I Made Intense Eye Contact with an Astronaut at the Maritime Museum of San Diego

 

I was mostly going to the museum to see this ship, so the intense eye contact was a bonus.

The HMS Surprise is so pretty!

Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander series is one of my favorites (second only to Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, which is Master and Commander with dragons), and the film version is one of my favorite movies, so I just really wanted to see this recreation of Captain Aubrey's favorite ship.

It had all its proper 18th-century British naval vessel parts--

Captain's room, with bonus TV playing footage from one of the scenes filmed there

--as well as lots of informational signage:

I'm keeping this photo in my phone's camera roll so I can send it to the kids when I'm worried they're not eating enough fresh fruits and vegetables at school.

I also really liked how the signage explained stuff from the books that I'd never really understood. Prize money IS important!

It's also important not to use your prize money to speculate on lead mines, JACK.

Mostly, though, I just wanted to clamber around the ship and pretend to be an 18th-century British able seaman enjoying the ocean on a beautiful summer day:

We also got to clamber around the Star of India, which is a proper real ship that actually did proper ship things during its working lifetime:

I really liked that each ship, as well as being an artifact itself, is also a museum gallery, in which the museum puts other exhibits. 

The miniaturist at the New Zealand Maritime Museum in Auckland taught me how people get ships into bottles.

Throwback to our England trip a couple of years ago, when we all learned how VERY much the British people love Nelson!

I also saw my first one of these at the New Zealand Maritime Museum, although I've since seen others, I really want one for myself!

Lol

We then clambered around a submarine--

--and ferry, then found our meetup spot for the bay cruise on a historic pilot boat that I'd signed us up for. A couple of us hung out and cooled our heels there, and a couple of us roamed around looking at the nearby exhibits while we waited. I was a roamer, so I was perfectly positioned to glance out the window to the harbor and notice a couple of people just coming up the ladder from the submarine and about to walk into the ferry where we were. 

Those couple of people included famous astronaut Hoot Gibson!

Do not ask me why I can recognize the faces and names of several notable astronauts, for I have no good answer. I cannot recognize the faces and names of most people I went to high school with, and even in my current hometown, where anybody who approaches me is definitely someone I've known in just the most recent 25 years, I'm still faking enthusiastic recognition a good 80 percent of the time. But this time, on this occasion, I looked at Famous Astronaut Hoot Gibson, and I knew that it was 100%, without a doubt Famous Astronaut Hoot Gibson.

I was also absolutely still staring at him when he walked into the ferry, looked around, caught my eye, noted that I was staring at him, absolutely thought that was weird, and continued on with his business. 

ALSO, I then pulled up his photo on my phone and one by one forced every member of my family to look at it, then surreptitiously look at him, then assure me that 1) yes it definitely was Famous Astronaut Hoot Gibson, and 2) yes that IS cool can you stop whispering about him I'm worried he can hear you.

I swear, my kids are so hyper-aware of how I act in public. They always all, "Stop dancing to the piped-in store music. Can you not wave at that dog what do you even expect to happen with that? Please cease staring at Famous Astronaut Hoot Gibson," etc.

Well, joke's on them because one time I was dancing to "Heat Waves" in Kroger, and on the far end of the aisle a totally random dude saw me and started dancing, too, and it was hilarious. Another time, there was a really cute little dog sitting in a lady's lap in the car next to us while we were all driving down the road, and when I waved at her dog she saw me and waved the dog's little paw back and it was adorable.

And while on vacation at the Maritime Museum of San Diego, I saw Famous Astronaut Hoot Gibson and then I pulled up his photo on my phone and showed it to everyone in my family so they could say that they'd seen and recognized him, too!

Famous Astronaut Hoot Gibson did not end up on our bay tour with us, alas, but that's okay because there were other cool things to see.

Like the HMS Surprise from the water!

And several aircraft carriers, since the museum is right across the bay from Coronado.

None of them had planes on them, which I was bummed about until our tour guide explained that they actually fly the planes somewhere else when the aircraft carrier is headed to port, for a variety of reasons. 

Going under the Coronado Bridge was my favorite part of the tour:

The tour guide said that the architect designed Coronado Bridge so that from just the right angle, the pillars and underside of the bridge would show a line of silhouettes that look like California mission bells. I got almost the right angle!

We were also treated to a formation of Navy bombers:

Here's a giant ship that transports giant yachts:

Here's a giant ship that transports nothing but giant containers of Dole bananas:

Here's the Coronado Bridge from afar:

And here's our museum!

I had kind of promised the more bored members of the family that I would be about ready to go after this, but then the big kid and I discovered that the ferry has a boiler room, so obviously we had to go check that out:

And THEN I discovered that the ferry also had an exhibit of manuscript maps and early books of exploration, most on loan from special collections libraries! So while a couple of people spent the next whole entire hour playing on their phones and contemplating murdering me--

I spent the next whole entire hour with these guys and many more of their companions:

This is a map of the Western coastline but the thing is that nobody actually KNEW what that coastline looked like farther north, so in 1593 Cornelis De Jode just made it up!

THE Mercator's son, also a cartographer, published this map in 1613. His take on South America is pretty iffy, but otherwise he didn't do a terrible job!

The best part of ANY map is the sea monsters, obviously.

The seas have so many monsters!

Eventually, after I had looked at and exclaimed over every single map, given all the sea monsters nicknames, and made notes about all the early exploration books so I can look them up to read them later, I finally consented to leave the museum and we went to do what the kids had most been looking forward to that day:

Somali food!

My chicken curry was DELICIOUS, as was my mango drink. Everybody else loved their food, too, and we ate so hard that we didn't even need any to-go containers afterwards. 

Ugh, I'm actually dying to have that curry and mango drink and flatbread again RIGHT NOW!

It's okay, though, because tomorrow I'm going to eat every single kind of ballpark food I can fit in my mouth!

And here's the rest of our trip!

• Day 1: Cabrillo National Monument
• Day 2: Palomar Observatory and Borrego Springs sculptures
• Day 3: San Diego Zoo
• Day 4: Maritime Museum and Somali food

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Make Your Own Path Tile Game from Mat Board and Markers

I first published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

A path tile game is a great introductory DIY board game, with tons of opportunities for creativity and infinite playability.

Tbh, I love making board and card games even more than I love playing them–and I love playing games! I really love taking a traditional game concept that’s been around forever, like chess or the Royal Game of Ur, and reskinning it with my own design, although I also have a lot of fun modifying more modern games for my own personal use; check out the Cards Against Mythology game that I made with my Girl Scout troop!

I particularly love the open-ended playability of path tile games. I love that depending on the design, the path you follow could be a highway or a water-filled pipe or a route through a cave system, and I love that you can make an all-new game just by changing the shape of the tile or the number of paths per tile. You can make up your own rules for your game, you can change the rules every time, or you can have no rules at all and just enjoy the process of building an intricate and ever-changing maze.

For this particular game, I decided that I wanted to make it for my four-year-old niece, so I wanted it to be fairly simple in shape and number of paths, and otherwise as open-ended as possible. I chose four bright colors for the paths, but otherwise kept the game un-themed so she could feel free to make up her own rules, enjoy the process of maze-building without gameifying it, or even incorporate the pieces into her own small-world play.

That means that this tutorial is for a square path tile game with four paths per square but no other theming or embellishments. Feel free to change the tile shape, number of paths, or anything else about your own game!

Materials

To make my simple version of the path tile game, you will need:

• stiff chipboard, cardboard, or mat board. I used mat board for this project because I have plenty in my stash and I’m pretty stoked about using it up. Mat board definitely made for a wonderfully sturdy game, took marker like a champ, didn’t need to be sealed, and is so easy to source that adding new tiles won’t be a problem–as long as I remember what color markers I used, lol! If you’re looking for a quick and easy game to experiment with, drawing on the blank sides of cardboard food packaging would work perfectly well. If you’re looking for something heirloom quality, you could upgrade to wood-burned and watercolor-stained wood tiles.
• measuring and cutting tools. Your tools will vary depending on your materials, but I measured with a clear plastic quilting ruler and a gridded cutting mat, and cut with a guillotine paper cutter and a craft knife.
• embellishing tools. For this project, I used a mechanical pencil to measure and draw the paths, then four colors of Prismacolor marker to color them in and a black Flair pen to outline them.

Step 1: Measure and cut your tiles and mark your paths.

The first decisions you need to make consist of what shape and size you want your tiles to be and how many paths you want per tile. If you don’t want each tile to have a top and bottom, then they need to have rotational symmetry in both shape and path endings per side. For the path endings, I accomplished this by measuring and cutting a set of 50 2″x2″ tiles, then marking paths that began 3/16th of an inch from each corner and were each 3/16th of an inch wide. There’s then a 1/4″ gap between paths on each side.

It’s tedious work to go ahead and mark every path ending on every tile, but you’ll thank yourself for it later.

Step 2: Draw out the paths.

The next decision to make is what you want your paths to look like. I have eight path endings per tile, which means that I’ll have four paths per tile. These paths can look however you want, shaped however you want. Do you want angles to fit a robot theme? Scallopy edges because your playing pieces will be boats on the water? Do you want to insert a couple of dead ends or u-turns or other tricky traffic signs? You can do anything you want!

My family of four worked together to create our 50 tiles, and I like that you can see a stylistic difference between our tiles. I liked smooth lines and curves that matched, but another family member liked a lot of wavy lines and crazy curves, and another family member even added some loop-de-loops to their paths. The game was meant to be a handmade gift that was clearly from all of us, so in this case the stylistic differences were a feature, not a bug. If you want an overall more cohesive aesthetic, decide that from the beginning.

Mat board doesn’t erase particularly well, so make yourself a few extra practice path tiles if you really don’t want any faint pencil lines or eraser marks to show while you’re figuring out exactly how you want your paths to look.

Step 3: Color the paths.

This is my favorite part of the process!

You can choose any number of colors for your paths, but I decided on four colors that would each be represented by one path on each tile. You could make your paths all the same color, or a different color for every path throughout the entire game, but I really like the impossible prospect of trying to match path colors when I play–it’s randomly satisfying, for all that you can never perfectly match every color.

Carefully color in the paths, then outline the edges in black pen.

Step 4: Play!

This is such a fun game to play, with rules that are unlimited only by your imagination–if they exist at all! Add a couple of wooden game pieces that you’ve liberated from another board game (for this game, we spray painted DnD minifigs solid colors to match the paths), then decide if you want to try to run each other off the playing field, or if you battle when you meet on a path, or if touching orange moves you back to the beginning and loses you 100 points, or if you all have to try to get to a specific spot.

To store the game, build a box out of that same mat board, or repurpose another storage container. I really like this clear acrylic one that I rehomed from a bathroom drawer because it shows off the pretty colors of the game.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!