Jail Break – Georgetown, Grand Cayman – [12/14/2018]

There are a few things that I’ve never really thought would be in my wheelhouse –I have weird fears, I usually respect them.

Except when I decide that it’s time to look them in the eye and see if I can face up to them: such as when I challenged myself to go down in a submarine and cruise around a shipwreck in Hawaii a few seasons ago.

We were wandering through Grand Cayman last cruise (there’s not a whole lot to do there) and we happened by a relatively simple sign reading “Locked Inn: Live Escape Rooms”.

Those of you who know me well, know that I …don’t do escape rooms. I don’t do anything where I don’t know 100% know how I can get out, and the escape rooms back home? Most of them don’t readily offer that reassurance. But attitudes are much more laid back in the islands, so I figured it would be worth asking about. And so we came back today, and confirmed that yes, they have an emergency key in each room, and the first thing they point out when you enter your challenge is exactly where it is.

But if you use it, the game is over

Oh, that’s fine, I just need to know it’s there

And I looked at Amras

Ready?

Ready.

So we walked down an unassuming hallway and listened to our cheery guide suddenly get serious

The Cayman Island asylum closed down years ago, after rumours of terrible experiments, it was condemned shortly after the physicist accused of torture disappeared. Today we offer tours of the asylum, but be careful, some say that the grandson of the physicist is carrying on the tradition of torturing and experimenting on the patients…

And then she opened the door, escorted us in, showed us where the key was…and left us there. For a minute we just stood there, because the whole room is supposed to be a clue, literally anything could be a clue – and then we start poking at things. Actually talking about details is a bit difficult here as I don’t want to give away secrets in case someone amongst my readers actually finds themselves visiting the Cayman Islands (and given that a large portion of my readers are cruise ship people that’s not an unreasonable possibility) so I’ll try to be as vague as possible.

Amras found a clue right away that as it turned out usually the monitors have to give away at the end since no one gets it (which resulted in a ping pong ball nearly hitting me on the nose, but also opened up our first lock…).

As for me, I found myself continually distracted by the writing on the walls. Most of it was gibberish, put there to emphasize the story-line, but that was just it – it was all gibberish, except this one string of words that was repeating itself over and over again.

That means something, I thought, that is important. That doesn’t fit the story.

Turns out that that was the other clue that most people normally miss.

What amazed me about all this was not just how calm I stayed (if you tell me where the door is, I will gladly forget it’s there and just play the game) – but how engrossing it was to be in the center of a great big puzzle. Amras and I think very differently, but the way we think meshes together – in scenarios like this Amras is very much an analytical thinker, the one looking at the numbers and sequences, the little tiny details; which works great for when you’re trying to do things like figure out lock combinations. I on the other hand am a writer, which means that I’m plunked down in the middle of something like this – I apparently look at the big picture, I saw the whole thing as a story, and anything that didn’t fit the story…well that must be a clue. Which works great for figuring out where the lock combinations *might be*. In fact I didn’t even realise that that was what I was doing until we were finished.

They issued us with a walkie talkie so we could radio in for clues if we needed them (which we only had to do once, and that’s because I utterly suck with seeing certain types of patterns) – but even finding the walkie talkie took more time than we expected. That one they gave us for free, about ten minutes into our time just trying to figure out where we were, we heard a little electronic voice from the corner

Let me out. Let me out.

So that lock we didn’t exactly solve on our own.

We cracked the final lock with just over two minutes to spare. Which involved me dashing across the room to get the key in the lock…which may have been the only time that I was actually a little bit stressed, because the last 5 minutes? Went incredibly quickly. Especially when we were very close to stuck on the last puzzle.

So it looks like we’ve found another cool thing to do in different ports….

And another fear is that much closer to biting the dust.