DanH's GCD 2005 Experience! - April 21st / April 22nd / April 23rd / April 24th

The German Open Championships, held in Gutersloh, was my first competition of this year, and a great chance to meet up, and catch up, with all my cubing friends. Please also check out the German Cube Day 2005 pictures in the Picture Gallery section of my site. For links to other media from the event, please see the end of the report :)

Thursday April 21st, 2005

Before travelling to Germany for the competition, I planned to arrive in Holland a couple of days before, and stay with one of my Dutch friends, Joel van Noort, at his University residence. Getting through the airport was pretty straightforward, although I must have looked a bit shifty carrying all those cubes as I was subjected to a "random" search. The flight was short, 45 minutes or so, and Joel was there on his roller skates, waiting for me in the arrivals area . Per Kristen Fredlund had also arrived at almost the same time as me, and Ron was there to pick him up, so I was able to briefly shake hands and meet again with them. But they had to go almost immediately, so Joel and I went to the Panorama restaurant in the airport to have a "nice cup of tea" ;) We solved some cubes, and soon after made our way on the train to Leiden Centraal train station, followed by a short bus journey to his University residence in Leiden.

Most of the evening was spent cubing of course, as we practiced furiously for the competition on Saturday :D Joel was in good shape, with averages of 5 well under 20 seconds every time. I was having quite a bad time however, and couldn't solve in under 20 seconds for most of the time, and I was starting to regret not having practiced an awful lot before the competition. Well, better late than never I guess! We cubed until it got dark, and then we cubed again under a small desk lamp (which ironically was pretty good practice for the conditions which were to come in the first evening of competiton. But more on that later). We also tried some team solves, and without a lot of practice we found our solving styles matched each other fairly well. I am now number 1 and 2 in the Unofficial World Records for team solving ;) (perhaps the only guy to hold a #1 AND #2 spot in the UWR for the same record? Maybe).

We then just spent the rest of the evening chatting and catching up, and ended up going to bed pretty late, even though we had to get up early the next morning, but lack of sleep was to be a theme throughout this whole weekend! There was just time for Joel to manually inflate his "self-inflating" bed mattress, and for me to lose a bet for 1 euro about Zbigniew Zborowski's best time at the European Champs 2004, and then we got some sleep.