Dutch Cube Day 2017

An early morning alarm rouses me from blissful nothingness at the start of a weekend late in October – this must be the sign that I’ve been waiting for: DCD weekend!

The traffic is light (everyone’s still asleep!) and the queues are short at the airport so I have plenty of time to pick up essential gifts for folks I’ll be seeing, a long cup of coffee and a failed attempt at picking up a new phone a bit cheaper in duty-free. (No, I can’t rock a rose-gold phone… I want a black one… they don’t one have in stock).  KLM and Storm Brian make for a wonderfully exciting take-off and just over an hour later I’m greeting Louis outside Schiphol Arrivals. The trains behave and we get to Rob’s place just after midday, as planned, where we find wee-Steve puzzling quietly at Rob’s dining room table. Rob tops us up with caffeine and we pull out the puzzles…

I’ve taken along an evil packing puzzle by David Goodman which several people try over the course of the weekend, and while Louis finds a (new to me) rather tight solution, nobody manages to crack the “right one” – as discovered by Ali at the last MPP.  I also have a couple of burrs that I need help with, and both of them end up getting solved over the weekend, although we end up having a lot of fun with Lucida: several people fiddled around with it before I took a turn, and in the process of trying to take the pieces apart, I mistakenly end up solving it. Realising my obvious error, Rob then helps out by taking them apart again and for the next few hours we fail at reassembly, until Louis eventually takes pity on us and re-solves it… at which point I hide it in my rucksack lest Rob “helps” me again.

During the course of the afternoon Wil and Sveta, Taus and Isabel, Goetz and Frans arrive… Rob keeps the snacks eternally topped up to keep puzzlers from flagging, and the banter and merriment flow in equal proportions.

Somewhere around early evening Rob orders a large pile of pizzas for dinner so we take pity on him and help him out by polishing off most of them for him. We puzzle for a bit more until folks start feeling the need to check into the hotel and leave Rob in peace and quiet – knowing he still has to prepare his slides for his traditional presentation at DCD covering this year’s IPP exchange puzzles. (There’s apparently a bit of a theme here as Taus hasn’t prepared his slides either and manages to get them done in the early hours of Sunday morning…)

Back at the hotel we get checked in and head down to the bar, finding some random Luxem-burgers and a few more German puzzlers, so we set up a table, grab a few drinks and pull up a few puzzles to solve.

The stand-out favourite puzzle that I’ve taken along for the weekend turns out to be a lovely little wooden number from Takeyuki Endo. It’s basically four nesting pieces with couple of constraints in the form of dowels and grooves between a few of the pieces… everyone can immediately see that the goal is to put the smallest piece into the centre and close up the other pieces into a cube around it… except that a few minutes proves this to be totally impossible. Taus managed to solve it in a matter of minutes, Louis spent considerably longer on it before he solved it, and everyone else (and there were several challengers!) failed to solve it, with everyone wanting to know where it came from (Torito) and how I’d managed to get hold of it (because they won’t ship internationally)… it really is a brilliant little puzzle that relies on one beautiful “A-Ha!” moment… I predict that if a puzzle re-seller who shipped internationally were to stock them (assuming Endo-san has any more copies available) they would be an instant hit!

Somewhere around midnight we fade for the night – and crash… I get a rather pleasant full night’s sleep not having to get up at 3am to let the puppy out!  A combination of a rather dreich day, a late night and not setting an alarm sees Louis and I wake up at 8am… which was when we told wee-Steve we’d meet him for breakfast – Oops… we get down to breakfast not much after eight.. ish…

We check out in time to grab a lift to the hall with Goetz, register and enter the annual DCD wonderland where the speed-cubers are frantically solving down one end of the hall and the rest is given over to tables groaning under loads of puzzles their current owners are trying to offload - it’s a sight I’ll never grow tired of.

Jack has hinted at some of the wonders that he’ll have for sale a few days before in a post on FaceBook and I’m keen to snag at least one item from him, so as he starts setting out his stall I descend on him and insist on giving him some cash… yet again I tell him his prices are embarrassingly good – I’m sure he’d sell just as many puzzles at twice the price… I grab a tiny copy of Coffin’s Cruiser and a monster copy of Coffin’s cardboard burr in wood – very chuffed with that one!

Much later on, when people have begun to leave, I swing back via Jack’s table to pick up some copies of his “Make a House” and Cruiser as gifts for puzzlers.

Michel has a wonderful array of eBay finds for sale, including an incredibly well-preserved Devil’s Knot, complete with a well-worn instruction sheet that he reckons is probably more than 8 years old… I resist the urge and later on he tells me that it found a delighted new owner.

Marcel has an enormous variety of puzzles available and Hendrik seems to have brought a fair chunk of the latest PuzzleShop.de stock for sale. I pick up a copy of Siebenstein’s Bell puzzle – later described quite accurately by Goetz as a poor man’s Panex – and a little cube fidget spinner for a fiver. A little while later I accost Oliver (he of twisty-sticker-fame) and ask if he has any stickers for the fidget spinner – OF COURSE! And his partner duly sorts me out with a set for next to nothing… at last a cube I can actually scramble and solve with virtually no effort whatsoever!

As per normal I end up spending an inordinate amount of time trawling through the piles of crates on Wil’s table, finding some wonderful little treasures ranging from a nice large Jan Sturm copy of the standard handcuffs disentanglement puzzle through to some beautiful wooden creations, including a Karakuri Rose that I’ve been looking out for for a while. 

NKC provides the usual huge spread for lunch and after lunch Joop rounds us up for the lectures… so we can see if Rob and Taus have finished their slides in time – Spoiler: they have.

Taus presents a really interesting mathematical (yes, really, those two words, together!) analysis of a set of Polarium-style puzzles, introducing tools for analysing different problems and then positing various interesting questions on solvability and indeed proving some puzzles have no solution. The audience got involved with suggestions and ideas for further analysis. 

Chris gave an amusing presentation on ambigrams and other visual puns – he has great timing in his presentation, letting the audience get there themselves rather than taking their fun away from them. Rob ended things off with his annual canter though the IPP37 exchange puzzles.

After the lectures we caught the last few rounds of the cubing competition – great to see Mats Valk in action – in between some last minute shopping for puzzles – just in case we’d missed anything super-special!

When all was said and done, the most challenging packing puzzle of the day commenced: getting all the puzzles into the case before we headed out to the station… just in time to catch the rain – which didn’t manage to put a dampener on a terrific weekend… must try and do it again next year. 

DCD 2016

What a fantastic weekend!

It started for me with a rather rude alarm waking me at 3:05am on the Saturday morning (I’d given myself 5 minutes extra… it didn’t really make things all right!). Shortly before 5am I was sitting in an airport coffee shop moaning about my fate on social media – I won’t bore you with all of the sympathy I received here (mainly because there was none!) but after a leisurely cup of coffee I was heading cross-country at about 35,000 feet (best achieved in an aircraft, in case you were wondering). It always amuses me in aircraft how people stand up as soon as they can and then have to wait 10 or 20 minutes while airbridges are connected before they can actually go anywhere… and then they amble gently down the concourse like this is the morning stroll they’ve come here for… I digress – this is supposed to be a puzzle blog… sort of…

…as I walked out of baggage reclaim and customs I spotted Louis walking in my general direction, and knowing that the others wouldn’t be arriving from London for at least half an hour, we sat down for a coffee and a general catch up on respective families, work, etc. At the appointed hour we wandered down to the appropriate arrivals exit to wait for the London crowd… who seemed to take quite a while – we knew we were at the right exit because we knew they were arriving at 9:05 from London… and yet.  After waiting a little longer, we headed back up to the next exit, with a similar lack of results… just after we’d headed back to the “right” exit, my phone rang and it was Ali.  While I’m talking to him trying to work out where he is, I spot wee Steve who recognises us and waves – at which point Ali spots Steve and then the two of us… which confuses me a little because wee Steve was supposed to be travelling with Ali and big Steve… we set that aside for a while and regroup at another coffee shop to kill some time.

While we’re enjoying a calm coffee we establish that the Steves and Ali have indeed all travelled from London, and some of them even travelled on the same plane (they moaned like drains about having to sit next to some big bloke that pretty much pinned them into their seats the entire flight and made it almost impossible to enjoy the complimentary French pastries being served on-board (not all of that last sentence is true… it is left in as an exercise for the interested reader to work out which bits weren’t)). Wee Steve, having been told when the others were flying, booked himself similar arrangements, and indeed, if he hadn’t chosen a different airline and a different airport to leave from, he might have been on the same flight as big Steve and Ali… but what matters in the end is that we found one another and more importantly, I had a good story for my blog...

We spent an hour or two chatting and sipping coffees before heading out to Rijswijk where Rob had offered anyone arriving early some lunch…so we got there very early! So early in fact that we ended up loitering outside the library for a while discussing the architecture, and the local take-away joints.  We are, after all, a rather diverse bunch… once we’d established that Rob was home, we headed up and made ourselves at home… puzzles came out and then got cleared away pretty smartly to make way for lunch – for there was a lot of it.  Laurie arrived as we were setting it all up and we enjoyed a wonderful spread of all things good for lunch…even better than the previous year’s Subways – which were pretty darn nice!

After the lunch things had been packed away, puzzlers began drifting in and we pretty soon had a rather entanglement of puzzlers, although not that many that we’d creating a packing puzzle of puzzlers.

Big Steve and I found a big box of Altekruse-style pieces on a side table that we felt the need to assemble so we asked Rob what puzzle it was… he was very helpful and told us he’d bought it in pieces and had no idea what it was as he’d never seen it assembled. Steve decided to apply his mathematical mind to the problem and determined that there were 36 pieces in the box, quickly leaping to the conclusion that it was a 36-piece puzzle, possibly an Altekruse. Big Steve knows puzzles! 

For what felt like the next few hours we sat on the floor with a tiny fold up table between us trying to work out how to assemble a large Altekruse… Rob had a similar one which would have been useful, only we couldn’t work out how to get that one apart, so we were pretty much on our own… well, I say we were on our own, but in fact we were surrounded by helpful friends all yelling out really helpful suggestions (NO I WILL NOT TRY SPINNING IT!)

We had several false starts, seemingly making progress only to decide that we’d put something in the wrong way around quite early on in the process and having to dismantle everything. Once we’d got the basic structure going more or less right, we found the handy push-pull feature would work and we’d be able to slide another layer into place… there was however a downside in that the process would dump a layer of pieces out the bottom if you didn’t remember to turn gravity off before performing the slide… so we spent a while adding a layer at the top while a layer fell out of the bottom, with Steve eventually getting quite exasperated and asking me why I was doing that… reducing me to tears of laughter for quite a while as we discussed whether it was my fault for sliding the pieces or his for not turning gravity off… I haven’t laughed that much in ages… the tears were literally rolling… and then a short while later we actually managed to get the last pieces in place and declared victory – took a pic or two and then Rob took it away from us lest we considered reducing it back to a pile of sticks again…

I’m not sure about Steve, but I suspect that I used up all of my puzzle-solving mojo (there wasn’t a lot to start with, mind) on that damn Altekruse because I’m almost certain I didn’t solve anything else that day.

By the time we’d finished that puzzle, Rob’s was looking pretty packed with puzzlers: Taus and Isabel had arrived from Denmark, Frans, Wil & Sveta, Rik, Maarten and Chris had assembled from sundry Dutch cities, Nigel arrived from Spain and Goetz and Hussein arrived from Germany…not bad for a lounge-ful of puzzlers! (And I’ve probably forgotten someone from somewhere even more exotic!) 

Sometime around early evening a bunch of us headed toward the hotel to check in and get some dinner…we assembled in the bar (it’s always the bar, with puzzlers…) and when there were about ten of us we enquired about the possibility of a table for dinner – this apparently scared them a little and they asked us to give them half an hour as they were a little busy. So we did, and we drank and puzzled and generally abused one another (figuratively, damnit!)… we eventually sat down for dinner – which was a rather drawn-out affair where we were worried for a while that they’d forgotten that we still needed to order, then forgotten to bring us our food, and then forgotten to bring some of us our main courses… but in the end the food was great and worth waiting for, and we had plenty of chatter and puzzling and fiddling with various little challenges… before settling up with a wonderful combination of cash and vouchers they’d insisted on giving us when we checked in…turning it into a really reasonable meal (for those of us staying in the hotel – and the Danes who kept telling us how cheap eating out in The Hague really is!).

I crashed at about 10 o’clock (see opening line, and I did not take a nap on Rob’s couch like some cough-wee-Steve-cough – people) , with the rest of them playing away in the bar until at least midnight…

We’d agreed to meet at around 8am for breakfast and Louis and I were fashionably late…so we joined big Steve and Ali for breakfast. Wee Steve was somewhat more than fashionably late – I assumed his wooden watch hadn’t coped well with the combination of the humidity and the change-over to winter time. Or it was his phone that hadn’t coped well with one or both of those…?

By 9am we were all wandering down the familiar road in the crisp, sunny morning air to Sint Maarten’s College for DCD proper. In return for a little cash we're loaned a name tag and given a couple of little souvenirs: a puzzle and a customised set of DCD cube stickers (I’m going to have to buy a cube now, aren’t I?).

We headed straight over to Strijbos corner to dump our stuff and somehow I got sucked into trawling through crates and crates of treasures – I must have spent ages combing through a variety of boxes finding all manner of unexpected treasure and making piles of “definitely”, “hopefully” and “probably not” before pulling out my calculator and shifting some treasures from left to right until I was merely broke and not thoroughly in debt!

Having largely exhausted my spending money for the day, I handed over my cash to Wil and wandered off in search of puzzlers to chat to…

Jack had brought me a little more Power for my Tower and then promptly gave me a beautiful copy of his CFF burr – a burr with the letters C, F and F on the faces designed as an entrant for the CFF 100^th issue giveaway. No good deed should go unpunished, so I gave him a copy of my IPP36 exchange, tipping the pieces into his trusting hands as I always do…briefly the shoe was on the other foot and I was able to give him a little challenge to amuse him after all the joy his craftsmanship and designs have given me over the past few years.

Michel tried to flog me an enormous Arjeu copy of the Atom puzzle – a one foot ball-of-shiny-balls [he’d recently found two of them!] when I gave him the puzzle I’d brought over from the UK for him … and a copy of Phive Pack, in bits, of course.

Christoph Lohe had produced laser-cut acrylic versions of seven of his symmetry puzzles so I joined the queue to collect a set of them, knowing that I’m almost certainly never going to solve them – but it’s good to have a few puzzles in the cabinet to humble you… although in my case those ones might be gaining the upper hand among the collection!

Tony Fisher had made the trip across the channel with a few bits of his Guinness World Record twisty cube and they are humbling to see up close…seeing Tony constantly pushing the boat out further and further and doing more and more spectacular things is just brilliant!

Lunch was provided in great quantities as usual and I suspect there were several trays of ham and cheese rolls left over at the end of the day…

After lunch there were three lectures:

• Derk introduced us to the Dutch mathematical magazine Pythagoras aimed at schoolchildren (perfectly pitched for us puzzlers!) introducing us to a number of their puzzles and on-going themed articles – with plenty of audience interaction;
• Chris demonstrated an interesting feat with a 4*4 sheet of paper that when folded any which way and cut always produced the same  sum of digits facing upwards before challenging the audience to work out why it worked… cue fantastic discussion about chequer boards and origami cranes; and
• Rob gave a whistle-stop tour through a number of the IPP36 exchange puzzles, describing several of them accurately!

All the while there was a speed-cubing competition happening in the same hall… with the usual suspects solving twisty puzzles really fast – sometimes without blindfolds on! Some seriously impressive skillz on display!

When things started winding down, there was one last whizz around the sales tables to make sure that we hadn’t missed anything important before heading back to the station for our trains to Schipol, where Ali, the Steves and I managed to meet up on the far side for burgers of various descriptions before flying back to Brum and London (several flavours!)

What a fantastic weekend!

DCD 2014

Last weekend saw the latest annual pilgrimage to the Dutch Cube Day with puzzlers from around the world (including Hong Kong, Russia and a ton of folks from Europe) descending on a school in The Hague for a day’s puzzling, bartering and buying. Of course it wouldn’t be a proper DCD weekend without a couple of additional activities, so we ended up adding a pair of RPP’s to DCD-proper and it turned into one helluva weekend.

Steve and I flew over from the UK on the Saturday morning and met up with Louis at Schipol. We grabbed the train through to Rijswijk where we had a quick bite to eat before heading over to Rob Hegge’s place for our now-traditional, pre-DCD, Rob’s Puzzle Party. Rob had laid on piles of cake and snacks and cleared his dining room table for us to play on… and soon after we arrived, we had some puzzles out and spread across the table. Over the course of the afternoon our ranks swelled with puzzlers old and new – it was great to actually meet Philipp from Germany after ‘meeting’ him online on puzzle forums and FaceBook.

Philipp had brought along a number of his recent impossible bottle creations as well as his wonderfully named REtrOMAZE handmade in wood. This puzzle is quite an achievement as it’s a fully functioning dynamic puzzle where the dynamic bit operates perpendicularly to the normal plane…very clever and beautifully made.[UPDATE: a mate of Philipp's made the core...]

I’d taken a couple of Yoshi Kotani’s little acrylic cube packing puzzles along and several folks had a bash at them with most people really enjoying the ones with a bit of a twist. One of the puzzlers had a bit of misfortune when one of the more fragile pieces broke while he was packing them into the box – something that Laurie immediately picked up on and for the rest of the afternoon whenever anyone was having trouble with a  solve, Laurie would helpfully ask if they’d considered the Hendrik-method yet?

I spent a while playing with some of Rob’s vast collection of trick bolts… one of which had me particularly flummoxed – Ethel duly picked it up after I’d given up on it and had it opened in minutes.

At one point Wil plied me with a couple of disentanglement puzzles by Jan Sturm – they all looked vaguely similar to a standard set of bent nails that I bought from Sloyd a little while back… but each had a small quirk or two that made the solutions rather different. Somehow I managed to work my way through them all much to Wil’s (and my!) surprise – although the next day he got his own back when he gave me one of them to try again and I singularly failed to separate the nails, so I ended up buying a set from him to torment myself further at home…and then duly solved them in 10 minutes in the peace and quiet of my study!

Our ranks swelled progressively during the afternoon until Rik arrived to take us all across to his place for dinner and some more puzzling – at Rik’s Puzzle Party, which also happened to be in Rijswijk. :-)

We ordered a massive pile of pizzas for dinner and while we waited for the pizzas, Rik began by giving us the guided tour of his puzzle collection spread across the three floors of his home. With glass cabinets full of puzzles virtually everywhere you looked, the tour took quite a while.

Pride of place in a number of the cabinets were Rik’s collection of food-related puzzles – from Karakuri cakes and McDaniel Petit Fours downstairs to the colourful 3D assemblies and sliding puzzles upstairs – all based on sweets or food items – definitely one of the most unusual specialisms I’ve encountered.

The main puzzle room is an absolute Aladdin’s Cave of goodies, with custom-made shelving (all perfectly puzzle-sized) covering most of the walls. It’s staggering to see how many puzzles fit into the shelves… and then there are the drawers below the shelves… Rik’s given a lot of thought to the shelves and their configurability and the result is an enviably efficient puzzle storage system that not only displays them beautifully, but allows direct access to virtually all of the puzzles – something that I had to sacrifice a while back with my somewhat less efficient puzzle cabinets.

Dinner was gratefully consumed by a bunch of hungry puzzlers before we all lapsed back into playing with Rik’s collection, and one or two puzzles of our own that we’d brought along.

The puzzling came to a natural end at around 10pm when we headed back to our hotels/hostels for the night. Once Louis and I had checked into the hotel we headed down to Wil’s room so that I could collect a couple of puzzles I’d ordered. As luck would have it Wil had a few unusual puzzles that required solving or needed playing with so we ended up spending a couple of hours playing with some rather lovely puzzles – some more successfully than others - before finally giving up at about midnight and heading off to grab some sleep.

We woke up at about 8am in spite of setting an alarm for 7:30 … my excuse was that I’d started the day in England, lost an hour travelling to Holland, gained an hour overnight as the clocks changed and somehow the iPhone had gotten confused with what the time really was… we made it down to breakfast before everyone else had left and then wandered across to St Maarten’s ,via an ATM, for DCD-proper.

After collecting our name badges from last year (and spotting Nigel’s there and wondering if he might turn up unexpectedly) and paying our entrance fees, we were all given a free gift of a little acrylic board burr courtesy of Peter Knoppers – the NKC-guys always manage to come up with something small to give to everyone who turns up as a gift – a really nice touch.

By the time we arrived things were already pretty much in full swing with most tables already groaning under the load of puzzles for sale. We found a spot to stow our suitcases and set about saying hello to everyone – it’s always such a pleasure meeting up with puzzling friends you haven’t seen for a few months or for the whole year.

My first port of call on the day was Jack Krijnen who’d brought along a copy of Power Tower for me. Power Tower was his joint design with Goh Pit Khiam that they’d entered in this year’s IPP Design Competition. Since then they’ve tweaked the design a little … actually they’ve tweaked the design A LOT! The competition version had two pairs of interacting sliders, this version has up to three pairs, with enough sliders to set up the puzzle as either binary, ternary, or ANY COMBINATION of the two! There’s also a handy blocking piece that allows you to restrict the number of sliders in the puzzle – so you can have a really confusing mixture of pieces without having to commit to a massively high move number… ideal! I’m well-impressed with that one and looking forward to getting some time to “experiment” with it, i.e. play!

Next up was a quick visit to Bernhard’s table to pick up some puzzles for a couple of my Midlands mates and then across to Michel’s table to grab a copy of the plus-size Crown and Cross – the super-sized version of Goetz’s exchange puzzle earlier this year that he and Robrecht Louage had collaborated on.

With the pre-ordained stuff out of the way I was free to spend the rest of the day wandering, chatting, playing and even buying the occasional puzzle as well…

It was great to meet Splinter (he of Burgh Lock and Swing Lock-fame) who had come along to his first DCD with several examples of his puzzle locks and his Mazerolls for folks to play with and purchase. Several times during the course of the day I came across Splinter among a knot of puzzlers trying to solve one of his puzzles, and seeing the rather large grin on his face while their confusion grew, I suspect that he’ll be back again and we’ll be seeing more puzzles from him in the future.

Tony Fisher kindly autographed a puzzle for me while I told him he was crazy for putting a Petaminx into a glass bowl with a mouth that’s just way too small to allow it in. I didn’t ask how long it took him, but given that just assembling and stickering those things usually takes days, it must have required a significant investment in terms of time. He also had a few copies if his wooden replica Rubik’s cube prototypes for sale at a rather reasonable price and despite not being much of a twisty puzzle fan I found it hard to resist the urge to buy one – and suspect I’m going to have to drop him a note and ask if there are any left in due course. His attention to detail on these replicas is simply stunning – right down to the markings and stickers in the pictures of the prototypes. His huge handmade 4*4*4 cube drew many an admiring look and almost as many offers to scramble it for him … all politely declined, thankfully.

Alfons Eyckmans had a table piled with his wonderful burrs, all beautifully made with some rather lovely exotic woods. He had a steady stream of folks chatting about his creations throughout the day and I watched him effortlessly demonstrating a number of his designs while chatting away – quite impressive!

Goetz was wandering around with a rucksack full of goodies and spent a while demonstrating Namick Salakov’s Design Competition entry from this year Complementary P-arity. It just looks plain intimidating! Made up of several plates and sliders at right angles to one another, they work in different bases, and keeping track of where they go and how, is pretty challenging…although Goetz was doing a pretty effortless job of demonstrating them to anyone who was interested. He is the king of n-ary puzzles though…

Marcel had a huge table full of goodies, including some rather desirable ones – and if I hadn’t already spent more than I should have I may well have added an original Gillen bottle to my collection…

Wil had probably the biggest spread available for sale on the day with several tables covered in plastic crates full of puzzles. His car must have provided a serious packing puzzle to enable him and Chris to actually be able to get into it and drive more or less safely between Venlo and Voorburg. I ended up spending quite a while at Wil’s table idly fiddling with a number of puzzles while chatting with other punters.

Lunch was up to the usual DCD-standard with piles of filled rolls and hot soup available in seemingly endless quantities… along with the tea and coffee with tarts and biscuits that were on offer the entire day. The NKC guys understand the need to keep puzzlers well-fed!

The afternoon saw some great talks from some interesting puzzlers. Rox gave us a talk on puzzling in China, introducing us to a number of the faces behind the brand-names we all recognised and talking about her regular “Boys and Toys” gatherings. Peter gave a rather humorous talk about his quest to design a cubic board burr to use as an exchange puzzle at IPP and G4G (also the DCD 2014 gift) – he really did a great job of building up to his inevitable punchlines that hinged around things being impossible. Tom introduced his open-source software for packing pieces for 3D printing orders and amused us with some examples of just how whacky Shapeways current pricing model is. Rob closed off the session with a canter through this year’s IPP exchange puzzles.

After the talks there was time to watch the final round of the speed-cubing contest (gawd those guys are good!) and do a final lap around the various tables of goodies for sale…

Just before 5pm four of us wandered briskly back toward the station to catch the train through to Schipol where Steve and I grabbed a bite to eat before heading our separate ways back home… another altogether brilliant DCD weekend. 

[Sorry about the dearth of decent pics - my travel camera and I are having a disagreement!]