IPP43 - prima parte

We start our travels on Saturday afternoon heading down to London for pizzas with Chris and Ken at Social Dough before crashing at Chris’ place for the night. Next morning we head to the pod parking and we’re in the terminal in plenty of time to grab some breakfast at Nero before saying goodbye to our bags and heading into the duty-free paradise(!) that is terminal 5.

We stock up on M&Ms for the room and Longchamp bags for the carrying thereof…we mooch around for a while and head to the gate where there’s an absolute masterclass in not listening to the pleas not to gather at the entrance to the gate before your group number is called…we get on toward the end of boarding and there’s plenty space in the overheads so we relax for the short haul to Rome.

Rome is nice and warm (30C) and we get through immigration fairly quickly after expecting the worst with the new EU entry requirements – we found the shorter queue somehow… We get our bags and join the queue for the taxis after establishing that Nick and Anne are already well clear of the airport. Our bear of a cab driver drops us at our hotel and we’re welcomed to our room for the next few days…

We meet up with Nick and Anne a short while later and head out for a lemonade (with basil) and some pastries in lieu of lunch… then we head off into the underbelly of Rome managing to avoid most of the tourist spots until Nick navigates us to the Villa Borghese where they’re setting up for some sort of celebration for the local police chief, apparently… the grounds are massive and we spend ages wandering through them before heading down Via Veneto (I’ve heard of that one) which is fairly quiet as it’s a warm Sunday afternoon. We cut back and forwards toward our hotel and arrange to meet for a spot of dinner a little later…

Dinner is at a pizza joint that Chris has recommend (she also recommended the hotel and several other eateries around the hotel) and it’s brilliant! The pizzas are excellent and the waiter’s recommendation of lemon cake for dessert is really memorable! There’s a queue waiting for tables pretty much the entire time we’re there – clearly the locals like this place as well! We crash at a reasonable hour and get a brilliant night’s sleep.

We sleep in the next morning and Nick and Anne end up putting us to shame and heading out hours before us even though they’re the ones who should be jet-lagged. We end up back at the local coffee shop for a pain au chocolate and an espresso before meandering down toward Piazza Navona and a cold drink. Lunch consists of a massive plate of starters for me and a Caesar salad for Gill… we wander past the Trevi Fountain and I get a great pic of the assembled throng of tourists all clamouring for the perfect shot of the fountain…

The walk back to the hotel is largely uphill and as a result we take a pretty direct route before chilling for a few hours.

We meet up with Dave and Jan and Nick and Anne in the lobby and Dave wrangles us a cab down to Travestere where we have a secret food tour booked… we find Frank and Jo already in the first bar so we join them… it would be rude not to after all! After a short while our guide for the evening joins us and following the usual introductions and a long explanation of why we meet up once a year somewhere around the world – which for some reason includes an introductory lesson in mechanical puzzles.

Ludo then proceeds to introduce us to a bunch of local Roman dishes from a series of specialist establishments – deep-fried zucchini with anchovy and mozzarella at the second stop, proper Roman pasta at the fourth, Maritozzi was a revelation and the final round of gelato was superb…we’re all grateful to Jan for finding this one and for taking the initiative – it’s a brilliant evening for friends to reconnect and experience some of the local specialities.

Gill and I fade stupidly early – we don’t have the excuse of being jet-lagged so it must be an age thing!

 

Tuesday morning is another leisurely start with breakfast at our usual spot and then a trip to the local supermarket for some hotel snacks and breakfast the next day… then we grab a cab down to Piazza Navona for a little sight-seeing before our pasta and tiramisu-making class.

We meet up with the Potts and the Baxters and enjoy a welcome glass of prosecco before heading into the restaurant to start the process of making our pasta… literally from scratch – one egg and some flour and fair amount of gentle encouragement and we have a large sheet of pasta on our boards about an hour later… that duly gets chopped into strands and we choose our pasta sauces…

Next we’re onto the tiramisu and that’s even harder work as the real Italians don’t believe in using electric mixers! Once it’s fully beaten into submission we head out for a starter and some cold drinks in the warm piazza – those misting machines are superb! We end up having a wonderfully leisurely lunch made largely by our own fair hands and end up chatting there for an hour or two.

We’re feeling lazy and grab a cab back to the hotel where we end up chilling for the rest of the afternoon…

We meet the Rossettis and the Baxters for dinner at a local Taverna that Dave’s chosen with the help of Google and it’s superb! We literally feast on some simply superb dishes over several hours and have a brilliant evening before a gentle wander back to the hotel.

We end up getting all our packing sorted before crashing – we’ve set alarms for the morning but don’t end up needing them…simple breakfast in the hotel room and the final packing before meeting the gang downstairs and grabbing a taxi van to the train station… we manage to evade the alleged plague of pickpockets, grab another coffee and pastry before heading off to the platform, which it turns out is a long hike across the other side of the station… we make it with about 10 minutes to spare but the Potts don’t…

They end up grabbing a cab to another Rome station and getting a later train from there to try and catch up with us at our change-over where we should have just over an hour between trains… we watch their progress over the next couple of hours with their window of opportunity getting progressively smaller and smaller but they manage it with a couple of minutes to spare in the end…

We get onboard and find Duncan and his wife in the same carriage, only I insist on calling him Donald for some reason… in Assisi, Jan is off the train in a flash and wrangles us the only taxi on the rank and all 8 of us pile into it and head up the hill to our hotels.

We check in and unpack and then start running into all of our friends in the lobby and at registration – it’s good to be among my tribe again, especially now that there’s a growing number of MPP-ers among them!

 

MPP XXXXCIIIV

[Apologies for the tumbleweed – some of my puzzling/blogging time is being taken up by other aspects of the hobby – it’s a good thing, it just means that I need to be a bit more selective about my blogging so there’ll probably be a bit less of it going forward.] 

No puzzlers staying over means another more relaxed start to MPP. Rather unusually I’m the first to arrive at the hall and start getting everything laid out for the day’s festivities: the fridge is packed with pop and the cakes and biscuits are spread out invitingly. I start on lugging the tables and chairs out when I’m joined by Chris and Chloe, and Robin manages to time his entrance with the completion of all the heavy lifting.

The puzzles come out and the gang starts drifting in (in the gentle arrival sense, not the rubber burning sense – the car park isn’t that large after all). I’ve taken along my most recent Karakuri boxes from this year’s Idea Contest for folks to fiddle with… and several do – they’re enjoyed, but this year’s crop (at least the ones that I’ve secured) aren’t massively challenging.

Kevin arrives with a large jigsaw puzzle for Steve – he’d won an auction for one of the Hayducks’ lovely creations that was fairly local to Kevin so he’d muled for Steve.

It was great to meet Carlos, dipping his toes into the proverbial MPP swamp for the first time. He’d brought along a few of his own designs for folks to play on and then gifted me a copy of Pyramidst at the end of the day as a thank you – thank YOU, sir! Although having had a bit of a play with it, I suspect it’s going to be beyond my solving abilities – there are a lot of complex shapes to pack into that neat little box!

Toby bounded into his maiden MPP and fitted straight in, dispensing “helpful” banter like he’d been there since the start… he’ll probably fit in. There was plenty of discussion about the Games Expo down the road and which puzzles were worth picking up and where the puzzle stands were as some folks had already been and others were planning to head there on the Sunday.

After our success with Derek’s big ball at King’s Day, he’s sent me a copy of the STLs for his 480-piece Icosahedron Frequency 4 – it kept the printer humming away for a few days and I have the bits all neatly package up to challenge the assembling puzzlers… who don’t disappoint. Chris and Chloe put in the main shift, importantly noticing that the colour-coding that I’ve given them isn’t quite right and the lovely large picture that Derek’s supplied has every joint inverted. Once they get past the initial hurdles the jolly big ball goes together steadily over the course of a few hours and there’s some celebration when the final piece is locked into place, completing what turns out to be a remarkably stable structure – Thanks Derek! [Now I just need to find somewhere to put it…]

Several folks have a go on the Tartarus Stickman Safe – making a reasonable amount of progress before retreating and resetting it for the next puzzler.

Kyle ends up spending a fair amount of time getting about three-quarters of the way through Benno’s Red Treasure with a little encouragement from Carlos – they ask me for some advice at one point and it rapidly becomes clear that I’ve already forgotten most of the solve… that seems to be happening more quickly these days!

Several folks enjoy fiddling with Robin's copy of Henry Segerman’s transforming cube-cuboctohedron – it’s a fun object to fiddle with as the sides change length between states… very clever stuff.

The Monkeys have brought along several copies of their latest project: a run of Gary Foshee’s Transparent Locks – definitely one of my favourite Foshee designs: it all looks so totally open and honest when you start, yet there’s some delicious puzzling to be had. The guys had done an incredible job on bringing this one back to the market – it’s a faithful replica of Gary’s original (with his family’s blessing of course!) with the one small touch of brass, well, there had to be, didn’t there? Awesome job fellas!

Frank arrives around the middle of the afternoon after I’ve nipped home to check on the hounds – apparently the traffic on the motorway down was so bad he nearly had to stop for a nap. (#iykyk) He’s brought along a couple of copies of a new design he’s toying with – two (burry) rods in a box that need to be removed… which it turns out is a bit trickier than you might imagine. Of course there are all sorts of knobbly bits inside the box stopping you from doing what you want to do and in the end you’ll need a fairly decent dance between the pieces and box to find a way out… shows promise! ;-)

I’d printed off a fistful of George’s new four-piece dodecahedrons and we managed to make sure that in the end everyone got a set that would actually assemble – some folks are incapable of following simple instructions like take two “a” pieces and two “m” pieces… that one’s definitely worth a play because there are two very distinct assemblies.

Somewhere around 5pm we headed back up to Puzzling Times HQ for pizzas and more puzzling… Carlos and Toby managed to stay for a little – hopefully they’ll be back and be able to spend a bit longer next time.  

There were a few distinct cohorts developing – the serious puzzlers hunkered around the dining room table ploughing through a series of puzzles collected from the puzzle cave… some gentle puzzling and chatter in the lounge and then a bunch of us in the kitchen just chatting without even the pretence of puzzling… everyone seems to find their niche and all seemed to have a good time – so I’m calling this another successful MPP – our 62^nd!