Worlds Part Seven: Teamwork

[crystalcazzie]

          Part Seven: Teamwork

Saturday dawned bright and sunny, no trace of the hailstorm of the day before!

I ventured to the dome and was greeted by the geese.

Hello, friends!  

They were very excited to see me.

Until they realised I had no food for them.  Then I had to suffer their judgemental disappointment.  

The big screen lives!  

I'm glad they replaced it.  It's so nice being able to sit outside and still watch what's going on.

I met up with my teammates and we had a discussion about strategy.  

Untitled

Piece Treaty ready to head into the dome! 

One of the advantages about the teams round is that the boxes aren't hidden in bags, so you can go into the dome and have a look at what your choices are going to be before the round starts.

We all agreed that Garden Allotment was a definite.  I liked the Rockefeller Christmas one, but it didn't really lend itself to speed puzzling.  I was tempted by Disney Toy Shop as I have done the 500 piece version of that, but it was a bit too busy.  We decided to go for Gelini as our second puzzle.

We did Garden Allotment first.  Allison and I put it together while Irene and Lynn sorted and gave us the pieces we needed to work on next.  It worked really well, although it did feel a bit unfair on the two sorters.  But if we'd all been puzzling we'd have taken a lot longer.

We did Garden Allotment in 1:01:10, which wasn't bad.  Gelini was a bit harder and we all got rather frustrated with the fish towards the end!  We were also missing a piece but called time rather than searching for it.  

We did the second puzzle in 1:21:42, giving us a total of 2:22:52.  Such a shame we weren't 30 seconds quicker!  

We weren't anywhere close to qualifying, but we did complete both puzzles comfortably within the three hour time limit.  This means that I managed to complete every puzzle in all my rounds, which was my goal going into this.  

A successful team!  And we got a shout out on the commentary, which was lovely! 

Untitled

The finished Gelini.  Obviously I didn't stop to take a photo of Garden Allotment in the middle of our round!  

We're on the board!  I was really pleased about this cos in both my solo and pairs rounds the board took so long to update my name never appeared before it had to reset for the next round.    

We each took one of the four puzzles home.  I got to keep the Christmas one, which I really wanted.  

We also got a photo of ourselves by the sign after we'd finished.  

I had hoped maybe we'd all go for a drink together, but other two left immediately.  Lynn and I had a beer before she went to go and volunteer for another round.  I was joined by Abbie who told me about a Puzzle Marathon her cafe is having in Lytham at the end of November.  It sounded interesting but Lytham is quite a long way to go!

(Spoiler alert: I'm going!)

I also tried some Broken Eggs, which were very nice but I couldn't eat all of it!

Then it was time for the pairs final, which obviously I wasn't in, but I watched the start of and queued up to buy the puzzle.  Lynn sent a message asking if someone could pick a copy up for her so I said I would.  (Later on, when I gave it to her, she said she didn't want it and had deleted the message immediately.  I showed her that it was still there.)  

I watched the pairs final and the solo final on screens with some of the other UK people.  It was very exciting, a proper sporting event!  

That evening we had a scavenger hunt bar crawl, with clues as to each place we had to go to!  It was a lot of fun, although my low phone battery meant that I didn't want to be Googling stuff or looking at maps.  Fortunately I was with others who could.  

Making our way to the first place!

The first bar turned out to be tiny, so we went somewhere nearby to grab food before rejoining the crawl!

Pretty.

The next clue led to a place called Mordor!

Very cool!

I wish I could have relaxed more.  I was worried about my phone battery, and I had a bag of puzzles that I wished I'd dropped off in my room first but we didn't go in that direction.  

I also think the locals were a bit bemused about their rock bar being descended on by a group of jigsaw puzzlers who started playing Tiddlywinks in the corner!

We moved on to another bar and I was worrying even more about my phone and getting back to my hotel.  I chatted to a couple of ladies who were really nice, we talked about moving houses and jigsaws.  When they said they were going to head back, I said I'd walk with them cos their hotel was near mine.  

I felt a bit sad about giving up so early, but I saw from the group chat that the next bar they went to turned out to be closed and they went back to Mordor, so at least I didn't miss out on a new place!  

I ended up going to bed around 1:20am.  Very late for me!

And thus concludes Day Seven.  Next up, All Good Things Come to an End!