Day 52

Day 52: 7/8/15 (Oklahoma City)

0 miles

Kris took the day off today so we would be able to spend some quality time before taking off for our next destination.  We ended up sleeping in a little, but Kris was up watching the Tour de France (he loves cycling) so we didn’t feel as bad that we weren’t up early to take full advantage of the day.  Kris had mentioned an old silo that was made into a rock climbing facility so we made that our plan for the afternoon.  Jillian got a call from one of the apartments we had scheduled a viewing for so we were able to get most of our questions answered.  Afterwards she called her sister to give her all the updates. 

The rock climbing place didn’t open until 2pm so we headed there around that time.  We didn’t have too much time to climb because Kris had booked us a room at Trapped, which is one of those escape room venues.  We were excited to try it out because we all like puzzles and logic.  When we got to the climbing place, we quickly got into our harnesses and were brought around for a brief orientation.  In a matter of minutes, we were scaling the walls.  The belay systems were automatic so Jillian had a little trouble trusting it at first and was climbing down the wall instead of letting go and repelling.  Kris finally convinced her to just let go.  There were a few different stations so we tried them all and agreed on which one was the hardest – it was like all of a sudden there was only big round rocks with no grip or little pebbles – hello impossible.  Before we left, we went over to the bouldering wall to give that a try.  We really got our butts kicked here.  The wall is angled towards the ground so gravity works against you when you try to climb.  All of our arms and fingers were so sore after.

We got over to the Trapped location just in time.  The room we were locked in was called the Oklahoma room and had a success rate of only 27%.  We were a bit surprised at how empty the room seemed when we walked in, but we immediately spotted several locked boxes.  We started gathering all the boxes and searching for clues.  We worked as a pretty good team because in the end, we made it out!  It took two clues and just about the entire hour, but we did it.  Half of the locks and combos were pretty straightforward, but the others were frustrating.  There was one unique lock and we were certain that we had the combo, yet when Jillian and Rico tried, it didn’t open.  Then Kris tried the same combination and he got it and showed us up.  We were down to a few boxes and about 15 minutes to go when we decided we needed our first clue.  There ended up being a key hidden between a shelf and the peg that we had missed.  We figured out a few more clues and unlocked a few more boxes and then we were down to one.  We were definitely missing something and we only had 5 minutes left.  We asked for one more clue and ended up finding a cypher which coded the alphabet with other letters.  We knew exactly what letters we needed to decode because we had tried it on everything else already and fortunately it worked!  All of the boxes were filled with different playing cards, and Jillian realized that in the end there was probably going to be some cards missing which would be our code to get out.  She started writing down all the cards in the deck on the whiteboard and then erased the ones that we had unlocked.  After opening the last box, the 4 cards that were missing was an Ace, 2, 3 and 9.  We tried a few combinations and then Rico guessed that it was a date so after 1932 didn’t work we crossed our fingers for 1923.  We were excited to see the light turn green and the door open.  We kind of expected that we’d make it out, but we were hoping we could have used less clues because there wasn’t a record yet for using only 1 clue.     

Once we had escaped, we considered going back to the climbing gym, but everyone’s arms were too tired to handle another beating from the bouldering wall.  We started thinking about dinner and Kris suggested a steakhouse that was supposed to be really good.  It was located down a road that had some legit cowboy shops offering boot shines and all.  The options on the menu were steak, steak, or more steak.  Rico got a sirloin strip, Jillian got a smaller version of the same, and Kris went for the big ribeye.  The meat is butchered and aged in the restaurant so it had some good flavor and was nice and tender.  Once we were all steaked out, we headed back to Kris’s and finished off the beers we picked up.  Jillian and Kris were watching Big Hero 6 while Rico was skyping with his parents trying to pick out clothes for Shannon’s wedding.  Rico missed the whole movie and shortly after it was over, we were all heading to bed.

Fact:

Some people just aren’t good with combination locks (Rico and Jillian)

Lesson:

If you want really buff forearms, start rock climbing

Eat Well; Travel Often

Rico & Jillian