(Sorry, I can’t bring myself to spell it wrong!)
A couple of weeks ago I found myself heading down to
Stansted to meet up with Peter, Ali and Louis – it turns out it’s quicker to
fly to England and pick up a flight to Perugia if you happen to live in
Eindhoven. We don’t find Peter until we head down to the gate and manage to
solve the gate puzzle when Ryanair pull a last-minute gate-switcheroo without
changing the boards down at the gate.
We head off a bit later than planned but Ryanair seem to
have some spare time in their schedule and we land more or less on time… Louis’
passport sees him through in record time and the three Brits bring up the rear.
We find Steve outside waiting for us – he’s come over a few days early and
rented a car to fetch and carry us – nice man that he is…
The drive back to the castle is complicated a bit by the
fact that the car’s satnav speaks Italian, the main motorway is shut for road
works and everyone drives on the wrong side of the road. We manage to solve one
of these when Ali fires up Google Maps on his phone but we still manage to miss
a couple of turnoffs along the way… we end up having a wild ride through the
Italian countryside but Steve gets us all safely to the castle.
We grab our bags and head indoors where we find Rox
welcoming all of us. She shows us to our rooms – Steve and Louis are in the
castle and Ali, Peter and I get to choose a room each in the hotel – Ali takes
the twisty room, Peter the IPP Exchange room and I grab the Lego room.
We head back up to the castle where Rox has laid on a
massive Italian feast for us – we navigate up to the dining room and set about
enjoying a great dinner of homemade pizza and lasagne – just brilliant!
There’s a little time for puzzling, but somewhere around 1am
I run out of steam and head off to my room to crash. I get a great night’s
sleep and somewhere around 9am we regroup at the castle for breakfast.
After breakfast we spend some time puzzling… there’s work to
be done on some polycube assemblies that form part of Jan Zoon’s massive Notre
Dame – I remember seeing this one at DCD a number of years ago and seeing it up
close & in bits, was way more impressive! This assembly represents about 6
month’s of Jan’s life and is made up of literally millions of little cubies all
glued into unique assemblies – they in turn assemble into the building blocks
that in turn build the Notre Dame… a couple of these blocks have become
partially disassembled and need rebuilding… and that’s a massive job, it turns
out, even if you have access to several copies of BurrTools. A few of us have a
bash at it manually until Rox and Marie managed to procure a CD drive for
George’s laptop – that ended up giving us access to Jan’s notes and enabled us
to track down the appropriate virtual brick and rebuild it… despite that pithy(!?)
description, that ends up taking us several hours!
We head upstairs at the opposite end of the castle through
the crystal room (currently in need of a new means of supporting the shelves)
and then heading up the stairs past hundreds of boxes mounted in the stairwell
with some truly awesome puzzles begging to be played with. (Peter obliges later
on and even I join in on it.) The rooms are all lined with fabulous antique
display cabinets all doing their damnedest to display the mainly wooden puzzles
throughout the castle (where the humidity is pretty consistent given the depth
of the castle walls which have effectively protected Panicale from invasion for
centuries!) – the room we’d dined in the night before has a stupendous
collection of wooden puzzle boxes in it – I think I spot an Apricot box on top
of one of the cabinets – it’s probably safer up there!
The view from the tower on the top floor is incredible.
(Note to my reader: I’m probably going to run out of superlatives at some
point.) I find myself just standing there drinking it in several times over the
course of the weekend.
The tour continues over at the hotel where George and Rox
show us what they’re doing on the first floor to create a main suite for
themselves… next to the gym and George’s new (clean) workshop which still looks
pristine and must be almost ready to start receiving the collection of printers
and laser cutters. Everything is set up to make this one almighty makerspace,
in line with their aim of having a place where folks can come and collaborate
and prototype new puzzling ideas on the spot… I’d say they’re going to achieve
that in spades.
On the upper levels we run through the IPP Exchange Room –
with narrow shelves around all of the walls holding (literally!) all of the IPP
exchange puzzles (some were still in boxes but I think that by the time Steve
and Louis left, they’re all out there!).
The Lego room has space for plenty of the wonderful kits
still in their boxes, along with piles of general construction bits for folks
to play… the Twisty puzzle room is jaw-dropping! Literally floor to ceiling
shelves covered in every single twisty you could imagine – from the oldest ones
to the very latest, and every single thing in between…
Next the plastic and electronic puzzles room is similarly
jam-packed…
Down in the basement there are several rooms with map
drawers and piles of boxes and some with just plain piles of boxes – in spite
of the stupendous amount already out on display, there’s even more still
waiting to be unpacked and displayed…
We work our way along the basement under the hotel into George’s
dirty workshop – complete with direct access to the street outside for easy
delivery of large quantities of lumber, or, frankly whatever takes his fancy…
and up against one wall of the next room along there’s a tell-tale door-shaped
arrangement of stone work in the wall begging to be attacked… (Yup: Italian
artisans 1 – bricked up doorway 0).
Rox and George treat us all to dinner at Gallo, one of
several fine eateries in the town – Rox has ordered a bit of what they do best
for everyone and it duly starts coming and keeps coming… the food is delicious
but several of us find ourselves asking if there’s much more to come as we’re truly
stuffed. It turns out there are just two more courses to go and we soldier
through it… did I mention the food is fantastic?
After dinner we take the long route home, wandering around
the other side of the town until we get to the base of the castle and Rox spends
a while playing with the lights up in the tower and delivering various flags from
around the world… much to our amusement – the kids are easily amused! There’s
some more puzzling before I crash at a more sensible hour than the evening
before.
Breakfast is a repeat of the day before with everyone
surfacing at more or less the same time… after breakfast I resume working on
Doog’s latest called Channel 13 – I’d spent some time on it the day before and made
a little bit of progress, thankfully I’d managed to reset it so I gave myself
another go on it in the morning… this time I got it into a position that seemed
like it might not be reversible and I panicked a little and asked Doog if I’d
done something silly… he laughed at me and said I probably hadn’t broken it… so
I puzzled on and a short while later managed to complete the solve, and indeed
reset it properly – fun puzzle!!
Ali, Steve and Louis set about completing the Mega Mansion
solve after Steve and Nigel had done most of the initial work on it during a
previous visit. There’s some serious heavy lifting of both the literal and
figurative variety – heck there’s even some consultation of the solution notes
and some backwardsing and forwardsing with Tracey before the Mansion quite
literally opens up and yields the final challenges… much to Rox’s absolute
delight.
There are a few personalised jigsaws and a serious
construction project still to be tackled… the lads end up short-circuiting one particular
bit of the solve to make it a whole lot more tractable for the next set of
solvers but resetting it takes up the rest of the day and indeed some of the
following(!).
While some of that’s going on I play with Perry’s latest
offering that I’d missed out on in Houston and find it as delightful a solve as
ever… Peter’s favourite phrase is “Perry has out Kawashima’d Kawashima” – and I
find myself agreeing with that – it’s a wonderfully surprising little box that
never let’s you just get into a rhythm and “know” where the next move is going
to come from…
Lunch is a blur of delicious flatbread sandwiches before the
puzzling resumes… and it is good.
The Millers head off to the opera with the Zoons and at a
somewhat sensible hour we head off to the airport with Ali riding shotgun and
providing navigational suggestions from Google – we end up retracing some of
our steps from the trip out and make it to the airport in plenty of time, so we
find a quiet corner, catch up on emails and enjoy a little more puzzling time.
Ryanair takes us back to Stansted a bit later than scheduled
but I’m back in my car just before midnight ready for the two-hour drive home…
the traffic is delightfully light and I‘m very glad I’ve had the forethought to
take the Monday off work…
It really was a truly remarkable weekend – something I was
reminded of when folks in the office asked me what I’d been up to over the
weekend – “Been to Umbria to visit some friends who bought a castle and a hotel
to house their puzzle collection” – that is never going to sound ordinary in
any conversation.
Thanks to Steve for getting us organised and playing
chauffeur and to Rox and George for being awesome hosts over the weekend…
I’ll be back…
