Archive | September 18, 2022

Wonderland

Yesterday was quite a day. To start with we had to get up suuuuuuper early to go to Omaha to participate in the Alice in Wonderland event hosted by Clued Upp Games. I’d been worried it would be hot and sunny but instead of sun we had clouds. And rain.

Which was okay because it kept us from getting sunburned and even better it quit raining in time for us to play. We went with some friends – Mike and Pam – so we had a team of five. The game is location based augmented reality – much like pokemon go is. You have to start at a certain location, in this case city hall, and then follow your map to find different characters and items. The storyline is that The Red Queen’s has taken Alice and you have to save her from being beheaded. There were lots of puzzles to do – getting them wrong gave you a time penalty. Some were easy and some were hard. The worst ones were the first few as we learned how everything worked. Like we took the first one waaaay too literally and so we failed it. We also ended up with a twenty minute time penalty because we paused the game, but when we unpaused it we weren’t all standing inside the location circle. But, either way, we succeeded and we had a lot of fun!

A thing that surprised me was how many people were there playing, too! I’d bet we saw over 100. And so many were actually dressed in costumes! I wish I’d taken photos, but as I said the game was virtual so I had to have the app up and just didn’t switch out of it. I didn’t even pokemon or take photos until afterwards. And there were a lot of neat buildings since we were in old downtown.

After we save Alice, we headed for the nearest restaurant, which ended up being a nonprofit place where the food is whatever you donate for it. The cinnamon roll was amazing, and the salad was good. I hear the sweet tea was awesome, too, but not being a fan, I can’t say.

After that we had time to kill – we thought it would take a lot longer to play. So we went to the Imaginarium store because Mike loves it and I’d never been. It was pretty neat!

After that we checked out what they’ve done to the Gene Leahy Mall. We used to go Pomemon there a lot, but they closed it back in 2019 to renovate it, and finally reopened it this year. It is very different. Some changes are good – like they’ve added bathrooms! And some are bad – like they took out the river that used to go through the middle of it in order to add event space for performances and such. The bridges are gone, of course, and they’ve added a large play area, an astroturf hill, three new slides to go with the teo old ones, some adult sized swings, sculptures, and tons of little seating areas. Oh, and ping pong tables. An article I read awhile back said they were wanting to attract families and children and they seem to have accomplished that, anyway.

There used to be two areas that went under the road. On one end they’ve just filled it in and done nothing. On the other they left the water. That would be my favorite part of it. I do like the grasses they’ve added along the edges. Sadly most of the ducks that used to live there are gone. There was only one there.

They did put in an area for food trucks, so we got snow cones!

After that was a trip to Walmart and some boring stuff, though the clouds on the way home were beautiful.

Of course, clouds led to tornado sirens later and we ended up in the basement for twenty minutes, but all the bad stuff missed us, so yay! To celebrate we broke out the saki.