On the 24th of April started 4 of the busiest days that I have had in a LONG time. 4:30 am marked the time that I rolled out of bed to get to the bus an hour later. The whole team groggily packed up the bus with our fellow alliance partner team 4026 aka Global Dynamics from Decatur high school. 9 hours later after lots of joking around with Adam and Billy (the drivers from the other team), lots of sleep, lots of food from Cracker Barrel, 2.5 hours of playing Hearts with Collin, Jasmine, and Jay, and even more sleep we arrived safe and sound in St. Louis. We had from about 5:00 pm till 8:30 pm to send 5 members of the team over to the Edward Jones Dome to unpack the robot, reassemble it, and make sure that all of the paper work for everything was correct. We were able to successfully able to open the crate and get the robot out, but learned very quickly that we were not going to be able to remove it from the bag that it had been put into at Peachtree Regional a month before because Sue (one of our mentors)had forgotten a piece of our paper work. There were 2 forms that said that the robot had been bagged the night of the end of the 6 weeks and had been locked the day that it was shipped off, but there was no form that stated that we had ever opened the robot at Peachtree! Until we got everything figured out we couldn't start work on anything and couldn't get inspected. By some miracle a woman from Peachtree happened to walk by and ask us how well we were doing and when she heard our troubles she called a guy name Dr. Bob who apparently has a lot of clout in FIRST. By the honor code we were saved. This was the first of many of our MANY troubles..
There had originally been a team social arranged by one of the other GA teams at the Old Spaghetti Factory, but because of the delay, Jasmine, Collin, Ben, Casey, and I completely missed it. The food ended up being brought to us. One thing that I must say for all of our disorganization and complications I would never ever ever trade our college mentors in for other people. There is a special bond that we all have together and there's never a weird separation between us that makes us fell out of place with them. Casey of all people seems to be the most student like despite all the people who apparently asked Sue whether or not she was a high school student. But back to what I was saying that night was full of lots of pasta, watching Turner and Ben play Super Smash Bros., and Casey and Ben trying to get Alex to push the beds together so that they would have more room and be able to have a said "cuddle-fest"! Needless to say Jasmine and I were rolling around on the bed laughing at Ben and Casey's efforts.
Let me pause a moment an say that here's how it works. There are four fields and the competition is in a bracket system. The top 8 ranked teams from each field pick 2 other teams to be on an alliance. the top 8 compete in elims in best out of 3. The winning alliances from the 4 fields go on to Einstein field.
I mentioned earlier that the lock up forms were one of many of the problems that my team encountered... possibly because we were suffering from the Curie curse. Apparently there is a curse at Championships where NO ONE from Curie field has EVER won the world champion title. Great way to start the 4 days dontcha think?
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