Pinball in Texas

 McKinney, TX

Arcade 92 in Downtown McKinney

Downtown McKinney

As many of you know, Donna and I like playing pinball and we like to play pinball in different places and different states.  It's a goal of ours to play pinball in every state.  We have played pinball in 14 states so far and yes, that number seems high to me too.  I had to double check to make sure I was tracking correctly.  Also, I haven't even marked Florida because I am not absolutely sure we did play pinball there.  I am sure I played pinball in places before I started tracking.  Anyway, Arcade 92 is a great place with classic arcade machines, classic consoles hooked up to TVs, as well as current and classic pinball machines.  They are open from 11 to 11 and once you pay your $12 you can come and go as you please.  

We got there just after 11 and brought our niece Erika with us.  She is a big gamer but hasn't really experienced the arcade scene.  We all enjoyed playing pinball and other games.  Erika and I played a very competitive game of Mario Kart on the switch and Donna and I played a competitive game of Mortal Kombat OG.  I didn't find Mortal Kombat like riding a bike.  I forgot all of the moves and had to mostly button mash to get through it.  

They had a handful of pinball machines I hadn't played and even a few Stern machines with the Stern Insider log on.  I am just getting going with the whole Stern Log in but here is my profile if you are curious.

Wednesday's happy hour is $2 off bottled beer 

This was a new machine for me.  I didn't like it that much.

This game gave me flashbacks.  We had this same machine in the Lake Tahoe office while I was helping finish NFL Blitz 2001 for PS1 and N64.

Nice and empty on a Wednesday at 11:45am

After our first pinball session we went to lunch at a little place downtown.  We had breakfast for lunch at Layered.  The food was very good and it was served by a smiling robot.

Our food was carried on the trays in back but a server had to hand them to us.  It's only 2022 you know.

Well, the eyes are smiling

They had a good spirits collection too.

After lunch we swung by a yarn and fabric store so Donna could pick up more yarn to make more Octopi.  They had a great selection and everyone there was very nice.  

Socks are supposed to be comfortable, not tough love...

All the colors and textures!

They had a "robot" winder there.  Who knew McKinney was the land of robots?

After the yarn store we walked back to the car and drove Erika home and then headed home ourselves.  We went to Kroger to get salad ingredients and made a nice cool salad for dinner.  It's still in the 80s after the sun goes down and the front room in our Airbnb still gets pretty hot even with our window coverings up.  

In the early evening I took Francis out for a wee.  We usually just have him find a place in the front yard on the grass because the sidewalk gets hot during the day.  There is a marker on the grass that notes a fire ant mound so we are sure to steer clear of it but apparently today I didn't steer clear enough.  When I was opening the front door I felt stinging on my right ankle and looked down and saw 3 or 4 red ants.  I quickly took off my shoes and socks and kindly asked the ants to leave my feet.  Donna looked up "fire ant sting" and had me run to the shower and wash my ankle with soap and water.  Fire ants don't bite, they sting.  When they sting they spray formic acid on you so washing the area really helps.  I think I only got 5 stings and we tended to them quickly and also put Hydrocortisone on the affected areas.  As a final precaution I took a Benadryl because some people are allergic to the sting.  I was heading back to the arcade for an evening session of pinball and didn't want anaphylactic shock to set in until I got home.  For the rest of the evening I couldn't even really tell the stings were there so it was a cheap lesson and we will be on the lookout for the little critters and protect Francis from them as best we can.

After the great fire ant incident, I headed back to Arcade 92 for more pinball.  I had already paid so why not?  I got there around 7:30 and the place was hopping!  Screaming people everywhere!  They were mostly playing the party games like Guitar Hero, Dance Dance Revolution, and 10 player Killer Queen so the pinball machines were pretty much available but it was loud as heck!.  Also either someone was trolling the pinball players or they had no idea what they were doing and it ended up being a troll.  I found many machines with 4 player games abandoned at the start.  It's more of a pain than it sounds because you have to plunge 12 (actually 24 because of ball saves) balls to get the game to end so you can play a normal single player game.  I focused on a few machines and got some really good scores and filled out my Stern profile a bit more.  Pinball is really fun and the Stern Log In makes it even funner (that's a word and it will get into the dictionary if we all start using it).  My friend, The Palm Springs Linguist says so.

Booya! 

Double Booya!

Well that's a lot of words today but a lot happened that isn't shown in photos.  I don't mind if you skip the text and just look at the photos and read the captions.  

If you didn't hear about our double dip into Oklahoma yesterday you can live that experience through text and photos here.