IPP41 – the aftermath

Pic: Regan Green

Next morning we wake up to a truly biblical storm - we’ve got the tail end of Hurricane Beryl passing by and whereas the day before we had rain going upwards outside our window, today we have leaves blowing up past the window (we’re on the 12th floor!) and then a bar with lighting swinging past the window (yup, we’re still on the 12th floor out of 24… it’s quite surreal!).

Pic: Regan Green

The power comes and goes across the city and at that point several homes are already without power, we can see trees down around the park and along the road and road furniture is largely flattened… so we do what we can and we all head into the puzzle party room and start playing with puzzles.

Four of us get our puzzle hunt / quiz and activity stuff together and we end up running that for a couple of hours in the morning…albeit slightly longer than planned due to some A/V issues, it’s a lot more leisurely than we’d have had to do it the night before… so it worked out well in the end. Folks seemed to enjoy themselves and we had a huge amount of fun getting them to challenge the boys to a balloon duel, complete some pretty random challenges and solve a puzzle hunt along the way… three tables managed to get to the meta puzzle and knew what they had to do for the final task and one more table got there with a few nudges… so at the appointed time we had four paper towers reaching skywards and then Steve our trusty chief-judge decided it was too close to call so three tables each got a bottle of wine… and Brian only lost out because I only had three bottles! (I owe you a bottle of wine, Brian!) 

From there we went straight into another puzzle hunt that Kellian and her crew had cooked up overnight - this one had us trying to entertain Steve as the Ticketmaster (Dun, Durn, Duuuun) who had all of our tickets to escape Houston (great theming given all of the cancelled flights and hunkering down in the hotel we’d been doing!) I join a table with Brian P and we gradually accumulate a bunch of serious puzzlers and start making progress through the paper puzzles while Jen and Ken run around the hotel on a scavenger hunt for more clues… we make a pretty good team and all rejoice when Koichi solves the evil maths puzzle for us… we finally manage to pack all of our bags and get given our (economy class!) ticket out of Houston - a great puzzle hunt – massive thank you to Kellian and her crew!

Somehow we’ve all managed to amuse the assembled mass of frustrated puzzlers and actually have a heap of fun in the process…but we were the lucky ones to be in a hurricane-proof hotel – by now there are 3m homes and businesses without power (including, sadly Strange Bird Immersive so our booking on Monday evening is cancelled). There’s flooding and trees down and a bunch of the really well-established trees have been ripped apart in the park over the road - the less well-established trees are all on their sides… I reckon puzzlers are a good bunch to get locked-in with…

A bunch of us gather in the lounge area on the 12th floor for a picnic to get rid of the extra food we’d bought in case we couldn’t find a restaurant (the hotel had laid on a grand buffet for lunch and dinner in the event) - the mood is pretty good until phones start pinging with flight cancellations for the next day….then follows several fraught hours as folks try and get themselves re-booked… there’s a knot of Dutch puzzlers on the floor trying to make sense of the KLM chatbot / support line, Ali manages to get himself re-booked via the website after an initial misfire and Steve spends several hours on the phone talking to various call centres around the world but by the time Gill and I head to bed he’s still not got himself and his mum on a plane back to the UK.

Next morning we meet Anne and Nick for a chat over coffee and soon find ourselves in the middle of a lot of goodbyes and chatting with all manner of puzzlers, some of whom are actually managing to leave the city… maybe.

Late morning we meet up with Dor and Megan to share an Uber to the Galleria for some retail therapy for Gill, and some glorious chocolate for both of us… we grab a burger and chocolate shake for lunch before heading back to the hotel when we find Wil and Louis have not only managed to get re-booked but also find a room for the night for Wil as he’d been forced to check out as planned.

We do some more packing and chill for a bit ahead of meeting up with the gang for a Puzzled Pint downstairs.

The pub that was going to host the puzzled pint Houston event is still recovering from Beryl so Sam gets the puzzles printed out for us and finds us an alternative pub - Hearsay right by the hotel. About 12 of us end up there for a quick dinner and some puzzling… Louis, Nigel and I make decent progress on the first round of puzzles while wolfing down our food and we manage to claim the sheets for the meta and the bonus puzzles before dashing back to the hotel to meet up for our trip to Strange Bird Immersive.

Brett’s managed to pull together a couple of spare slots for the Man from Beyond after their power is restored post-Beryl so we pull together a team of 7 and head across town in a couple of Ubers… we get there first to find the gates to the business park locked and nobody on the intercom … it is 9pm after all…we decide to tailgate a car coming in and send Nigel ahead to find where we’re going and he duly bumps into a bunch of IPPers who’ve just finished so they tell us where to go when the second Uber arrives… I’m not going to say anything about the escape room itself as that’s definitely best experienced in person… and I’d probably run out of superlatives!

We had a great time playing around in the lobby beforehand without getting up to too much mischief, the whole experience of the room itself was quite literally incredible - Brian had joined us for the experience and it was his first ever escape room - we felt sorry for him because every other escape room is going to be a disappointment after this one! (The Houdini theming is exceptional - there were so many little subtleties in the story line, the props and the puzzles that were just spot-on with the history… if you’re a student of the man, you will be impressed!)

After the experience we are all thoroughly buzzing while we wait for the Ubers back to the hotel…a quick drink in the bar with the boys before I head up to the room to crash.

Next morning is the final packing before we meet Ali in the lobby to grab an Uber to the airport to brave the chaos we’re expecting after the past few days of cancelled flights - we’d fortunately always planned to travel back on the Wednesday and so far our flight is still showing as on schedule, Ali is less fortunate and has had his flight cancelled yet again so he decides to head out to the airport with us anyway and try to get on another flight… which pays off bigtime when he manages to score a seat on a United flight direct to LHR that afternoon…

The flight home is a great anti-climax after the past few days – and that’s a good thing!

IPP41 – the main bit

On Friday morning the alarm goes off early so that Gill can round folks up for the fabric and fibre tour… they all rock up in good time and apart from two ladies who try to escape to the Zoo tour, they make it away fine… so a few of us wander down to the Corner Bakery Cafe and have a damn fine breakfast before wending our way back to loiter in the lobby for a while - the Design Comp judging is underway so we can’t get into the Design Comp Room – although a few folks innocently wandered in only to be told to exit immediately by a stern chief judge. There’s puzzling and chatting and Regan shows me the database he’s created in Access and offers me a copy - which I reckon will be a major step up from my current excel spreadsheet…we agree to swap files. 

About a dozen of us headed back to MKT Bar for lunch and had a super meal before dashing back to the hotel for Robert Yarger’s puzzle box-making workshop… Steve, Brian, Ali and I are all on the same table and we have a lot of fun (and laughs) assembling Rob’s superb kits - his instructions are excellent and all of the bits just fit perfectly. Most of us had opted not to glue the boxes together fully so that we could take them home in bits or experiment with the alternative assembly (the kit builds into either of two alternatives)…we get to run through the solutions and see that everything works before heading out (of course it does!). 

We freshen up a bit and head back down for the buses to the J Bar M BBQ for the Founder’s reception where Gill and I share most of a single serving and we’re absolutely stuffed… the band plays plenty of rock and then Jerry introduces all of the Greenhorns and invites them to tell us where they’re from… it’s really cool to see a couple of my MPP muckers up there beaming!

Gill and I head back on the first bus as my chest isn’t enjoying the heat and then I head up to the Design Comp Room where I fail singularly to solve virtually every puzzle I turn my hand to… I crash at a fairly reasonable hour.

Next morning is the puzzle exchange so when I’m ready to head out and find some brekkie I ask if anyone wants to go to Phoenicia for another breakfast, only for Ali to tell me it’s closed and they’re downstairs in Starbucks already… I fail to get a croissant and resort to a toasted cheese sandwich before grabbing my exchange puzzles and heading down to meet Louis in the ballroom. We set out the exchanges and wander around a bit… it’s going to be a great day.

Louis’ organisation is excellent and we get around the whole lot with a couple of hours to spare, which gives me time to get up to the room to take the obligatory shot of exchange puzzles on the bed just as Gill arrives back from lunch with Deirdre, somewhat sodden due to the arrival of a bit of a storm… we then watched it out the window and it was pretty spectacular stuff - plenty of thunder and lighting and squally winds with the rain literally going up outside our window… a foretaste of what Beryl might be bringing.
The afternoon lectures included an insight into Perry’s assembly process, with some excellent self-deprecating humour liberally tossed in, before Robert gave us a virtual tour of Perry’s gift puzzles (jaw-dropping) - all of which were on display in the Design Competition Room… Rox gave us another update on the WPC and George talked about 3D printing with a live demo during the talks - yes, it was that quiet! (Big Louis ended up taking that printer home afterwards…)

While we were hanging around Tye messaged that he had some puzzles in his room for me so Steve and I headed up and we got a little shopping done ahead of the main event on Sunday…

Everyone congregates outside the ballroom for dinner and we establish an MPP-ish table for some more fun. Food service is tres rapido and before we know it, we’re into the announcements of the next couple of IPP venues and dates - cue lots of happy puzzlers who can make travel plans to meet up again next year…

The evening’s entertainment is a magician called Ben Jackson - great patter and he worked the crowd well, making sure we were all on his side and doing some actual twisty solves, along with a couple of effects thrown in. His card-slinging is pretty impressive and along the way he seriously bends some folks heads with some of his mentalism bits… before ending up with a wonderful reveal of a borrowed, signed $100 bill inside a lemon and a prediction of the exact ending time for the show… After dinner winds up I head to the DC room for a little more puzzling and then crash around midnight…

Next morning is the puzzle party so I’m up early grabbing something from Starbucks and chatting to Lee about how I can service my Clutch Box before we join the rather orderly queue to get into the puzzle party proper. There’s a somewhat unruly scrum at Perry’s table so I choose to wander around the room until the mad rush subsides, which turns out to be a bad choice as I end up behind Brian at the table a few minutes later and he buys the last copy that Perry has… which means I have a bit more cash to spend at Tom’s table a little later… first world puzzling problems, eh?!

Boaz is selling all of his latest locks, including a new one from the design comp - also coincidentally his exchange puzzle, so I just end up picking up a commemorative booklet with pics of his dad’s puzzle designs.

I spend a little while chatting with Jerry about his new puzzles and put my name down for a couple of his big hitters…

By the time I get to Tom’s table there are still plenty of wonders on display and I end up choosing a few to add to the hoard… I suspect that some of them are going to take me quite a while to solve…

Takeshi had copies of the not-quite-released Hanayama puzzle available and I manage to snag a lovely copy of Onigiri from Teddy… Brian (M) had some thoroughly delicious looking wooden bits and I grabbed a copy of Ring the Changes that I’d enjoyed playing with in the DC…

At one point I ended up buying a bunch of gift puzzles from Tye to take back to the UK where I’m sure they’ll find good homes…

There are announcements during the course of the morning about the incoming weather - the tail of Hurricane Beryl is due to hit on Monday morning so folks head out to the shops to grab some food to stash in their rooms just in case we end up with limited options for food – I strongly suspect we ain’t going to starve even if we are cut-off from civilisation for a week or more…

When the puzzle party winds up, we head into the lectures where Aaron talks to us about the evolution of PuzzleCAD, Brian and Sue tell us about their wonderfully puzzling life and Chinny gives us a peek into his turning endeavours. 

The foul weather begins to roll in and we can see the wind and the rain (and thunder and lightning) coming across the city – it’s quite an impressive spectacle… by now we’re getting increasingly dire warnings about the incoming weather and we hear formally that NASA have cancelled our trip the next day… the committee is running around organising things when we’re heading into dinner and we agree to move some of the entertainment that we’ve got teed up into the next day so that we can finish the dinner early and the hotel staff can get home before the worst of the weather arrives.

We rattle through dinner and then Nick does the usual presentation with all of the designer’s names before handing out the awards to the winning designers… we have a huge cheer from our table when the Monkeys win an award for BMSD… and Juno wins the top gong on the night for Hugo… both well-deserved.

There are a long series for thank-yous for all the folks involved in the organising before Perry does a presentation on the host gifts for Matt and Steven, before handing them over.

With all of the formalities out of the way, and IPP coming formally to a close, there is a lot of standing around and chatting - and just a little more puzzling - specifically a couple of folks totally dismantle the Monkeys trophy puzzles and then create a single interlocking house-like structure…much to the amusement of everyone… Rich then decides he can do even better and builds a NOS burr inside the frame - not satisfied with that, he subsequently assembled two BMSDs inside one of the frames… apparently it took Steve until the early hours of the morning to retrieve them…and a few days after returning home he’d managed to reassemble his trophy.

Everyone shifts outside the ballroom onto a series of large tables for some more puzzling and miraculously some bottles of beer arrive, so we’re set… Roger is doing magic and certifying folks for time travel - I think I made it, but it was a close call with the red and blue lights not always getting triggered at the right time.

IPP41 – calm before the storm

It’s 4am and we’re wide awake… the flight across the pond was brilliant thanks mainly to BA deciding to upgrade us (which solved the “why have our seat numbers changed from last night when we checked-in” puzzle), the trip through IAH was pretty efficient (there was literally no queue at immigration!) and the drive to the hotel was fair-speedy. We managed to find a few puzzling people in the lobby after we’d unpacked our stuff in the room (mental note, ship your damn exchange puzzles next time!) - we haven’t seen Nigel in years so we get to catch up a bit and he entertains us with the story of his bus trip from the airport… he’s sharing a room with Ali who’s due in a bit later, so Nigel’s lurking in the lobby - not that unusual for an IPP, to be fair!

We settle into chatting to Brian & Sue and Jim & Susan and end up heading over the road to The Grove for some dinner (nice grub, but not cheap) - we have a great time catching up - we haven’t seen the Strayers in 6 years so there’s lots to catch up on… as we’re finishing off with dinner Steve arrives with the New Zealand contingent and we stand around chatting for a bit before we all head back to the hotel where we take up residence in the bar so that Steve and his mum can finally get some dinner. Deirdre is royally entertaining and it’s immediately clear that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. While we’re in the bar, Ali finally manages to clear immigration and makes it to the hotel - there’s much hugging and greeting - I haven’t seen Ali for a couple of weeks at least - and Nigel can finally get into his room!

I crash at about 10… and then find myself wide awake having a debrief with Gill at 4am - jet lag has made sure we’re both wide-awake - but it’s still a great start to IPP41!

Gill and I head out to find some breakfast and end up in a nice little restaurant for a jolly decent breakfast before we head back to the hotel to help Brian, Marc and co. set up the Design Comp room…they’ve virtually finished by the time we get there so Gill and I end up catching up with Kellian and occasionally disassembling a puzzle or two for the comp… from there I spend a bit of time on the quiz for Sunday and get some things printed off at the business centre (wow, they’re organised!). We grab a bite to eat at the deli and find Dave & Jan, Rob and Boaz in the lobby - cue more hugs and greetings… there’s going to be a lot of that - we haven’t seen a bunch of these folks in several years and it’s good to be back among my tribe!

Gill and I take a wander to the Phoenicia Market to grab some lunch (Spanakopita) and snacks for the room (soft drinks and emergency breakfast supplies)… Nigel and the Monkeys have headed off to lunch at Hearsay and we don’t see them for several hours but they come back raving about the joint, which is a good sign and enough reason to add it to the list for potential meals over the next few days…

Hanging out in the lobby becomes progressively better as more and more puzzlers arrive - there’s a contingent of Dutch puzzlers so we catch up with Wil, Frans and Louis… Clive arrives and regales us with tales of his recent trip (up) - if you really want a good laugh, ask him what he thinks of the French hospital that treated him! He’s still clearly in a lot of pain - to the point that Big Steve actually helps him up after he collapsed in a chair instead of just laughing at him, as we normally would, ‘cos we’re nice like that!

Somewhere around 5:30 Steven starts rounding up folks and pointing them in the direction of the Brewery for the unofficial outing… a bunch of us decide we’ll walk to the nearby food court to grab something simple for dinner… only to find they’ve closed early … so we head across the road to the MKT Bar where they fed and watered us wonderfully, even if we did overstay our welcome quite a bit… (but now we know they close at 7:30!).

Back in the lobby there are a lot of puzzlers now… it’s great to catch up with Kelly and John P… Rod and Nick spend quite a while trying to work out Regan’s safe puzzle… including the use of several well-external tools… Regan definitely got a kick out of the fact that they were somewhat stumped for quite a while…

Bob brought out his massive stellation construction kit and Marc and John spent ages working their way through the various impressive structures… loved Bob’s description of gluing over 3,000 magnets in place for the project as “quite zen”! [That kit came out again later in the week and this time the giant structure ended up getting dumped on a table with the ensuing collapse into thousands of pieces being captured for posterity.]

Thursday morning we head out to a likely breakfast spot only to find it was in fact closed… apparently July 4^th is some sort of holiday over here, so we go back to Phoenicia (which was open!) where we got ourselves a jolly decent brekkie enjoyed just outside the deli.

Back to the hotel for registration and portrait shots, aka pulling funny faces for Perry.

I spend a few hours in the Design Comp room with not much solving on my part, but plenty of banter and nice chat about IPP, playing with puzzles and blaming Jerry for all of this…

Lunch is a choc chip cookie and an iced mocha (having had a huge breakfast at Phoenicia) courtesy of Starbucks in the lobby before heading into the first puzzle box-making workshop with Kel Snache… we had plenty of laughs with Brian and Steve at opposite ends of our table along with several impressionable greenhorns… I think they had fun and mostly the puzzle boxes functioned, except for Steve’s - which was more of a one-way puzzle box. Rich arrives looking somewhat frazzled – I don’t think he’s slept much in the past 24 hours… but in spite of that he manages to get registered.

Gill managed to catch the end of the Murrays’ match from Wimbledon up in the room and after a bit of a break we headed down to the buses to POST for the 4th of July fireworks… we grab some street food and eat outside on the loading dock where we hatch a plan to grab some Ubers and head back to the air conditioning of the hotel bar… where Ali and I enjoy our milkshakes and the rest have some more traditional fare from the bar. We chat for a while and then most of us crash early… with fireworks from the park across the road punctuating our sleep… there’s no midnight debrief this time so we may have kicked the jet lag, but my throat is scratching something horrible and I’m hoping I don’t lose my voice ahead of the exchange…