked back to the bus station but I do have a coupon for 10% off if I do go back up to see her.

The trip as you could see from the title is a two parter, one being a tournament in Ontario on the 31^st of May (that’s the Oregon version, not the actual province) and then the Montana territorial on the 2^nd of June. This gives me a chance to play and get myself a quick warm-up into playing against other people, which I always feel is lacking when I’m online. I don’t get to play or see other people when I play which always gives people in their little game-playing group an added advantage as well as an advantage as to what’s viable in their metagame and what isn’t. It also gives me an opportunity to hear about what was being played in Vancouver’s Territorial that was being played on the same day as Montana’s. Since Washington’s is the week after that, it will have an effect as to what people will play and possibly, I’ll be able to plan ahead for that metagame ideally speaking.

Bus ride wise, it was pretty uneventful as all overnight bus rides should be, no one sitting next to someone else unless they want to be, no children screaming, just as peaceful as riding on a bus can be for the general population. Unlike Greyhound’s website however, the bus arrived a full three hours later than it should’ve which was fine by me, less time outside at night and gave me more of a chance to catch up on my sleep which is always in short availability when I travel. Unlike mapquest.com though, it gave me wrong directions. How wrong, you might ask? The sign, "Welcome to Idaho," might be some indication. After finding a phone book, I went to the other side of town and looked for a point of reference to go off of and soon realized that Ontario’s city planners were nuts. Why would you have 4^th Avenue and 4^th Street ever connect to each other? Most people just look for the numerical value and then base their assessments off that. But sure enough, I was standing at the intersection of 4^th and 4^th, thinking to myself that Seaside has it so easy. Here, we have a main East/West street called Broadway, if your street is north of that and it’s going east/west, it’s given a number. If it’s on the other side, it’s given a letter. North/south streets are given names and descend down the alphabet the farther away the street is from the beach. They’re weird.

So, I went to the library (which was my reference point) and sat in front of the building as they weren’t open yet, proceeding to sort through my cards to get a semblance of an idea for a deck that I would make. Problem was whether or not I wanted to make a powerful deck that wasn’t very fun (like I had envisioned for the Territorial) and use this tournament as a tune-up or to just relax and have fun. Before I could decide though, the library was open and I went inside to check my mail and get directions.

For a community college, the place is huge but the LDS institute (Latter-Day Saints, for those of you playing at home) isn’t so I just sat in front of a tree and attempted to make my deck. There’s two problems with this – One, the trees available to sit under kept dropping a combination of moss and twigs that kept getting into my hair that I’m sure some parts of it is still in there and Two, my forearms got sunburned. I hadn’t got sunburned since I was a teenager and that was just on the nose. Unfortunately, it was to be 10 hours before I could get any relief to my pissed-off arms.

About an hour and a half before the tournament started, Dell showed up. A rather thin, lanky individual with soft features that kinda reminded me, for whatever reason, of one of the Waltons, that kind of quiet innocence that someone as jaded as me rather envies after a while. I don’t think I was much of a conversationalist while in the throes of making a deck but I did my best. He spent most of the time looking through my cards, which fascinated him as he had never seen a lot of these cards before. It’s at this moment when I think to myself, "Oh my, this is going to be a slaughter…"

I write down a lot of deck archetypes with classifications of casual, tournament and win at all cost. But even my most casual of decks seemed ahead of this playing group and a lot of that had to do with what cards were available to them, after all it’s hard to combat a lot of modern-day decks when you only have cards from earlier expansions at your disposal. So I went into talking about different expansions, common day tactics, recommendations as to what people could do to speed up their decks, etc. By this time, I had made up a deck that basically was supposed to have 4 places to report for free – the Vidiian Sodality, Hirogen Hunt, HAFH on the Equinox and War Council and the Caretaker’s Array. My free reporting was definitely overkill as I didn’t have really much of card drawing except the Hexany (see Olav’s article in April of this year) and a smatterings of Kivas/War Councils. And I wouldn’t attempt a mission without getting out Vic first (no STP a Holodeck door to hand, it’s a casual deck after all, so I simply placed three of the four Holodeck doors that I own into the draw deck and 1 in the Tent.

When the others arrived, they kept asking me questions about myself, whether I was any good ("I’m not as good as I’d like" and "I’m okay" were my responses but no one believed me), where I was from (Seaside which afterwards I had to describe just where that is so don’t feel bad if you don’t know where it is either) and of course, what are you doing here (on my way to the Montana territorial) Eventually eight other people and me were there and I was thinking to myself, please don’t get a bye, otherwise it’s possible that I might not win the tournament but luck was on my side and it went to someone else. And so, the tournament commenced.

I came to realize that the Jensen brothers have the same facial features but this one had more darker hair and eyes plus much curlier hair than his brother’s short, blond/brown hair. He was playing Federation AQ with a Tented Traveler: Transcendence among other things for card drawing purposes but he only reported one per turn. But he did have dilemmas, that’s for sure, at least 3 on each mission with a few Referee’ able Hidden Agendas (no Q the Referee for anyone around here) I got Vic out on turn 1 but realized that I couldn’t find my Array so I took it out of the deck along with the Equinox and the Home Away From Home. This left me with, in my mind at the time, just one ship in the entire deck but there was actually two (Olarra and the Venatic Hunter, which was in the Tent) I hit the combination of Your Galaxy is Impure – Unscientific Method – Scientific Method, which posed to be a one turn stopper as I had Vic download Bariel via TMW and used Organ Thief to download another Motura (I was one Science short) to net myself a Horga’hn. Next mission, I ended up use my lone QtR on Temporal Vortex because I actually came up against a Borg ship dilemma, which surprised me and panicked me since I couldn’t find it in my draw deck. Lucky for me, however that it was in my Q-Tent. He was trying to complete his outpost mission in order to grab himself a Tox Uthat which I was glad that he never got a chance to grab but was also interesting is that he had no space missions at all. I had to complete four missions (got nailed hard with The Higher, the Fewer for 15) and he never attempted at all (I think he had four turns worth of personnel on the table, could’ve been more) for a 100-0 win. 2 (+100)

The tournament director’s younger sister, she was complaining most of the game and didn’t care about what she was doing, complaining about her lack of sleep and how she wanted a bye (she wasn’t all that old, maybe 10-12 judging by the tantrum and by how late it was when she went to sleep which was 1. It was all I could do to not laugh as I rarely go to bed before 1 am) Like the game before, she was playing AQ Federation but she did attempt a mission which took away her staffing for her ship, making it unable to make it back to her OP and after a chance Revolving Door on her STP (chance as it was the only valid card play in my hand), she couldn’t take it back to hand. I was more cautious with attempting space missions, waiting until I got the QtR back into play and then cycling it back before attempting another space mission. I had gotten a horrid draw (1 personnel, 6 interrupts, of which 5 were the Power, definitely a freak hand) but eventually I got my deck going enough to win again 100-0 after stealing one of her missions as she forgot to flip Fair Play, which I had gauged correctly (lucky for me). 4 (+200)

The guy who saw me make my deck was my final opponent and I was interested to see how he’d take my advice in attempting early would fare since I only had 12 dilemmas. He was playing Romulans, which was nice but he had two of the universal PNZ missions, one of the built-in OP missions, which I had given him and Wormhole Negotiations. I had already made up my mind to steal Wormhole Negotiations, seeding Your Galaxy is Impure, Scow dilemma and Dead End there as he had I think no planet dilemmas at all. He out-seeds me at his OP mission which didn’t bother me any and sure enough, it was a Cytherians (a move I happened to like) and eventually he made it down the spaceline. On my side, it took me two turns to get out Vic (among two turns of Masaka Transformations, The Power x2, Mutation x2 and one All Threes) but it took just the people I had reported by then to pass Liberation for my Horga’hn. I then attempted one of my space missions and was hit by Maglock (only one Officer out) but instead of downloading one, I downloaded Plans of the Tal Shiar and waited two turns for my Officers. He, on the other hand, had gotten stuck on my Scows as his Scout Vessel has no tractor beams and the fact that I eventually played an Intermix from hand (again, only valid card play) After a while, he attempts Wormhole Negotiations and gets stopped on the Scow Eventually, I pass the mission and play a Tent for a Wormhole, hoping that he wasn’t going to use an Amanda on it but he didn’t. I go to attempt Wormhole Negotiations but I forget about my Galaxy is Impure and he takes out Penk, leaving me one Treachery, one Honor and two Diplomacy short at this point. He’s unable to take advantage of the situation and his ship is no match for my Olarra, so it runs to the other end of the spaceline. Now, I’m stuck with my ship in the AQ and no other holograms to report to the ship until I remember Bariel, I just have to wait until I get back my TMW and I’d be all set. So I followed his ship but being kind, I didn’t blow it up, using my Horga’hn to draw cards as I only had personnel coming up at this point. Eventually, I got a Palor Toff and played it on the TMW, played the TMW, played Bariel to the ship and went back to the mission, attempting and solving it for the win. 100-0 6 (+300)

So I win the tournament and spent most of the time afterwards just talking and answering questions, almost like I was some kind of traveling professor on the subject of ST:CCG which I will admit, did wonders on the ego but I tried to keep it low key. I didn’t get a tournament foil (Decipher hadn’t sent any out for the tournament before that he had run on the 4^th in May) By this point it was nearing 7 pm and my bus didn’t arrive for about 5 hours so the Jensens drove me to the movies because that’s what I do when I wait for buses whenever possible. Lucky for me, this theater wasn’t like the one in North Bend as they let me leave my bags with them for both films which were Insomnia and Undercover Brother (it was either that or Enough and I don’t find Miss Lopez that appealing, go figure)

Insomnia was very stylish but predictable, at least to me, which detracted from enjoying the movie much. I had already foresaw most of what was going to happen so I won’t go into what it is if you decide to watch the movie but when I can already predict what’s going to happen in a murder thriller, I tend to not enjoy it. It is, however a very well acted and directed film, and for whatever reason Robin Williams reminds me a lot of my father (don’t ask me why, your guess is as good as mine but it only happens when he either smiles or is a serious manner, go figure)

Undercover Brother was campy and made no pretense about being anything else than pure fluff, which I can respect. Plus, if you listened to the actual dialogue, it was in places quite funny. I probably would’ve enjoyed it more if it wasn’t for the jungle gym teens. This theater has a ledge, which everyone climbed over, whether it was before, after or even during the movie, much to my increasing annoyment level. I think it’s one of those movies which the people who made it knew that the lead couldn’t control the entire movie so they gave him a great supporting cast and it made the difference. I could’ve seen it at home and wouldn’t have lost anything except annoying teenagers but I don’t regret going to it either.

After that, it was around 11 am so I had time to spare and decided that I should probably eat today, so I grabbed myself a cinnamon roll and looked to find some burn lotion which I did. I also thought about asking if I could use one of their showers but I decided against it after finding that I had no shampoo with me but did proceed to go through about a quarter of the burn lotion before I ever got on the bus. Figuring that the cool air outside would help the arms feel less burny, for lack of a better description. Unfortunately, I had Mr. Mentally Slow and Decides to Bother You With the Same Questions Over and Over Again when I was waiting for the bus, which you’ll find at a lot of bus trips I’ve found over the years. I try being polite, informing him that I wasn’t interested in answering his questions about New Orleans, cigarettes or his sex life (like he had one to even talk about…) Eventually he realized that I had my headphones on and stopped bothering me and I never heard from him again.

I didn’t expect the bus to be as full as it was, after all what’s in Montana that people would want to go to but this was the odd shaped bus trip. Apparently, it goes through Idaho down to Ogden, Utah, then back up through the other side of Idaho and then through Montana. 420 miles away takes 20 hours, you can do the math on that one. I sat near the back since he said he was getting off the bus at Boise, which meant I could have the seat to myself, which was great. That didn’t happen as I was sitting next to someone else but I didn’t mind as it wasn’t often that women want to sit next to me.

Yulia was on her way to Moscow, Idaho but her car had broken down in Boise and needed to get back before her finals. She was about my age, with more prominent red highlights in her red/brown hair, light butterscotch freckles around the base of her black rimmed glasses which was in distinct contrast to her very white skin but I found her teal eyes most interesting. She was an insomniac like myself and I felt my need for sleep replaced by my desire to make her like me (as I said, I’m a sucker for attractive women which she was in every description of the word) So I told her about myself and my life, the interesting parts that is, which she found rather fascinating and I didn’t even have to be try to be funny, it just sorta came out that way. We spent the night just talking to each other and it felt really nice and did absolute wonders to my self-esteem. I did ask the relationship question (it’s a guy thing, we always ask unless we don’t care but I did) and she said that she was seeing someone back at school. We talked about relationships after that until she felt tired and said that she wanted to get some sleep in before the sun came out. I half-jokingly said, "If you wanted, I’d make a great pillow." I distinctly saw her eyes flash and she said, "Well, let’s see about that" in that charming, coherent Russian accent of hers. So she slept literally on top of me or in my lap, depending on what helped her sleep more. Eventually, it ended up being a kind of her sitting on my lap, leaning against my jacket which she used as a pillow as she curled up against me. I didn’t move for hours, just content to stay there, occasionally adjusting her blanket back on her as it kept coming off somehow. I wanted to stroke the top of her head as she slept, I’m not sure why exactly, it just seemed natural to do. Of course I also wanted to kiss her and many more passionate things but that’s just not what I do for any number of environmental/psychological reasons and rationales.

I woke her up when we stopped for breakfast and we ate together, just chatting away about whatever came to mind, same as before but I knew that her stop was next after this so it did kinda put a damper on things as was the increased lack of sleep that I had gotten (operating on 28 hours without sleep does that to a person, even the likes of yours truly) But I did manage to ask, since she made the comment that her boyfriend would be there to pick her up, if I could kiss her hand for an enjoyable leg of the bus trip, probably the best one I’ve ever had. She laughed and said that it was the most unexpected question she’s heard from me (and considering that I can talk about most any tangent off the top of my head, that’s saying something) but she didn’t see any harm in it. Smiling, I got up, walked to her side of the table and knelt to her side and kissed her right hand and looked back into those teal eyes. Her reaction was best said in her words, "That wasn’t what I was expecting" but the smile was enough for me. "So what were you expecting?" I asked, adding a teasing lilt to the phrase. She got up and kissed the sides of my cheeks. "You’re sweet." I had a feeling there might be some kind of tension after that so I did what every goof does: I fell out of my chair.

After she was dropped of, the trip became instantly duller and back to the usual bus ride fare. However, if you ever do go through Montana, you do have to take a look at the scenery. It’s weird, one second you could be driving through thick forest and the next, a perfectly flat emptiness except for grass as almost as far as the eyes can see, one place in particular which reminded me of the first large battle in Braveheart with the highway in the dead center of it all. All the buildings were either made out of logs (if they’re targeting tourists) or brick for most everything else. It was rather interesting just going through all of the small towns, how they reminded me of the Alaskan towns in Insomnia. I even remade a scene in which Al Pacino runs through the supposedly empty town, only mine had a truck that honked his horn at me when I had finished. No appreciation for comedy apparently.

I make it to Bozeman and promptly ran towards the cheap motel right next to the bus station and for $29, got a room for the night, which felt great, especially considering that it was starting to pour outside. It was a sparse room as the bed took up half the room but I didn’t care. I promptly took out my cards and went to work on two deck designs, one was the Ontario deck and the other was an armada deck that relied on Live Long and Prospers for card drawing amid blowing up their facilities, to add insult to injury as it were. It was about 3 am when I had them both finished, even wrote out the deck lists in shorthand before going to sleep to the sounds of 12 Angry Men on AMC.

Waking up, I found that I had awoken to My Fair Lady with Audrey Hepburn’s mouth filled with marbles. Kicking out the perverted thoughts out of my head, I went to take a long, overdue shower but was surprised to find that there was no free shampoo in the room, which sucked. I learned later that I could wash it with regular soap but didn’t know that at the time (although with my hair, I’d probably go through half the bar, even after a haircut) Leaving the motel in plenty of time, I started to walk the 22 blocks to the store with my two bags and arrived at the store with about an hour to spare before registration. The owner was very friendly and we struck up a conversation about whatever, mainly comic books as I’ve been a fan of Marvel comics for quite sometime, (mainly X-Men and Spiderman with a focus on trade books over getting actual comics themselves) and various other things. The tournament director showed up at probably 11 or so and self-admittedly didn’t know much about Star Trek but as we later found out, it didn’t matter.

No one showed up.

I was rather surprised, especially considering that they had Lord of the Rings the day before and people had brought their Trek cards with them but apparently no one was going to play in Montana’s territorial. We spent a few minutes opening the two boxes that came with the binders (which by the way, look great. Top-notch job to the designer of them.) and I took whichever rares I wanted from them (which weren’t many but I got a few extras of cards that I wanted) and he kept the rest while he gave me both binders, which made me quite delighted. Lucky for me I buy an Ameripass so I didn’t buy direct tickets, otherwise I would’ve been stuck in Bozeman for all day. I went through his bargain bin comics and bought like 20 or 30 so all in all, I spent $20 in his store (I insisted on paying the registration fee) and he was kind enough to give me a ride to the bus station.

The way home was actually shorter than it took to get from Portland to Ontario and Ontario to Bozeman combined but uneventful. I didn’t eat much, just subsisted on drinks on the way back. Really the only thing of note I can say is that Spokane has probably one of the best Greyhound stations I’ve ever been in – two floors, an actual restaurant with good Chinese food at a decent price, Web access, reasonably priced video games and plenty of chairs which people can lay out on as there were few arm bars between them. Made it home earlier than expected and relaxed the rest of the day, taking a long shower with shampoo and placed three of the foils up on Ebay.

Well, that’s it for trip #1, now you’re going to have to read (or in Spock’s case since trip #2 hasn’t happened yet, he’ll have to wait for it) when I take the bus from Portland to Phoenix for the Arizona territorial, only to go back and make it to Seattle in time for the Washington territorial, which are two days apart from each other.

Sincerely,

Michael van Breemen (who can be contacted as always at theninjascot@yahoo.com )