Wednesday
Since Championships fell on TAKS week (stupid statewide testing) only the 6 seniors could get out of school. Wednesday by 8am the Girl Scout van dropped the 6 seniors and our 2 Girl Scout Leaders/Mentors off at Austin Bergstrom International Airport. We hopped on our Southwest flight and were in St. Louis by around 2pm.
We drove downtown and found the Dome and Convention Center easily, we didn't have enough time to check into the hotel so we began to look for lunch. We found a cute 50s looking diner and had an amazing lunch.
By 4 were were in line waiting for the pits to open so we could uncrate and get inspected. 3 hours later we had a working robot, a set up pit display (a modified version of our usual pit because we had to fit everything in 2 suitcases), and had passed inspection (although the Inspector did not seem to understand that we didn't appreciate his since of humor o_O).
We threw our stuff in our hotel rooms and began looking for food. The search for food was harder than we thought, apparently most of the restaurants near our hotel were lunch only.....finding a restaurant that could feed 8 people at 9pm seemed to be a problem that we weren't anticipating. We had an amazing Italian dinner (St. Louis is such a sports town, you couldn't go anywhere without seeing someone in a red Cardinals shirt).
Thursday(we were on Curie Division)
The first half of Thursday was practice matches. We did a couple of practice matches and everything seemed to be working. Our first match was Q#2 we lost 14-36 but our alliance mates didn't quite live up to what they said they were gonna do. Our second match Q#19 was a win 33-12....I don't remember the specifics of the match but everything went as planned. Our third match, Q#49, was a win 66-49 but our robot lost power shortly after the match started so we didn't help much. The field tech guys were very puzzled by our power loss so they told us to change out the breaker (the on/off switch). We changed it out but the robot still wasn't turning on, turns out the battery was the issue all along. Our last match on Friday Q#60 was a loss 3-41......we were against some bad-a** teams and our shooter bands kept popping off so we didn't score anything that match :( . We found an old Brewery/Restaurant in Old St. Louis and had a delicious meal complete with desert (the chocolate cake was to die for).
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allison
