A few weeks ago, I posted about our trip to Tenerife (Canary Islands) and our day trip to a number of gardens. Those were further afield, but Puerto de la Cruz – where we were staying – had gardens too!
On our second full day on Tenerife, we visited Jardín de Aclimatación de La Ortova, more simply known as “Jardín Botánico de Puerto de la Cruz,” a botanic garden (jardín botánico), a not-terribly-long walk from where we were staying. Beyond the usual garden things – plants, water features, a welcome amount of shade – we also saw Eurasian blackbirds, Eurasian collared doves, a rat (just chillin’ in the undergrowth), and an endemic butterfly! Called “Canary speckled wood,” which confused the hell out of me when I ID’d it. I thought perhaps my app had glitched and focused on a tree!
Unlike the animals, the plants were well-labeled – as one can do when the subject is stationary – with species, family, common name, and area of origin! Which is how I know this funky donut-looking thing is a fig tree from tropical Asia!
That, and having played Metaflora for a while now, I was delighted to actually recognize some of the family names!! It’s the little things.
This is the second year we’ve made it to North Aurora’s Creativity at the Crossroads, and it was even more of a delight! The event is a Saturday art and craft fair, set up at a park by the river and in dappled shade – which was a great relief in the 90-degree weather! – with all sorts of booths and stalls. Selling prints, naturally; stickers, pins, crocheted plushies… there was a stall that almost exclusively sold scrunchies, and another that specialized in bow ties! Because bow ties are cool.
While the event is now passed for this year, I expect it will be back and even larger in 2026! I hope so, anyway. And if you’re around North Aurora, IL when it is, come check it out!
I finally played shuffleboard! We were staying out of town to visit some of our relatives, and the place we were staying had shuffleboard in the lobby. So, naturally, I insisted on playing a game.
I’ve never paid a lot of thought to shuffleboard. It was, naturally, a game that involved shuffling something, across a board, and I had the general aesthetic of it from watching GMM – Good Mythical Morning, for the unfamiliar, have done a guessing game version where they’re guessing, say, 100 Years of Party Snacks, and the shuffleboard sections are decades. Getting the concept right, then getting the shuffleboard part right, are two separate steps, and a massive production with sticks to push pucks a la very-confused-pool-cues. So I had never actually seen it table-sized.
Shuffleboard, it turns out, is really simple! Covered in sand, which I had never noticed, and about the size of an air hockey table, which I had never thought about, and a game of control-of-movement that can be played as Munchkin-ly or friendly as you like. That is to say, you can play it as friendly as you like – no promises about your friends!
To start, one player will take a puck (I don’t know if that’s what they’re called, but each player has four, and players alternate) and shoot it from one end of the board towards the other – again, much like air hockey. The board is separated into two halves, with a moat around the outside; push too hard, and you’ll go off entirely, but the further along you get without falling, the more points you’ll score! Playing bumper cars with other people’s pieces is valid and encouraged, at least in the resources I’ve seen. (Shh. GMM is a perfectly valid source.) It can also backfire tremendously, as your pieces and theirs veer off in unforeseen directions! Once all the pucks are in play, the person with the puck furthest along scores for each puck before the first of their opponent’s. After that, nada, and only the person who has that furthest scores. But! They also have to go first next time, giving the other person the bumper car advantage.
This was a delightful little skill challenge, physics experiment, and time-killer pre-airport on our day of checkout. I look forward to many more games of shuffleboard somewhere in my distant future! Especially with people who play Munchkin. Swoosh! Plink. Clatter.
(Translation: both pucks went zooming right off the board!)
Mom posted recently about out trip to Tenerife and our accomodations in Puerto de la Cruz specifically, so of course I’m going to post about… our day-trip to a completely different town!
Icod de los Vinos is a scenic bus ride from Puerto, and an absolute delight. Or at least, the one block we spent any appreciable amount of time on was!
On that block were Parque del Drago, home to a tree at least eight hundred (and possibly a thousand) years old; Mariposario del Drago, a butterfly house; and Casa del Plátano, a museum all about the cultivation of bananas! And a restaurant attached to the park. Had we been staying in the area, it was the sort of restaurant that we’d have been back to multiple times.
Beyond the namesake and massive elder tree (and the restaurant), Parque del Drago had a number of other native species, a cave, and an herb garden, with signage about all of them. The mariposario had birds, as pictured above, and Casa del Plátano had chickens – a form of natural pest control – and gives you a banana upon entrance. “Your ticket,” they said, as they handed us each a fruit. If you eat your banana around the chickens, they will stare disconcertingly. Or at least, they did for me. (It’s worth noting that Casa del Plátano also grows bananas, and the chickens were outdoors. They were not unleashed inside a concrete museum. Or whatever the primary building materials might be.)
All told, the three of these were small enough to fit easily into a day, inexpensive enough we didn’t feel cheated for it, and delightfully complementary. Between thought-provoking nature, head-empty pretty nature, and the process by which humans interact with nature, I was having a good time. Did you know that a continuous stem of bananas is really heavy? I didn’t, and I’ll never take them for granted again.
In this game, you’re harried not just by your opponents’ attempts to ruin you, but also this caveman’s attempts to help! It’s Groo: The Game, based on the Groo The Wanderer comics, and he’s not technically a caveman… which is probably a good thing. He’d be an insult to cavepeople’s intelligence.
Born to more of a medieval setting, Groo is the bumbling buffoon who will trample the new Town Hall you’re trying to build. As such, his good intentions are something to be weaponized, set on your opponents so that he’s far, far away from your work! Unfortunately, Groo’s movements are often dictated by the dice.
Rolling isn’t where your turn starts, but it’s where the explanation does. It’s your turn. You roll the dice. Most of them are resources, except the one that’s moving Groo; resources are spent on cards in your hand, to use them! Buildings, for instance, add Victory Points and special effects to your arsenal, while Troops allow you to defend and attack. When you have Troops at the beginning of your turn, you can use them before rolling and building, but that’s a Later Problem: first, the dice!
See, there’s a catch to the dice, in Groo: The Game. In Groo’s spirit of helping people, any dice you don’t use get passed to your opponent. And, if your first opponent doesn’t use them, on and on, til all the leftovers are used up! Or until they get back to you. Whichever’s first.
That game of “how much of what I can do can I do now?” continues with combat, in which attacking (committing Troops) begets defending (committing other Troops), and all Troops used in the fight are discarded. Can you afford to get rid of your defense? Can you afford to not? Every point by which there are more attacking Troops than defending is a Victory Point of Buildings the defender has to discard. And you only need seven points to win!
This one’s competitive and swingy and thematically a delight. I should check out the comics.
