Thursday, May 05, 2016

trip

We left the high school at about 17h20 on Monday, April 25th. We stopped for supper at an onRoute, then crossed into the US in the wee hours, then had breakfast somewhere and then lunch in St. Louis at White Castle. Stopped at the convention center to register and get our passes, then went to the St. Louis Art Museum, then went to a spot across the river from the Arc and took some photos, then picked up a couple of people then went to the hotel where we ordered in pizza.

Wednesday morning we visited a Sacred Heart school and then we had lunch in St. Charles, then we went to the dome and convention center where it was crazy with the 600 teams unloading their equipment to bring it into the pit. In the late afternoon there was a practice round.

Thursday and Friday were qualification matches all day, G-Bot's team's robot didn't do well - at the end of qualifications it placed 55th out of 75 teams. Thursday evening team 296 (G-Bot's team) and team 3990, another Quebec team, had supper together. They were crowded a little into a hotel conference room and just around the corner outside of the room was an access corridor to the hotel's bar/lounge. There were five parents in all (including me) who decided to eat there and we had a nice time for adult conversation. The service took long, however, and by the time we were done, the kids had all filed back into the bus and had been waiting for some amount of time.

Saturday morning was alliance selection and team 296 did not get selected, so some of us were free to roam while others started packing up the pit and the robot. I went to a different division and watched that division's quarter and semi-finals. I had to leave before the finals were played as we had organized a place/time for lunch. It ended up that a few loaves of bread, sandwich meat, mustard and mayo had been bought along with some chips and soft drinks and we found a spot in the student lounge in the convention center where the championship was held where we took two tables and had lunch.

Saturday afternoon was the championship where the winning alliances of the eight divisions battled it out. We were sitting very high and so it was harder to get into it and to see what was going on. The alliance that we were rooting for ended up losing in the tiebreaker of the final.

Soon after that we met up with the bus, loaded it up with our possessions and the pit equipment and left, it was about 18h50 that we left. We stopped at a Dairy Queen for supper at around 21h45, crossed the border at around 4h, had breakfast and lunch at onRoute stops and got back to the high school at about 17h on Sunday.

After this experience of being with the team I have decided I will play a more active role with the team next year, though what that means, exactly, I do not know.

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