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…