I grabbed a train down to London on Friday afternoon and met up with
Rich in the bar. Ali and Steve drove into town and then Ali carted us off to
Cluequest for a couple of escape rooms before dinner. We manage to save the
world from being mutated into sheep(!) in spite of some of us managing to
ignore massive big clues along the way and then we disarmed a post box…
excellent rooms at Cluequest - we’ve got one more to play there, but there’s
news that they may be getting a new room sometime next year, so hopefully
there’ll be a couple for us to play by the time DCD comes around again…
After putting the world to rights, we grabbed a pizza at a very trendy
place (you could tell by the fact that the rest of the clientele was about half
our age – and we had Rich with us remember!) where the pizza turned out much
better than we’d been dreading it might be from the descriptions on the menu.
After we’d refuelled we headed back to the hotel bar for a libation and some
banter. Rich disappeared off upstairs to drop something off in his room and
Steve and I spent about 15 minutes trying unsuccessfully to get served at the
bar - mainly because it had closed about half an hour earlier - turns out
Londoner’s don’t drink in hotels on a Friday evening - who knew?
Steve and I give up on waiting for Rich and head upstairs, only for the
lift to decide it’s overloaded - really rude given there’s literally only four
of us in the jolly thing!
We meet up in the lobby before the sparrows wake up and Rich amuses us
by telling us he’d been locked out of his room the night before - Liz had gone
to sleep and turned off her phone with the only key inside the room, and it
seems she’s not a light sleeper so it took half an hour of bashing on the door
to raise her…
At St Pancras there are a lot of people in Springbok rugby shirts
heading off the Rugby World Cup final in Paris… there aren’t many springbok
supporters on the train to Rotterdam. We amuse ourselves with some puzzles and
briefly with a Professor Puzzle escape room in a box - we get an extra hour’s
puzzling time because there’s a problem with a train ahead of us so we grind to
a halt for a while… Rich has brought snacks and there’s plenty of coffee and
puzzles so we don’t mind at all.
We navigate the Metro (a first for me) to find Louis in Voorburg and he
takes us through to the school so we can dump Steve’s stock and considerably
lighten his load. We swing via the hotel to collect Stefan and squash him into
the back seat between Rich and I and head off to Delft to find Rob’s new house…
we miss it on the first lap of Delft city centre but manage to spot it on the
second lap… we blame Rob’s directions, which in fairness are excellent as long
as you know what’s coming up next, e.g. turn before the building site… but you
only know it’s a building site once you’ve driven past it…
A couple of the guys are already drowning their sorrows in caffeine so
we join them… the puzzles come out, the helpful banter begins to flow and more
puzzlers arrive until we’re more or less filling Rob’s new lounge with laughter
and encouragement - and the odd bit of abuse.
We spend several hours playing with puzzles and catching up with folks
we haven’t seen for a while - the customary pizzas arrive and there’s a bit of
a lull in the noise levels as we feast, and then we’re back into full tilt
puzzling again.
Rob brings out
a shopping bag
full of what looks like bits of a dinosaur skeleton and in a fabulous bit of
misjudgement, he entrusts the assembly to Steve and Rich – who proceed to build
a franken-beetle-saurus which Steve then proudly displays on top of Rob’s
puzzle cabinet.
I decide to embarrass myself and have another go at solving Ali’s
exchange puzzle from Jerusalem -YES - I’ve been trying to solve it for three
months now… and finally get the inspiration to do the right thing and it turns
out I am an eedjit and Ali has beaten me thoroughly! Given that I’m already
getting so much grief for the fact that I’m spending literally three months
longer solving these puzzles than the rest of the assembled rabble, I pick up
Rob’s copy of Picolock expecting to add another few hours to my unsuccessful
solving time… but some helpful comments on some of the things that I’m randomly
verbalizing while I’m not solving it lead me to reassess a few
assumptions I hadn’t realized I’d made and soon I’m actually making some
progress on that one… and about ten minutes later it’s also solved and I’m
ready to sing Boaz’s praises for a long time…
I go three for three by picking up Peter’s exchange puzzle and literally
solving it in seconds… well, OK, three months and some seconds…
Somewhere around midnight we figure we better head back to Voorburg and
check into our hotel - we find the night manager and get our rooms and collapse
until the next morning…
Breakfast is excellent and Louis takes a car-full of puzzlers back to
the school for the main event.
There are already piles of puzzlers there so Steve sets out his stall
while the rest of us set about chatting to friends and shopping furiously, or
indeed some combination of the two.
I spend a while chatting to Jan Willem and spot some Rocky Chiaro
puzzles on his table and end up purchasing a few of the ornate “things” that
Jan Willem has decided to let go - I promise to give them a good home. Wil has
his usual long array of crates of treasure - where else are you going to find
most of the Roger D puzzles stacked up next to some collectible Karakuri boxes
and a Pachinko box for sale? Marcel had a huge selection of stuff from the
latest Hanayamas through to several of his own original chess pieces and some
Sandfield and Trevor Wood treasures…
Tony Fisher has brought a few throughly bonkers creations over for our enjoyment - I have never seen a skewb that large or indeed dinosaur eggs like that...(fact!).
The usual excellent spread at lunchtime filled us all up.
Jack had a huge selection of petite puzzles and I held back from his
table until much later in the day, before I hoovered up a bunch of his tray
puzzles and a few other little bits and pieces that make excellent puzzling
gifts.
Leo was auctioning off some rather collectible items in an actual
real-world silent auction which was really amusing to watch. Grown men
scribbling on post-it notes and then watching everyone else like a hawk… and
the real-life sniping at the end of the auction that was almost entirely undone
when Leo began closing out the auction three minutes before the appointed time,
much to the consternation of the snipers in the audience. Peace did prevail and
Steve bought an expensive jam jar with some sand and a few marbles in it and I
bought an expensive pair of scissors with some string attached - and we were
both delighted.
The afternoon lectures included some insights into 2*2 Rubik’s cubing at
world championship level from someone who does (that was way more fascinating
than I thought I’d find it!), an update from George and Rox on the World Puzzle
Centre (I suspect they’ve spelt it wrong!) and Rob gave us a canter through a
selection of the exchange puzzles from Jerusalem this year… well, the ones he
won’t be covering in the upcoming CFF article anyway…
After we’d reset the hall for the school lunch, a bunch of us headed off
to a nearby Chinese joint where we duly caused havoc - there were fourteen of
us… we had fun, and the buffet survived the onslaught, just…
After dinner Louis ferried Chris to the station and our baggage back to
the hotel where Steve and I found him about twenty minutes later… some of the
others who were walking back with us took a more scenic route and got to the
hotel about half an hour later…
Four of us ended up in the bar playing with puzzles - I know, weird, eh?
Next morning Steve and I ended up having a leisurely breakfast while
Rich topped up his beauty sleep (and I’m not going to comment on whether or not
he needed it) before Steve headed off on a bit of a wander and I headed off to
the room to type up my thoughts before I forgot the more important stories of
the weekend.
 |
...fashionable gentlemen meet-up
|
We checked out at the bell and then navigated the public transport
system back to Rotterdam to find some lunch and our Eurostar back to St
Pancras… we found a great burger joint just outside the station and then headed
across at the appointed time, where we found a slightly tetchy crowd of folks
outside the Eurostar check-in area – it seems that the high-speed trains
weren’t running through Rotterdam, as such, there was no Eurostar to catch. The
advice was to make our way to Brussels where the staff would put us on a train,
promise! The next three hours turned into a mini-Race-Around-The-World as we
took four trains to get ourselves to Brussels, where the friendly staff did
indeed put us on a train from Brussels to London as there was still no service
north of Brussels…
We ended up with a table to play with our puzzles and made our way
through the Exit the Game Lord of the Rings adventure… to the occasional
amusement of a rather serious fellow traveller on our table.
We may have gotten into St Pancras about three hours later than
anticipated, but it was still an awesome puzzling weekend!
