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!