Ice skating and Escape Hunt

Man, Fremantle is awesome. Last weekend we went ice skating at the outdoor rink set up at the Esplanade, and this Friday we went and did the Escape Hunt room escape. Any opportunity to go to Fremantle really.

I really appreciate ice skating outside in Perth as a feat of engineering, even if it is "winter".


It even snowed! Well... foamed.




I decided that I don't like roasted chestnuts, what's with that weird inner skin? Yuck.


Dinner at Little Creatures is always a winner, even though we order way too many fries.


The Escape Hunt room escape was so much fun! I'd heard a lot of great things about this, and we finally ended up going with a big group from work. We did the "Poisoning at the Cafe" themed room escape, with two teams split across identical rooms.



The actual escape was a big whirlwind of excitement, it went so fast! It involved solving a bunch of puzzles that gave codes for combination locks. Spoiler alert if anyone wants to do this particular one, stop reading here. For example, of the puzzles was a set of 9 beer bottles sitting on 3 shelves in a 3x3 arrangement, with a perspex "window" in front of them where bottle caps were stuck onto the perspex in front of each bottle. We noticed that the caps didn't match the beers, so we reshuffled them and then were able to use a black light (found in a locked case opened by another puzzle) to read a code on the bottles which were now in the correct order to open another set of locks.



Another example was a vertical wooden maze in a box with a clear plastic front. We could see there was a key sitting on one of the maze bits, and were certain that we needed a magnet to coax it around the maze and out through a hole on the other side. At this point I thought everything could potentially be a magnet and dutifully began holding up everything to the maze (including a metal paper bin and a cricket bat). Turns out the magnet was in another case that we later opened.

   

We ended up needing one clue from the staff (you're allowed to ask for clues via a walkie talkie) for the last puzzle which we really shouldn't have used. Based on the experience of someone else in the room, you didn't want to get stuck for too long at the risk of not being able to complete the room in time, so we set ourselves a time limit for this puzzle then used the walkie talkie. In hindsight we should have asked if it was the last puzzle before we got the clue, because we almost had it correct and would have definitely solved it in the remaining 20minutes that we had.

So our team won by 17minutes, but the other team didn't use a clue, so in my opinion they technically won!



I really recommend this, it's a great thing to do before going out to dinner (which we did, at our favourite Indian place, Maya).

Also, I took my first shift on Flying High last week!