Escape Room
This section chronicles our family’s love of escape rooms, from cracking a record 23 rooms in 2025 (82 total since 2016) to quirky trip logs detailing each puzzle, travel stop and post‑game reflection. It’s an ever‑growing diary of teamwork, hints and shared victories.
- 9:50a Jamie up, enhancing Escaping Things site
- 10:25a Time to be up
- 11:30a Leave hotel to Central Station
- 11:44a Intercity Heerlen line to Utrecht
- 12:45p escape room! Amazing.
- Stroopwaffels warm and fresh first time. Plus a sugar waffle.
- Exploring Utrecht.
- Magical experience at Keen Coffee.
- music box museum
- 4:00p Tammy steps out to get Brandi Carlile tickets!
- impromptu Macaron stop
- stopped at Belgisch Biercafé Olivier Utrecht
- Dinner at Casa Damstraat
- 6:00p Escape Room again. We liked it so much we decided to do another room!
- Train back to Amsterdam, Walk back to hotel
- 8:30a: Arrive in AMS. Not much sleep.
- Cleared passport control and collect baggage.
- Store luggage at airport.
- 9:46am: Dordrecht intercity train to Delft
- Breakfast and coffee at Kek.
- Explore Delft.
- 12:28p: Sprinter train to Haag Central Station.
- Sadly Escher museum is closed today. :-(
- Walk to a mile
- Stop at Barista Cafe for another cappuccino.
- Walk another mile.
- Visit Madurodam in Den Haag.
- 4:30pm: Tram 9 to Kalvermarket-Stadhius.
- fan searching:TK Maxx, HEMA, Media market, K
- Find dinner plan: EZ SMASH. They are closed.
- Figure out Plan B: Bonobo. They are hosting a fundraiser dinner so we squeeze in before that event starts.
- Depart dinner and everyone is cold and we haven’t a gap in schedule. Decide to go to Starbucks to warm up a bit before escape room.
- Cannot find tram planned to take so call Uber to get us to escape room.
- 7:50 Stqrt a Molly Game
- 9:50 Finish Molly’s Game
- Get Uber to AMS
- 10:45p Pick up luggage from storage in AMS
- 10:52p train to Amsterdam Central
- 11:10p leave central station in foot
- 11:27p Check-in to Hendrick’s Hotel
- 11:45p Finally to sleep — over 33 hours since we woke up on Sunday.
- 4:30p: Flight cancelled. 😞
- Reschedule first escape room.
- Realize we will not be able to see Anne Frank museum now.
- Tyler drove to Ultimate Collectibles on his own. First solo drive!
- Recognize π day!
- Lunch at Yum! with pie.
- FaceTime with Mazie!
- 6:50p: Should have been flying. It seemed fine. Hear airplanes flying overhead while having frozen pizza for dinner.
- Watch Anaconda at home.
- Prepare house for floor refinishing while away.
- Plenty of time to pack.
- 4:30p: Lyft to MSP.
- 6:50p: Flight DL162 to AMS
- Copper Cat Escape - Granny’s Recipe Rescue in Brainerd, MN. See post!
- Copper Cat Escape - Deep Woods Cabin in Brainerd, MN. See post!
- Puzzleworks - The Museum in St. Paul, MN. See post!
- No Esc Puzzle Collective - Sherwood Forest in Shakopee, MN. See post!
- Enigma Adventures - The Istanbul Gambit in Bloomington, MN. See post!
- Puzzleworks - The Hospital in St. Pual, MN. See post!
- Doldrick’s Escape Room - Crazy Train ⭐️ in Orlando, FL. See post!
- Puzzleworks - The Dungeon in St. Paul, MN. See post!
- Puzzleworks - The Anomaly in St. Paul, MN. See post!
- Enigma Adventures - Pirates of the Spanish Main in Maple Grove, MN. See post!
- Escape City - Mindmaster Industries in Calgary. See post!
- Solve Escape Rooms - Caper in the Escape Room in Waukesha, WI.
- Solve Escape Rooms - 14 Floors Below in Waukesha, WI.
- Escape in Time - Gold Rush in Madison, WI. See post!
- Cabinet Mysteriis - The Dreamwalkers ⭐️ in Quebec. See post!
- Cabinet Mysteriis - 2002: The Bovine Odyssey ⭐️ in Quebec. See post!
- Cabinet Mysterlis - Screaming Metal ⭐️ in Quebec. See post!
- Escaparium - Lost Island of the Voodoo Queen ⭐️ in Quebec. See post!
- Escaparium - Wardrobe for sale ⭐️ in Quebec. See post!
- Escaparium - Magnifico ⭐️ in Quebec. See post! Number 1 on TERPECA 2024 and 2025!
- Escape Room Alexandria - The Experiment in Alexandria. See post!
- Puzzled Escape Rooms - Time Machine in Fargo. See post!
- Breakout ND - Gemini Quantum Quest in Bismarck. See post!
- Escape Game - Ruins: Forbidden Treasure in Nashville. See post!
- Escape Game - Yeti Escape Room in Nashville. See post!
Escape in Europe — Day 3
Escape in Europe — Day 2
Escape in Europe — Days -1, 0, 1
Day -1 (March 13)
Day 0 (March 14)
Day 1 (March 15)
I’ve been working on this new site, Escaping Things, that is the full index of all of our escape room history. It is one of my automatic programming projects. I’ve had Codex and Claude Code engaged on it. I just moved the data backend to Airtable too. Check it out! 🧩
Tyler wanted to do an escape room on his birthday so we went to Lock & Key Escape and completed the Quest for Excalibur! It was a fun room, not too challenging, with some delightful surprises along the way! Room 87!
Escape Rooms of 2025
This year we jumped way into our Escape Room adventures, more than any previous year. We completed 25 rooms in 2025!
This year we went through all of our records and made sure we had a complete inventory of all of our rooms, resulting in our Escape Rooms list. We are getting close to having 100 rooms so that we can become TERPECA voters! Speaking of TERPECA, we did seven rooms that were in the top 100 for 2024 of the Top Escape Rooms Project. Note the ⭐️ next to those rooms in the list.
It was a super fun year for escape rooms! 🤩
Our log for 2025 was…
We had a great time completing the Loose Sleuth escape room at Puzzleworks. The puzzles in the room were just right — hard enough to be challenging but never so difficult that we felt lost. No clues! Solved in 49m 05s. Room 85!
Blog Categories via LLM
After using GPT-5 to create category introductions for my website I got to thinking about the categories themselves.
With over 9,800 blog posts spanning 20+ years it is daunting to figure out an approach to categories. It is especially daunting to approach them in a way that would make sense to a visitor to my website. As a test, I gave this challenge to GPT-5 using Agent mode. It took 31 minutes to do the research. I have no idea how many web pages it hit on my site (I wasn’t watching!). It gave me a whole report and the results seem really solid.
Each one of these is also provided a description and examples posts that would fit into it. This seems like a great place to use AI.
Going through my blog and assigning posts to these categories could be done with a script and some vibe coding. Perhaps this will be a winter project for me.
All of this has me thinking that it would be nice for micro.blog to do this for me. I wouldn’t mind having micro.blog use AI to recommend categories for me. But then separately, now that we have categories with introduction text take each of my blog posts and ask the LLM to categories it into the existing structure. All the data is there. 🤔
Category Introductions via LLM
I used GPT-5 to create introduction text for my blog categories. Now I just need Tiny Theme to pull them in and I’ll be set.
This is the prompt I used:
Passing the explicit list of categories and links worked much faster than the first prompt which I asked it to just look at the Archive page and figure out what to do.
