I’m going to go ahead and lump all four visits into one post, cutting out a lot of the records which were beaten once only for me to beat them myself again later on. The pictures from the 18th show most if not all of the surviving records which still had my initials up at the end of it all.

The highlight of this four-visit stretch would of course be the smashing 348.7M+ second only to the grand champion on this particular machine, and not by a whole lot at that (grand champion is/was at 375.6M+).

Some of you are no doubt familiar with Track 21, which was primarily a go-kart facility which also had mini-golf, laser tag, and arcade games. By the end of their run on September 4 of this year, the arcade games had been taken out in favor of an additional party room. The mini-golf and laser tag remained, and these were the attractions I took part in on their last day of business this past September 4.

I would start off the afternoon with a round of mini-golf. Admittedly, this mini-golf course doesn’t have much to it, and was clearly something of an afterthought as it was only 9 holes. I had played it once or twice many years ago. It was pretty good for what there was. The first hole had the par stroke count missing, and scoring on the ninth and final hole is unclear, with no par listed. There were no physical score cards so I kept score using a note app on my phone. My scores were:

This wasn’t too bad all things considered, though admittedly par on these holes was rather generous in a lot of cases. (There is no governing body for mini-golf to uniformly decide par on a given hole, for better or worse. In full-scale USGA/R&A golf, it’s decided by distance from the pin to the tee box; in mini-golf there is much more in play to decide relative difficulty.)

After two rounds of mini-golf (equivalent to the usual 18-hole round at most mini-golf courses), there were finally people showing up for laser tag. I didn’t know what to expect, despite playing laser tag here once many years ago, and honestly, not having played laser tag at all, anywhere, in easily a decade.

I did relatively well, given I was thrown into a team game and there were two employees playing out of the eight players. I had the third most points out of four players on the team (eight players total), and third most points overall (no individual on the blue team scored more than the lowest scoring player on our team, the yellow team).

With go-kart racing sold out long before the laser tag game was over, there was little else to do, but I did have a great time on my last visit to Track 21. I wish all the former employees continued success on their respective career paths, and the former owners an enjoyable retirement (assuming what I have heard is correct).

Once again I find myself running way behind on posts, so most of these will have a minimum of commentary. I normally do not post something like a Cidercade visit alongside others; hopefully that will not be necessary again for a while.

August 2, Poison Girl: Except for the rethemed Mata Hari, this was a pretty blah night.

August 9, Poison Girl: Pretty good scores all around, at least when looking at just the highs.

August 16, Poison Girl: Foo Fighters is fixed. (I broke the spinner on the 9th, it literally came off the mount and eventually came to rest above the lower right flipper.)

August 23, Poison Girl:

August 25, Cidercade: The highlight of this trip would, oddly enough, be my score on Pepper II (121K+), with The Walking Dead score of 42M+ up there as well. The rest I can take or leave.

August 29, Little Dipper: A few quick games of Creature. I’m back on the high score board after it was recently cleared (except for the grand champion of course).

I know I’m way behind, so there’s not a whole lot of commentary to go with many of these.

July 19, Poison Girl

I had the higher score on Jurassic Park and Iron Maiden.

July 24, Poison Girl

Not a particularly good day on Whirlwind, but a decent run on Elvira’s House of Horrors.

July 28, Cidercade

The #4 high score pic (HCK) from Heavy Metal is included for reference, to show I didn’t miss the high score board by a whole lot. I play Heavy Metal a lot at Cidercade because it’s a fun game. The Pepper II score, while not making the top of the list, is likely one of my better runs.

So back in early April I saw ads for a fun run called Foam Glow. They were waiving the usual signup fee, only requiring payment for the event insurance and venue fee. I think I opted in for a $1 donation to their charity as well, bringing my total just south of $17. I figured I’d do this once, and then base my decision to return on my experience this year.

So finally the day of the event rolls around. I find out packet pickup is the day before the event unless you want to pay an additional $5 for the privilege of picking up on race day. It probably cost me an additional $5 of gas just to make the additional drive to Conroe and back. To top it off my work assignment was in Lake Jackson later that day (and I still made it back down there in time to get most everything done, surprisingly).

Fast forward to race day, the evening of the 15th. I’m slightly anxious as I don’t really know what I’m getting into at this point. I manage to settle in and enjoy the ambiance for a while before race time arrives. I finish the bottle of water I have (some 32 fluid ounces) long before the race is officially on. So I walk back to the car to drop it off (no sense in carrying

It turns out that, indeed, most do this as a 5K non-competitive walk. In fact, there is no timing apparatus at either the start or finish line. If you want to keep track of your time you are more or less on your own. And I’m okay with that; I still have the occasional flashback to one of my few attempts at competitive running when I was in elementary school (5th grade), a mile run where I got pushed/knocked down at the start. (I went on to finish with a time of 14 minutes, 12 seconds, at the time a personal best.)

The distance as measured via GPS was closer to 4 kilometers than 5, so the organizers took a bit of liberty with the “5K” labeling. My total time according to this particular GPS track reading software was 54 minutes, 26 seconds (excuse the weird start/finish times, those are apparently in UTC not local time). That comes out to around 21 minutes per mile, not bad for a leisurely walking pace.

A lot of the pictures show black lights during the after-sunset portion of the event, so it is easy for the casual observer to conclude the course was lit like this for the entire length. It was not, as these were taken at specific points near the foam machines; toward the end the flashlight feature of my phone (and the phones of other participants for that matter) became quite useful.

I had a good time, despite higher than expected expenses. Parking was $20 I didn’t have in the original budget; besides being a bit of a price gouge (didn’t we already pay a venue fee?), it was mostly unavoidable given the locale (the outskirts of Conroe). It would have been nice to know this upon signup; not all of us are familiar with these types of venues (this is mainly a motocross track and would likely be unfamiliar to even the most seasoned of fun run/walk participants).