The last Sunday of WBC tends to be a fairly quiet day. There are only 3 games with open heats with 16 other games having their finals in the morning. Pounder and I don't take Monday off work so if we're going to get home at any reasonable hour to sleep for work we need to leave before they even take place. Or at least we should, anyway. Puerto Rico holds both the semis and finals on Sunday morning and for 2 of the last 3 years one of us made the finals. This has lead to a semi-joking ban from playing Puerto Rico since we probably don't get to leave until 2 in the afternoon if we do make it to the finals.
This year there was a new wrench in the works... No functioning car. Were we going to have to spend an extra night? Cab to Philly and fly home? Who knows! I briefly considered trying to wake up early to play Transamerica but that seemed a little mean to Pounder who had to wake up extra early to try to get the car fixed. Better to sleep in to make sure I could be awake on the ride home. And I'm terrible at Transamerica anyway.
We checked out of the room and gave our suitcases to the front desk for safe keeping while we waited for news on the car. Pounder kept calling to harass the garage about it. (They'd towed it fine but had no empty bays to work on it and the squeaky Canadian wheel hopefully gets the grease, eh?) We played a few hands of Bottle Imp in the lobby. Bottle Imp is an interesting little trick taking game with an ever shrinking trump suit. Scoring is quirky in that the person who takes the last trick with a trump scores negative points instead of positive points for the hand. (Their soul gets banished to hell.) Fun game.
We ate and then Robb had a nap on a coach in the hotel lobby while Pounder and I played a game of Innovation. By this point the garage had given us a rough estimate and it was looking like I'd get home around 1am with Pounder and Robb getting to Waterloo around 2. Our game was cut short when they called an hour early saying the car was ready to be picked up. Pounder headed out in a cab while I cleaned up the game and then read some more Game of Thrones.
The ride home was pretty uneventful (flash showers aside) though I discovered you can get pretzles as McDonalds in the states. It was pretty good! Ultimately I got home before midnight so the threat of lost work was gone. (And the hotel internet still wasn't fixed in the morning so I had no way to get in contact with anyone about maybe being absent. Very frustrating that they couldn't get the internet to work.)
4 comments:
How did your team end up ranking?
They haven't posted the final results yet. My team earned 12 or 13 points, I think, and 13 would have been good enough for 10th last year, 9th in 2009, and 9th in 2008. So it's possible we made the top 10 but I doubt we won.
I've heard that last century when people wanted to contact their office, they used "telephones". It's primitive, but it should work when the Internet is unavailable.
My phone doesn't work in the silly country down south. If we'd been forced to stay the night I'd have had to call long distance from whatever hotel.
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