Getting Out – August 31

 The school year here starts on September 1, which is also a holiday. This means that the kids all go to the school, meet or re-meet their teacher and classmates, have a little bit of a motivational ceremony, and then they’re free to go, with actual instruction starting on the 2^nd*. 

The general preparation for this day involves getting flowers for the teacher and then arranging for some fun activity after the events at the school wind down. Both of the higher education institutions Rasa and I work at are having day long celebrations and often, unless you’ve prebooked, you can’t get into any restaurant in town without a long line, including fast food places. This year, Monki is heading into 4^th grade. This will be her last year at this school, transferring next year to a 5-8 grade middle school and then, obviously, to a 9-12 high school. Because of this, we wanted to do something fun and exciting for her. We decided on an escape room. She’s been dying to try one out for a while, so we tried to book it of the first, but by the time we’d attempted to make a reservation, they were booked solid. Instead, we decided to do it on Sunday, the day before the school year started. And we didn’t tell her until the morning of. 

The thing about escape rooms, for her, is that she’s been practicing for a couple of years now. A few years ago, I found a game company called Haiku, who produce a line called “Adventure Escape,” which are basically multi-chapter mysteries where you have to solve puzzles to get your main character moving forward in the story. I was excited for this. I like mental puzzles, and this seemed like a fun series. 

Then Monki found it, and all bets were off. Now, it’s known in our house as “Mystery Game” and she plays it constantly. She’s played through most of the mysteries several times and one of the recurring characters, Detective Kate Gray, has become a mainstay in Monki’s own made up games.

All of which brings us to today, and our afternoon at Break Free, experiencing the Harry Potter Escape Room. 

Our scheduled start time was 1:30 in the afternoon and we arrived a few minutes early, which was good**. 

Because we were in a Harry Potter themed room, we were given a wand to use if we needed a hint. We put Monki in charge of that and followed our host into the Hogwarts decorated room. Then, the girl working there set the timer for 60 minutes, and locked us in.

We started looking around, opening everything we could find (and that could open). We found ciphers and clues we were going to need later, but we had a really hard time getting started. We found all sorts of locks which would need to be unlocked and codes to be deciphered, but we couldn’t find the one to start us off. After about 10 minutes of searching and stabbing blindly at digital number pads, we decided to get a clue. 

That’s all we needed. We got one hint, asking us if we’d located a pair of something (no spoilers here) and once we did, we were off and running. Solving that first clue (and to be fair, the hint didn’t solve anything for us, it just pointed us in a vaguely correct direction) was a huge confident booster and we started knocking out the puzzles as the came. 

It was truly a group effort, with Monki contributing quite a bit. I think I can honestly say had any one of us not been there, we would have had a much harder time getting out. We each contributed to all the puzzles, with no one taking a decisive leading role. There were a few puzzles which took longer and a few we solved fairly quickly. In the end, we escaped with about 14 minutes to spare. A win all the way around. 

It should be said, though, that this was the beginner level. But it was a great experience and Monki was ready to do another one right then. So I definitely think we’ll experience more escape rooms in the future. Thankfully, Kaunas has a few different places providing these experiences so we’re good for a while yet. We won’t run out of mysteries we can solve as a family. 

* If September 1 is a weekend, school starts on the Monday. Also, for the first 4 years of school, students are all in the same class, with the same teacher. 

** There was a slight hiccough because, despite what all of their information said about being able to pay either by cash or by bank transfer, when we got there, cash was not an option. We had to pay by bank transfer which took a bit of time. If I had one complaint, this would be it. Always leaves a bad taste when a company lies on their informational details.