Wine, Board Games and Star Wars: the Perfect Start to Winter Break

What a fantastic way to start winter break!  Bryan and I bought tickets to see Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker for the evening, but we decided to start out our day by heading up to New Market Plains.  It had been a while since we'd been there (and by a while, I mean a few weeks), and we're part of the wine club there, so it seemed like a good idea.  On our way up to New Market Plains, we stopped by my house to pick up some board games to play while we're there.

You know you visit a winery a bit too much when the employee there opens the door and greets you with a giant smile.  Yeah, we've gotten to that point in our lives.  Since we're part of the wine club there, we get four free tastings a quarter, so we obvious did a tasting.  We even got to try the new 2016 Chardonnay, which is absolutely delicious and probably my favorite chardonnay that they have right now.  After our tasting, we bought a bottle of the 2016 Chardonnay and set up on the screened in porch with our board games.

We picked up Ticket to Ride on our way up to the winery because I thought Bryan had never played it before.  Turns out, he played it two weeks ago with some of his friends, but that's fine, it's a great game to play.  Apparently one of the cats that lives on the winery property agreed, as he decided to join us.  He only stuck around for a little while, though, because we kept trying to stop him from climbing up on the table and knocking over all the little trains we'd already set up.

For those of you unfamiliar with the game, Ticket to Ride is fairly easy to learn.  You draw three tickets with different routes, and you have to keep at least two of them.  These are the routes you'll have to build.  Some are quite long and worth a lot of points, while others are significantly shorter and worth less points.  You don't want to overextend yourself, though, because if you don't complete a route, you lose those points at the end of the game.  In order to build routes, you draw colored cards.  If you want to connect two cities that have say four orange blocks between them, you have to use four orange cards from your hand (or some rainbow cards, which are wild cards).  If a track is grey, you can use any color you want, all the cards just have to be the same color.  It's a super straightforward game, and if you're interested in getting more into board games that aren't Monopoly, this is a great one to play.  There are many different variations as well, including Scandinavia, the United States, Africa, Europe and one that's all over the world.

Unfortunately for me, Bryan won the first game.  I would have won, but he took the one track I needed to complete my route, and I didn't have enough train cars to go around.  Had he not done that, I would have won.  I did manage to beat him the second game.  We didn't have time to play a rubber match to break the tie, but we'll have to do that another time.

After finishing up at New Market Plains, we drove back down to eat dinner at Gordon Biersch, which is our usual dinner spot before we head to a movie at Regal Rockville.  I just can't get enough of their garlic fries, I could eat them all the time.  We also got the pork potstickers as an appetizer, which is part of their Christmas menu.  They were amazing, and I highly recommend them.  I wish they were on the menu all the time.  They're served with a wedge of lime, and I highly recommend squeezing it over the potstickers.  It's a subtle addition, but it makes a world of a difference.

Done with wine and dinner, we headed over to the movie theater.  I prefer seeing bigger movies like this at a movie theater with assigned seats so we don't have to camp out ahead of time and get good seats together.  We sat in the third row, which Bryan and I decided was the perfect row; you're not too close but not too far away.  It was pretty much the sweet spot.

Let me start out by saying that, personally, I think there's nothing more exciting than seeing the famous words, "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." on a movie screen.  There's that anticipation as you wait for that amazing opening to begin with the powerful music and the opening crawl.  To me, it's the most exciting movie opening ever.  There was, however, a little bit of sadness this time around when I realized that this was the last one I'd probably see in theaters.  Of course, if they re-release the movies, I might be able to drag Bryan to see them again, but this was the last time I'd see this opening crawl for the first time.  It was definitely a bittersweet moment.

Personally, I thought the movie was fantastic.  I'll be sure to warn you guys before I dive into anything that has spoilers.  Out of the last three Star Wars movies, I definitely thought that this one was the best.  When it comes to where it falls in the grander scheme of things and compared to the rest of the movies in the series, I still haven't decided where it fits.  Like I said, though, it was the best out of the last three.  That doesn't mean a lot, however, since I thought that The Last Jedi wasn't very good at all.  In fact, it was so forgettable that I had to look up the synopsis at dinner and read it again so I could remember what had happened in it; I remembered the main plot points, but not some of the finer details I was afraid would come up in the movie.

One thing I will talk about before jumping into the spoilers is how General Organa was portrayed.  All of Carrie Fisher's were incredibly awkward, but that's because of her untimely death.  They had to work with what little footage they had of her, which made her scenes seem incredibly choppy.  It's hard to hold it against the movie, however, as they were doing the best they could with a tragic situation.

I feel like that is all I can talk about while avoiding spoilers, so if you haven't seen the movie yet or want to avoid spoilers, this is probably where you should stop reading.

Wow, just wow.  There were so many twists and turns, it was a lot to take in.  I'm struggling with where to start, so let's start with Rey and her family.  I knew she had to be someone important, but I had no idea who.  Part of me thought at the beginning of the movie with her eerily close connection to Kylo Ren that they were twins, but I just couldn't understand why Leia and Han would have abandoned her then.  It didn't seem like something they would do.  Other than that, I honestly had no idea who she was.  It never once dawned on me that she was the granddaughter of Emperor Palpatine.  I never even thought of him having children, which is why her being his granddaughter never even crossed my mind.  It definitely made sense though, because Palpatine was so powerful, and Rey was obviously incredibly powerful as well.

Personally, I thought Kylo Ren showed incredible growth as a character.  I definitely got the feeling that towards the end, he was in way over his head and had no idea how to stop the monster he created.  He knew he did something wrong, but he was too far gone and had no idea how to go back and put a stop to everything.  Therefore, his only solution was to keep going forward and hope for the best.  In his mind, he'd come this far, he had no thing left to lose.  In the end, however, Rey brought out the best of him, and he figured out a way to put a stop to everything by sacrificing himself for Rey.  One of his greatest moments, I thought, was when he was talking to his father.  He was no longer a megalomaniac but rather a small child of sorts who just wanted everything to go back to the way it had been before.

Okay, time for complaints.  I actually only have two big ones.  First of all, that kiss.  I mean, seriously?  I didn't seen any point in that kiss at all, and it just made what was an amazing moment incredibly awkward.  I thought that a hug was perfect, maybe a few tears, but there had been absolutely no sexual or romantic tension between Kylo Ren and Rey in the first place, which made the kiss seem even stranger and out of place.  Yes, they had just risked their lives, but there wasn't any sort of history that would cause them to act upon.

Alright, time for my other complaint.  When Bryan and I left The Last Jedi, I was thoroughly convinced that Supreme Leader Snoke was Darth Vader reincarnated.  Bryan insisted that I was wrong, and this was a huge bone of contention between us for the past two years.  We would argue about it back and forth at random intervals, and both of us would get incredibly worked up and passionate.  To me, it made perfect sense; he wanted control of the galaxy, he was incredibly disfigured, and the scar on his forehead lined up with the one on Darth Vader's forehead.  There was no way I could be wrong!  Well, I was, or so I thought at first.  In the movie, you find out that Palpatine created the image of Supreme Leader Snoke in order to pull the strings and control Kylo Ren.  In fact, you even see a tank or sorts with several renditions of Snoke's body.  Here's my theory: Palpatine based Snoke's appearance off Darth Vader.  He did this to create an image that Kylo Ren would subconsciously trust, and who better than his hero, Darth Vader?  So, while Snoke might not have technically been Darth Vader, I think, in a way, he was.  Bryan doesn't exactly agree, but I think he just doesn't want to admit that I'm right.

I would be remiss if I didn't take some time right now to talk about Disney World's Galaxy's Edge (of course).  On December 6th, they opened a new, amazing ride, Rise of the Resistance.  I always assumed they waited so long after the opening of Galaxy's Edge to open Rise of the Resistance because the ride wasn't quite ready yet.  While this might partially be true, the ride also aligns itself pretty well with the movie.  In both, members of the Resistance are captured by the New Order and must escape.  That's pretty much where the similarities end, but it's enough that both tie in together and can work as easy advertising for each other.  When I told Bryan this, he rolled his eyes and said, "No, Disney would never make a ride with a movie tie-in."  In instances like this, I just ignore him.  I thought it made perfect sense, and now it makes me even more excited to ride Rise of the Resistance in a few weeks.

Overall, I thought Rise of Skywalker was a fantastic movie.  Like I said before, I found it to be the best of the last three Star Wars movies.  It did have some moments that were mediocre, but part of it (such as Carrie Fisher's death) wasn't their fault.  It was a fantastic way to wrap up the saga, and it was bittersweet to see everything come to an end