Room Escape Adventures

My All Flesh Must Be Eaten group keeps an eye out for zombie-themed fun around town, which the ZM then translates into experience for our character in-game - like LARPing but a lot less nerdy. We even use our character names instead of our real names!

So it was that Joanne, Trevor, Diaper Steve, and ZM Glenn all arrived at a battered-looking building on Colfax for our latest IRL adventure. Room Escape Adventures locks you in a room with 11 other people and gives you an hour to solve the riddles and discover the hidden clues that will reveal the combination that unlocks the way out. The catch is that there's a zombie chained to one wall, and every five minutes, its chain gets let out one foot.

We were briefed on the situation by a "scientist" complete with lab coat, clipboard, and unplaceable Eastern European accent - Dr. Oxy was developing a super-secret serum for military purposes but accidentally pricked himself with the needle! While he was still lucid, he locked himself in his lab, left a number of clues around should he regain his humanity to release himself, and chained himself to the wall. I don't really remember why we were supposed to be going in the room with him, but whatever, in we went.

I don't really want to say more than that, in case someone ever stumbles on this blog. Just go. It's a blast, and they have them all over the country. Our local Denver Room had a 32% success rate, and Vigilance Force (we were allowed to name our team) managed to join that exclusive club with six minutes to spare.

Zombie Apocalypse Live!: Santa's Slay

13th Floor Haunted House presents a tactical, live action, video game like zombie shooting experience, Zombie Apocalypse LIVE! You and your team will use state of the art weapons to clear apocalyptic and infested areas where the undead have invaded. You will need to navigate your way through on coming infectious zombies and make the right choices when encountering survivalists, are they friend or foe? The weapons you will be using are military grade training replicas. Their size, form, and function are similar to real world models. Pull the trigger for a live bang, recoil, and muzzle flash. 

The zombies will be wearing cutting – edge head shot targets that will flash to indicate a hit. Beware! Some zombies may need to be hit more than once to be killed. Don’t forget to aim for the head.

Valentine's Day Sky-Diving

I spent all this morning psyching myself up for the jump. I'm normally a brave person, but the idea of jumping out of a plane had me rattled. With skydiving, you have a lot of time between realizing that you're gonna be painting the ground red and it actually happening. But, as I repeated to myself, the odds were for me, and even though it wouldn't be a pleasant way to die, it would definitely be an impressive one (imagine the obituary!).  So I was feeling pretty confident - even cocky - as I zipped into a speedsuit and my jump-partner, Randy of Out of the Blue Skydiving, tightened my harness.

The six of us (Dean and I, our jump-partners, and our cameramen) were squeezed inside this tiny little propellor plane before I remembered - I'm terrified of flying.  I'm an atheist, but you know that saying, there are no atheists in foxholes.  Flying is spitting in God's face; that metal tube is really just a giant middle finger to an omnipotent and vengeful deity; if humans were meant to fly, we'd have been born with wings!  And on and on.  Given the options between jumping out of the plane and staying in the plane, suddenly jumping out didn't seem like such a bad idea.

And it wasn't.  Skydiving is wonderful, and I would do it again in a heartbeat if I had the money.  The first few seconds are admittedly terrible - that roller-coaster feeling of your stomach hitting your throat cranked up to eleven - but then you hit freefall and you feel like you're flying instead of falling!  It ended way too quickly, just as I was really getting into it and wondering if Randy would hear me if I asked him to flip us over or something, the chute popped - far more gently than I would've predicted - and we were floating down to earth.

Penrose Airport from 5,000 feet in the air

Here's the exciting part; I could tell something was wrong after the chute popped because Randy was shifting and twisting an awful lot.  Then suddenly we started falling again.  I learned later that our first chute had malfunctioned - the lines were seriously tangled and it would prevent us from landing safely.  Randy had to eject that chute (hence the second fall!) and pop the back-up chute, during which we fell another 1,500 feet. We ended up landing safely (on our feet even), and everyone kept teasing me by telling me how lucky I was that I got two rides for the price of one!

People keep asking if I was scared.  Honestly, I wasn't.  It all happened too quickly for me emotionally react; I was aware what was going on, but it was like my neurotransmitters hadn't caught up to it.  Mainly I was thinking, "Of course this would happen to me."  By the time I was able to think things through, I was safely on the ground, and then there was no point in panicking.  In the end, I was pretty happy that I had such a good story to tell my friends later.  I asked Randy how many times this had happened to him before, and he said 26 times in his 5700 jumps!

White-water Rafting in Idaho Springs, Colorado

My very wonderful parents got me a pair of whitewater rafting vouchers from Clear Creek Rafting Company for Christmas last year, and I finally used them today with Dean. We took the beginner class; I recommend the intermediate class because the beginner class we took was a little lightweight, even for two people who’d never done it before. Still crazy fun, even though I didn’t get to fall in (was secretly hoping).

Shooting an Ma Deuce at Cherry Creek Shooting Range, Colorado

I tried trap-shooting at Cherry Creek finally, but the cold weather and my tempestuous moods did not make the experience a positive one. You should have seen the look on my father’s face when I told him I didn’t hit a one. I was disappointed in myself, too, but I was cheered by the cool machine guns being featured at the range.

An enthusiast called Larry is bringing around his Browning M1919 and Brown M2 machine guns on Fridays and Sundays to let the hoi polloi act out violent paramilitary fantasies on water jugs. The gun I’m crouched behind is a Browning M1919 and the brute to my left is a Browning M2. Larry says that the prices on these respective monsters are $2500 and $12,000 (!); the bullets for the M2 are about five bucks apiece. Larry was generously offering the opportunity to shoot the M2 for seven bucks a pop or twenty for three, and the M1919 for two bucks a shot, or thirty-five for twenty. They’re mounted on tripods and sighted already, so there’s not a lot to it, but still.

Colorado Gators Reptile Park

I wrestled alligators this weekend; what’d you do?

No, seriously: the Colorado Gators Reptile Park in Mosca offers an alligator wrestling class for anyone who’s stupid enough to do it – obviously G and I had to sign up. The price is 100 bucks a head, and it’s well worth it. We were taken under the wing of Jay, a man with a ponytail and a cowboy hat who kept making these dry morbid asides that I’m still not entirely sure were jokes; he started us off with the babies, which were swimming around in a big metal tub with red-eared sliders. After he showed us the technique and while everyone was standing around looking unsure, I hopped right in and caught one; according to Jay, the number one rule in gator wrasslin’ is don’t hesitate.

Alligators are surprisingly squishy; I thought that lovely texture of their skin would be bony and hard, but it’s not. After the babies, as a bonus, we got in the tank with the farm’s 100-pound alligator snapping turtle. Kong is truly a dinosaur. I couldn’t lift him by myself, so I got a pic with his smaller cousin.

The insides of turtles are very sandy and wet. We moved onto teenage alligators next. This required a more elaborate technique than just snatching them up by the back of the neck. We had to drag them in from the water by the tail, swinging and dancing around them while they tried to snap at our legs and hands, yank their tails backward towards us and then jump on their backs and push all of our weight down on their necks. Usually at this point, they’d go nuts and somebody else would have to hold the tail or it would drag you back into the water on its back.

Before you feel too bad for the poor little guys, there was a purpose to this that wasn’t purely sadistic. Alligators are nasty creatures, particularly to each other, so what we were doing was catching the gators and holding them down so Jay could put Neosporin on their cuts or give them shots of antibiotics. It’s something that has to be done around the farm, and the gators just swam back out to their sunning areas when you let them go.

Lastly we got to do a photo shoot of sorts with the biggest gator on the farm, a gigantic nine-foot female. This was actually probably the safest of all of our encounters, as Jay put her on a rope leash while we got to sit on her.

I got to kiss her nose, too, but I couldn't hold her head up long enough for a picture.

For completing the class, we each got a certificate of insanity, er, I mean completion.

Very cool weekend trip, and an excellent workout. I have an alligator head souvenir on my desk at work now; I’m telling everyone that I twisted it off with my bare hands.