DanH's UK Puzzle Party Experience! - Day 1 / Day 1 (competition) / Day 2 (+ full competition results)

On Saturday 16th July 2005, some puzzlers in the UK decided to meet up and get to know each other for the first time. It was a really fun weekend, with lots of puzzles being solved, tricks and tips being exchanged, and a really great atmosphere. Please also check out the UK Puzzle Party pictures in the Picture Gallery section of my site.

Saturday July 16th, 2005

It was an early start for me, although not as early as it should have been! My train was scheduled to leave Norwich at 7am, so I had planned to get up at 5am so I would have plenty of time to get ready. Somehow I ended up waking at 6.30am! Not the best of starts, but an incredible rush by me and my girlfriend ensured I was still at the station by 6.55am (Thanks Lisa :P ). The train journey to London was pretty uneventful, the usual 2 hour slog along the backbone of the country to my destination. I then had to catch the tube train to London Paddington train station, which, in the light of recent events, was quite a nervy experience. I think it was the same for everyone, my laptop bag (which incidentally is full of puzzles, rather than a laptop) was the subject of more than a few suspicious glances. However I arrived safe and sound (and quite early) at London Paddington, and walked to our meeting place to find Sean Connolly eating a baguette :)

Not long after that we were joined by Paul Nixon, who I had exchanged e-mails with but never met before, so it was great to finally meet him! We were all a little early, and since Jasmine Lee (a cuber from Australia) would only have to embark on a short walk from her bedsit to the train station, we decided it would be a nice idea to find a cafe in the station to have a sit down and something to drink. As soon as we sat down, out came the puzzles, so there wasn't really a lot of time to drink the gargantuan mugs of tea and coffee which we had bought! Finally, we were joined by Jasmine, and her fiance Peter, who accompanied her to the station. It was almost time to leave by then, so we left our half drunk beverages at the table and set off to look for our train.

Fortunately we managed to find a table with 4 seats on the train, so we could all sit together, chat and of course cube! This time the train journey was a little more than 2 hours, but the time flew by as we discussed each others Rubik's Cube solving methods, looked at each others puzzles, and just generally chatted away the whole trip! As usual, all the cubers seemed a really great bunch of people, and we instantly bonded, as is usually the case at events like this! Jasmine and I are also really big Scrabble fans, and as she had a Scrabble game on her iPAQ (what doesn't she have?!) we also started up a series of games which would continue for the whole weekend. Jasmine's fiance Peter later texted Jasmine to ask her if we had travelled through some nice countryside on our way to Stroud, but none of us were sure, because we didn't really spend much time looking up and out of the window from our puzzles! Finally, we pulled into Stroud station, disembarked and were greeted by Duncan Dicks, who was wearing his "Speed Cuber" t-shirt.

Duncan's house was situated almost on top of a very steep hill, and as we trudged the 10-15 minute walk to his house from the station, some of the group realised that wearing thick jeans in the hot weather perhaps wasn't such a good idea after all! It took a while for the weary travellers to make it to the house, but finally we did it, and when we got there we set all our bags down in the dining room and met Duncan's wife Catharine, who was a great hostess. Duncan had put on a great spread for us to have for lunch, there were rolls, crisps, muffins, fruit, drinks... pretty much everything you would need really! We hungrily tucked into some food while we got out various puzzles, and I set up the StackMats in preparation for the friendly competition which we would have later on in the day. We were scheduled to begin the competition at 2pm, but since Matt Burns hadn't yet arrived, we decided to postpone it for a while, but it was soon clear that he wouldn't be able to make it, so we started the 3x3x3 handicap competition at about 2.15pm.

The competition was quite a nervy experience for some of the puzzlers, because they weren't used to the different conditions which even a friendly competition can put you under. We had had some practice on the StackMats before hand, and I had talked everyone through the rules of the competition, and the procedure which would be used to make it as close to official conditions as possible. For the 3x3x3 handicap event, we split up into 2 pairs (one judge and one solver per StackMat), and Duncan was the unfortunate odd one out, and had to wait for a little while, until one of the other pairs had finished their average of 5. I opened up the sealed envelope which contained the scrambles, and we were pretty much ready to go :) I was one of the first cubers to do their average of 5, and I was pretty relaxed, although probably not as focussed as I should have been, even organising a friendly competition is quite a distraction.

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