I’ve spent the last week or so on vacation in Washington, D.C., which is my high school stomping grounds. The wife and I spent three days there, seeing the sites. You could spend a year in D.C. vacationing and still not see everything there is to see, but we crammed a lot of Smithsonians, memorials, and dodging whiny field trip groups (really, school is still in session?) into three days.

The real meat was a Boy Scout Troop reunion. I’m an Eagle from a troop in Northern Virginia that dissolved sometime in the mid 90’s. Our troop was a solid outdoorsy group, that went on High Adventure (12+ day) trips all across the country, including one 87 mile trek through California that remains one of the fondest memories of my life. The image below is of Mount Whitney, the peak of that trip.

Mount Whitney.

While at the reunion, I was reminded that Game Dev magazines were not my first foray into print. Here’s a quote from the August 1990 Boy’s Life:

Still to come was a 1,000-foot climb to Colby Pass – the roughest stretch they had seen in six days of hiking. And that wasn’t all. Once they topped the pass, they had six more days of hiking awaiting them on the other side.

The climb was steep. “I was hoping my leg would break so I could be carried out,” Damion Schubert later wrote in his journal.

Haha. I never had a journal… but I did break my leg on a Skiing trip two years previous. Very funny, Mr. Scoutmaster.

Incidentally, my scoutmaster still fits into the same uniform he fit into 40 years ago when he started. The games industry has not been so kind to me. I gotta start working out.