Caby and I don't do a ton of traveling after we're done traveling. What I mean by that is that the trip to London, or Cardiff, or wherever—that's already a lot. So far, once we get into the city, we usually stay put, and anything that takes longer than an hour to walk there, we don't even know it exists, let alone seek it out.
While Reddit is a cesspit that I've learned my lesson on hard this year, I did learn through a post there that, just around the time we'd be going back to London for my flight home, Kingston University London would be having a week-long exhibit called The Archive of Retro Computing, showcasing the famous, not so famous, and infamous side of British and European home computing, plus game consoles from the early discrete Pong consoles up to the Jaguar. Given we'd already explored the party in the back of old-school gaming, we thought it'd be fun to dig into the business in the front of it as well.
We got more than we bargained for, but we got there in the end.
A tale of Cammy's navigational incompetence
In my defense, we don't have public transport where I live, outside of a very limited bus system meant mostly to shuffle seniors around. The last time I was regularly taking buses, I was in high school. London buses are completely alien to me. I was scared of the day I'd have to take one of them because I knew I would make a pig's ear of it exactly like this.
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We start out towards the Wimbledon station, which crosses over into South Western Railway territory. Basically, while Underground (which I'm very comfortable navigating) stations obviously mostly connect to other Underground stations, they also connect to non-Transport for London services and general landmarks. You go to the Wimbledon station on the Underground, and another train service entirely can take you places outside London, which we had to do to get to Kingston University.
It was fun seeing the inside of a different train! We sat in a car that was specifically marked as a "quiet zone", which is such a phenomenally good idea that I'm surprised I haven't seen it elsewhere. Although we were a little unsure of how to pay to leave the station (that's how the Underground works, you tap a card to get on and then tap to let it let you out, and that's how they bill you for how far you went), we landed in Kingston upon Thames without issue.
Now it was up to us navigating the bus system.
Now, we're not totally stupid, or at least Caby isn't. Although it was incredibly spotty in pinpointing where we were on the map, Caby had an app on her phone for directions up for basically everywhere we went that wasn't Cardiff Central. This app tells you what trains and buses to get on and even roughly when they'll be arriving. How can you fuck that up?
Well, here's my first question to you: if a London bus is numbered, wouldn't you think that number only applies to that bus? Isn't that the point of a numbering system?
Well, I was wrong. Turns out, "71 Kingston" and "71 Chessington" are, in fact, different. They go different places. The number is the route number, which is (I think?) equivalent to an Underground line, namely a specific line of stops. The name is the end destination of the bus, the way that you have District trains that go to, say, Wimbledon, which is a branch of the District line, and District trains that go to Richmond, which is a different branch of the District line. My dumb ass, not just listening to the directions, thought we could save some time getting on the 71 Chessington bus.
So now we're going the wrong way, very much out of the way. Of course, just being brought to the wrong spot is whatever, you can just keep hopping buses until you get the right one. This bit bothers me more though, because I actually embarrassed myself over it. As I said, the Underground has tapping in and tapping out—this is the way you make it through the ticket gates, and how they know how much to bill you for. You tap in on the buses also! You do not, however, tap out. You're charged a flat fee regardless of how far you went. (Apparently, they used to charge you for how far you went, but that was changed in the mid-2010s.)
So when we got off the wrong bus the first time, I freaked and thought "oh shit, I forgot to tap out". There are signs all around the Underground that talk about a £100 penalty fare, money I was acutely aware I was already burning through faster than OpenAI over the course of this trip. I start doing two things, one, trying to navigate the Transport for London website to try to pay for not tapping out (website's completely broken, of course), and two, maybe hopping on another bus just to tap my card to register it as having tapped out. I tried to explain this to the driver, who said "uh no, you're on now". So Caby and I get on, get off at the next stop. After some walking, we decide to get back on that bus to at least take us back to the start, and eventually, after a lot of waffling when we tried to get off again, this same driver has to tell me that you don't tap off the buses.
I suppose I'm fortunate that I will never see that driver again, and that London bus drivers no doubt see shit way worse than an autistic man without a clue as to how the bus system works, because that is my gazpacho soup moment of the trip and maybe all of them so far. Still haunts me to this day.
We make it to the promised land
So we're lost. Caby's tired and freaked out, though nevertheless quite patient despite her dumbass American boyfriend's antics, and we decide to walk for a bit, find 71 Kingston, and just get on the correct bus this time. We do so (different driver, so I wasn't as embarrassed), we make it to the roundabout down the street from Kingston University, and we arrive with hours to spare.
Was the payoff to this joke (I'm the joke) worth the setup?
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Yeah! There were these long tables set up with computers on the left, right, and in the center of the room, the classics, your Sinclairs, your Acorns, Commodores, BBC Micros, around the edges, and the weirder and lesser-known ones (shoutout the Dragon 32) in the middle. The back of the room was set up with game consoles, each with an EverDrive with what seemed like each console's entire library on them (this will become funnier later), and the entrance to the room had a few really noteworthy machines of each flavor (I remember an NES, another Pong console, and maybe a Commodore machine) to entice people to come in.
Each of these computers had an acrylic plaque next to them explaining their deal, and most were set up with games, though a handful were set up with BASIC prompts and books of printed code to encourage people (some of whom were sat dutifully typing indeed) to try the write-in programs like came in enthusiast magazines back in the 80s, or maybe just to experiment.
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There were also these bigger plaques to explain more of the general history of the 80s home computer world, something that passed us Americans who mostly jumped straight to the IBM compatibles behind. The one I found most close to home, about a generation of European kids making do without the expensive computers, is the one I've highlighted here. (Unfortunately, a lot of these photos came out blurrier than I'd like. I was pretty alright getting good photos through most of the trip, but I guess all the walking and stress had me shakier than usual.)
I spent most of my time at the consoles. This was my first time getting to try a lot of them in person! Games I'd only watched videos of or maybe emulated for years were finally running live in front of me. There's a shot of me playing Astrosmash on the Intellivision up there with its funky controller. I'd never played an Atari XEGS or an Odyssey 2 (or its European equivalent, the Philips Videopac, which was what was on display here), nor an Atari Jaguar, which I quickly learned how to switch games on and immediately moved to playing Doom and Tempest 2000 instead (I think it was set to I-War or something random originally). A Vectrex! I got to try out Mine Storm, on a real Vectrex with a real vector display. You just can't emulate that goodness.
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And about switching games! With any game from a specific console library at my disposal, I quickly got to work having a laugh. I booted up Bubsy on the Genesis (sorry, Mega Drive) instead of Sonic the Hedgehog and sat amused watching a family, including a little kid, twiddle with the first level. I wasn't the only one who knew how to get into the games menus on these; there were these two Ukrainian-sounding guys having a swell time with F-Zero on the SNES.
If you're asking if the staff really appreciated us toying with their setups like that, don't worry. The main guy on the floor, going around and chatting with people, talked with us a few times, the first of which was prompted by him noticing I'd switched the Jaguar to Doom. ("Yeah, I guess that one's important," he said dryly. He freely admitted that Doom was where his interest in games started to taper off, which interested me.)
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After an hour and a half or so of sperging out to Caby, playing Pong with Caby (first Guitar Hero, now Pong!), and chatting with random folks about my beating Famicom Contra in one sitting and with the proprieter of the exhibit about the temperamental nature of the Pong consoles, we were about ready to head back. I'm pleased to report that Cammy did exactly what the phone told him to do this go around and we arrived back at the Travelodge in good time. We were pretty cooked, so I got food for us myself and we settled in for a night of watching whatever we could find on the BBC channels and UKTV, doodling, and writing together.
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I knew that, when I got back to the US, it was going to be a difficult adjustment being away from her, and I just wanted it to last as long as it possibly could have.