Whirlwind Weekend

We are finally back home after spending the last three days in St. Louis for the robotics championships.  It was a quick busy trip, and we are pooped, but so happy we went.  PS left at 1:00 am Wednesday morning, and we followed after picking up TT and SS from school on Wednesday afternoon.

The Hotel

This is the TripAdvisor review I wish I could write.  We stayed in one of the swankier hotels in St. Louis, only because DH works for a REIT that happens to own the hotel and we got a fantastic rate. (Thus the reason I can't actually publicly post a review.) Anyway, to get the great rate, DH had to email someone in the hotel's management office and let him know exactly what we needed.  I saw the email--it said two adults and two kids.

When we arrived at 1:00 am Thursday morning,  we were given a king suite with a pull-out sofa.  Except that there was no room to actually fold out the sofa due to a massive piece of furniture sitting opposite the sofa. They said. "oh, we only had one person on the reservation."  And you didn't see 4 of us walk in? After much discussion, we were upgraded to a larger king suite on the club floor.  Yay! But by the time we finally got to bed it was 2:00 am.  Not a great start to our stay.

We were up early the next day and headed out to the robotics competition--not fully recovered from the long journey and late night.  It was after 9 when we got back to our hotel Friday night and we promptly showered and crashed.  And then, at 10:45, I was awakened from a dead sleep by music so loud that it was literally shaking the windows in our room and I could hear every word of every song ("Last Dance with Mary Jane," "Sweet Home Alabama"...) We called the front desk and we're told, "we'll see what we can do, there's a prom going on two floors above you." WTF? Obviously Swanky Hotel regularly hosts similar events.  Are they usually loud enough to shake the windows of their club level guests? I can't imagine.  Ambient noise I could have tolerated, but this was so loud it could have been right next door.  Fortunately, they shut it down within about half an hour.  I got the impression we weren't the only ones complaining.

And then last night, about 11:30 there was some crazy noise like a giant chain being dragged across the roof that, again, awakened us.  Even the kids heard that one. Fortunately it was short lived. All of this was annoying for us.  I would have been livid if I had paid the rack rate (nearly $300/night). Unacceptable for a hotel of the caliber it proclaims to be. 

The City

I'm kind of "eh" about St. Louis.  I didn't love it.  Traffic wasn't bad, but it has all these crazy loops and u-turns to get on and off the highways that made me feel like I was always driving in circles. 

We visited the Arch.  Knock that off the bucket list. Not that exciting.

We visited the City Museum.  That was exciting.  The kids decided it was the awesomest "museum" they have ever visited, and we practically had to drag them out of there. It's not really a museum. It's really a giant maze made up of enormous sculptures, architectural elements and industrial leftovers.  For instance, there is a giant "slinky" kids can climb through that is made from an old refrigeration coil from the Budweiser plant.  I really don't know how to describe this place, but for kids who like to climb and explore it is pretty freaking amazing.  One caveat is that I would have been a nervous wreck when my kids were smaller because there is really no way to keep up with them.  At age 11--and having two of them--I felt pretty comfortable letting them explore on their own with specified meeting times.

We also visited Fitz's Rootbeer, a restaurant in an old bottling factory that still bottles while you watch.  The food was decent and it was fun.  It's on Delmar Street (I think) which was a nice little shopping district.  We found a cool book store and comic book store, and I bought the girls finger narwhals in a little giftshop.

OMG ROBOTS!

The robotics competition did not disappoint.  There were 400 teams competing at our level (FRC), plus who knows how many teams competing at lower levels (like lego robotics)  for younger kids. At FRC there were teams from Israel, the Netherlands, Australia and Canada (and those are just the ones I know about!)  Needless to say, there were a lot of kids there, and it's just one huge party.

On the first day PS texted us "I just met some Canadians that are in the Archimedes division who were super duper nice and gave me chocolate that's illegal in America because of a choking hazard.  Today has been cool!"

I let my daughter go off to a nerd convention, and she mixes with crazy Canadians who introduce her to illicit chocolate! They obviously know her drug of choice. She had a fantastic time--although I think we saw about 5 minutes of her the entire trip--she was always running, running, running. (We sat with several other team parents and when they found out who we belonged to, every single one said, "Oh, PS!  We love her!")

Their team did great at the competition.  We made it through the quarter finals and lost in the semifinals.*  Our team is very young in the robotics world and this was only the second trip to nations and the first time making the finals.  The goal was to make it to finals (and therefore help establish our cred in robot world), and they were thrilled to make it that extra step. Definitely a worthwhile trip!

*****

*Ok, if you really want to know how this works... Each team gets 8 qualification matches. During the qualification matches, the robots are randomly assigned to teams of 3 (your "alliance") and have 3 on 3 game play.  Your win/loss is based on the total points for your entire alliance--so much depends on the robots you are paired with and those you compete against--and teams are ranked individually by their win/loss record.

After all of the qualification matches, the top 8 teams are automatically in the finals.  But then each of the top 8 gets to pick the alliance that it wants to go to the finals with.  Often the top teams pair together, which opens up spots for the next highest ranked teams.  So 24 total robots go to finals, in alliances of 3.

We were ranked 19th, but were a first round pick by the #5 seed team.  It was seriously huge that we were picked so early. Of course, rankings don't tell the whole story because so much depends on how others perform, and I guess the #5 seed saw this.

After alliance selections, it goes to a double-elimination bracket system for finals. Since we were the 5th alliance we played the 4th alliance and won.  Then it was down to 4 teams and we played the #1 seed and lost.  The winner of the top 2 in our division went to the "Einstein Division" which was the top team from each division (since there are 400 teams, they were divided into 4 divisions), and the winner of our division made it to the very end and lost (to the Canadians, so PS was very happy for them!) Maybe there really is something to that chocolate!