It was a password issue honestly…..

It’s been a minute since I last graced you all with my incredible written word and I am sure there has been a hole in your lives that simply could not be filled. Well after a solid 5 weeks of trying to work out what the login is to get back in and type away, I am back to fill your hole…

It turns out I signed up to this platform with an email address that was weirdly specific to our previous life in Texas, but that’s all water under the bridge now, I am back in and ready to update you all on the highs and lows of our life over here.

So what has happened I can hear you all scream. High level overview coming up. We bought another house, renovated it and moved in. While this was over a year ago now I still suffer the occasional bout of PTSD when I remember the moving in day, how smoothly it went and how Laura didn’t raise her voice even once.

Our young children have become teenagers and pre-teens. It’s hell on earth. I love them more than anything, but what I wouldn’t give to have 5 year old Freddie and 2 year old Harriet back for a week.

After not being able to travel for 3 years we have become weirdly addicted to cruises. I sit and write this on April 5. We have been on 3 cruises since Christmas and when Laura gets downstairs in a minute we are looking at booking our 4th for later in the month.

Most importantly though, Laura has “taken a job outside of the house”. She works at a school, which even though it has been well over a year blows my mind. She literally hates kids, especially other peoples but apparently she turns into some sort of Mary Poppins character the second she isn’t around any of the Shroders. Other than that life goes on much the same, the usual meandering from crisis to crisis, none of which are all that bad, just enough to piss me off.

“What has happened to bring you back to us Dave?” I am sure you are wondering and if you aren’t I am going to tell you anyway. What has brought me back is Escape Rooms….

Over the last 3 years we have got in to some random shit. I already mentioned cruising, I contribute to a Boxing podcast now as well as make a dismal attempt to train and I am currently working on becoming a certified professional darts player (more on all of these over the next few blogs, they are all things that genuinely happen) but none are as weird as the strange fascination we have for Escape Rooms.

If you are not familiar, an escape room is exactly what it says it is. You get “locked” in a room with a theme and some clues and you have to solve a mystery in order to get out within an hour. Orlando has absolutely hundreds of them, all sorts of random theming, some really good, some rubbish, but we don’t care we go to any of them and take people with us when they come to stay. One thing I should say about these rooms is they are monumentally expensive. Think $300 for an hour and for $300 an hour I want, no demand we get out and ideally at the 59 minute mark. I want all my money’s worth.

Despite the fact we do an escape room on average once every 6 weeks, we are shit at them. We have never got any better, we never will and I am going to explain why we are so shit at them. Firstly until VERY recently, Fred honestly thought you would be locked in there forever if you didn’t get out. The level of fear he had going in there was palpable. I am not 100% sure why he thought this, if I did a bad job of explaining the premise, but for at least the first 12 times we went Fred thought we would end up like one of One Eyed Willie’s victims in the Goonies.

Secondly as a family we do not think alike at all in any single way. We go in there and you have to work as a team. We do work as a team, just the shittest team imaginable. We have shit scared Fred, worried he will never see the light of day again and not quite sure why we keep putting ourselves in this situation. Harriet, the laziest child in the world. Absolutely certain she is right on the first clue, never is then just sits down in the corner complaining she doesn’t have YouTube to watch. Then comes Laura, normally the foreman of the family gently guiding us in the right direction and never raising her voice (this is dripping in sarcasm). When we get into these rooms she becomes so focused on one of the 48 different problems we have to solve that she completely ignores everything else. Finally me. I am a logical thinker, like way too logical. If I can’t reduce a problem to a number or pattern I have zero chance. I work my round the room shouting at everyone. The worst type of teammate.

Finally we are absolutely shit under pressure. We crumble literally the second we get in there. Each room has some ambient music as you work your way through it and as you get closer and closer to time running out this music increases in intensity. I am not built to deal with that. The sheer panic I start to feel about 40 minutes in and then for the remainder of our time in there is akin to the feeling I got when I got made redundant from my job 5 months after Fred was born. It’s a weird mix of fear, stress and a feeling I’ve let everyone down. I mask this feeling like all good men by just shouting loudly and directing people to pointless tasks.

Every time we go in we have the same talk. “We are going to stay calm, we are going to be methodical, we are going to solve each clue in order and we are going to work together. Oh and Fred, you absolutely can get out at any time if you need the bathroom, or you just don’t want to be in here. OK? Lets go have fun!” Every single time without fail after 45 minutes I am snapping at someone to pass me some random tool or hold a flashlight so I can see a clue written in braille or hieroglyphics. Laura has her head 3 inches from a clue we don’t need to solve for 10 minutes, Fred is trying random codes on the door to try and guess the final answer and Harriet’s initial enthusiasm has gone the same way as her enthusiasm for the guitar, running club, Wednesday night volleyball practice and school work of any kind.

Typing this out I have started to wonder why we keep doing these, it doesn’t sound a lot of fun, I am about $4,000 in the hole on them, but in all honesty we weirdly enjoy it. We get out almost all of the time, usually as the result of MANY clues and as yet Fred has not been left in the room to rot. Harriet could take it or leave it, except the one we did that was based on a Grandma’s house, she would do that one again because it has a sofa she can sit on.

Most importantly it has taught me some vital problem solving skills that I can use in day to day life. If it wasn’t for Escape Rooms, I’d never have got the login for this website back!