iguana | December 2017

In December I did two escape rooms (plus one in a box), walked through Exeter's underground passages, stacked a lot of logs, and went swimming in the sea on Christmas Day.

Escape Rooms

My family went to the Bacterium room at Mission Escape Exeter, since I'd already done the Maioc Crisis room with the usual suspects in Novemer. Bacterium was clearly the older of the two rooms since it lacked the theming and diversity of mechanisms compared to Maioc. The student working that day also hadn't memorised his spiel and started the clock before we'd had a chance to put away our coats; rather amateur hour. However, as my family's first escape room, they all enjoyed it and everyone got to solve at least one puzzle. We took one clue, for the last puzzle, and made it out with about fifteen minutes remaining.

Matt, Pete, Tim, Emily and I also did the second game at Time Run, which wasn't actually an escape room, but shared many of the themes with their other one. The idea was to liberate several objects in each of a series of rooms, against a timer in each room. This was rather cool -- a lot of the time you could see the artefact and had to figure out how to get to it. Once again the atmosphere was outstanding, and the actor introducing the game to us was convincing and genuinely funny.

We beat the game with a higher than average score -- my only criticism of this format of game is that we knew we had some artefacts left "un-escaped" so even with the scoring system we felt like we hadn't completed it. That said, the puzzles ranged in difficulty from fairly trivial to truly fiendish, and from short acts of deduction to agonising (in a good way) games of patience, which is something the format definitely enabled. Plus we got to take a Time Run bauble from their Christmas tree which was a nice touch!

Honorary mention to Exit: The Game, a disposable tabletop game with an escape room scenario. For what is essentially a selection of back-of-newspaper-style pen-and-paper games, it did a good job at keeping us entertained for an hour.

Exeter's Underground Passages

For my birthday my family took me to Exeter's Underground Passages, which are 14th Century passages originally dug as access tunnels to run water pipes through. It was a good little tour of some of the older and newer sections, with some history of Exeter thrown in which was interesting.

Budleigh Christmas Day Swim

Emily, her mum, and I got up relatively early on Christmas Day to drive over to my parents in Budleigh Salterton to do the annual Christmas Day Swim there.

It was the choppiest I've seen the Jurassic Coast, at least for the last several Christmas mornings, but I'd resolved to actually go in the water this year, and Emily had equipped me with some home-made reindeer antlers for the occasion. I also wore my backup pair of glasses, having learned my lesson in the Azores last year. (There weren't any eagles around either but Emily also wore spares.)

Charge! That wave is as big as it looks.

Bam! I think that was the wave that knocked me to my knees. Evidently the guy with the head camera next to me has some kind of super-human standing up ability.

I didn't actually get to the point where I could swim -- it really wasn't easy for anybody to get past the wall of waves coming in, though some managed it. Emily unfortunately did lose her spare glasses (and Santa hat) -- the ones that had survived Yakushima -- but still enjoyed it. I have a lovely bruise on my left knee from being thrown to the floor of pebbles but am otherwise fine!

Naturally the next day the sun was out and the sea was as calm as could be. But that almost sounds too pleasant!

Thanks to my brother for taking these photos of the swim!