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.
- Yummy Liberty Bagels.
- Walked to B&H..
- Ducked into Whole Foods to escape rain, got hot chocolate.
- Walked to High Line.
- Departed High Line for Chelsea Market.
- Explored Chelsea Market, including cheeseburger and book store.
- Stop at Apple Store 14th Street.
- Walked in rain to take R to 28th Street.
- Walk to the flagship Milk Bar store.
- Take R train to City Hall.
- Walk to Regal Theater in Battery Park.
- Go to a movie!
- Dinner at El Vez.
- 4 Train to 42nd Street.
- Escape room at Escape the Room.
- Walk back to the hotel.
- Andrew’s NYC for breakfast but too busy.
- Paris Baguette for mochi donut.
- Angelina for absolutly perfect macarons. Wow.
- Blue Bottle for cappuccino.
- Blocked by NYC Half-Marathon.
- Take R train to 57th Street.
- Nintendo Store for tons of shopping.
- Apple Store on 5th Avenue.
- Walked along Central Park
- Angelos Pizza.
- Southbound Q train to 28th Street.
- Milk Bar flagship store for Birthday Cake, Cereal Milk soft serve, and Confetti Cookie.
- Museum of Mathematics.
- Cab to Arlo Midtown.
- Walk to meet up with Hadar & Lois.
- Fabulous dinner with Hadar & Lois at El Rio Grande.
- Walk to Exit Escape Room NYC.
- Beat the Sugar Rush room!
- Walk to Times Square.
- Europan Cafe for crepes.
- Walk back to Arlo Midtown.
We successfully finished “The Zeros” escape room at Escape Code today with 1 second on the clock! We missed one clue so had to make an informed guess at the time end, but it worked out! Room 53!
We completed the Birth Machine room at Mad Machines in Milan, Italy! This is the 4th ranked escape room in the world and we had a great time. The subject of the room was fun and “unique”, and the puzzles were so well done! 🧩 Room 51!
Mazie Turns 18
Today we celebrated Mazie’s 18th Birthday! Both of the kids are out of school, and I took the day off, so we were able to make the day extra special for Mazie.
Tammy had the awesome idea of reliving each of Mazie’s 17 preceding birthdays! She wrote out a brief remembrance of each birthday event, along with a few photos from that year. Some of the years also revisited a gift she got from that year. It was awesome.
Highlights of the day included a morning visit to Shady Oak Beach, lunch at Yum! for her kid favorite of Mac & Cheese, a revisit of the Mad Tea Party at Zero Hour Escape Rooms that she did a few years ago with friends on her birthday (Room 50!), a new version of the Instax instant camera, and much more.
It was an incredible day with incredible memories — old and new!
Tammy's NYC Birthday Trip Day 3
Rained all day.
18,065 steps.
New York 2023 - Day 2
21,964 steps. 11.48 miles.
Tyler and I successfully solved the Sugar Rush room at Exit Escape Room NYC! We had 3m 3s time remaining on the clock. Doing puzzle rooms with just two people isn’t easy but we got it! Room 48!
Countdown at Mission Manner
Tyler enjoys escape rooms and for his birthday we went to Mission Manor and did Countdown!
We had a slow start with not much happening the first few minutes. There were a lot of locks and obvious clues, but it wasn’t clear what to do with them. Then we started rolling and we escaped the room in 45m 55s, with 14m 05s remaining on the clock!
And, a first for the Thingelstad family, we had NO CLUES! A total “clean sheet”! 🙌
And a first for us at an escape room, Mission Manor produces an actual score. With 2,240 points we hit the highest level of Escape Gods. 🤜🤛 We were only 60 points short of the record for the room, which if we would have finished just 1 minute earlier we would have beat.
I’m sure that we’ll be back to Mission Manner to do the two other rooms. Room 47!
POAP Extensions
I was pondering cool things that POAPs could have and three ideas came to mind.
POAPs with Backs!
POAPs are a bit like challenge coins, and physical coins have a front and a back. Why not support two images for POAPs so they have a front and a back. This would be cool to flip them around and see the other side. It could be a whole new place to have creative imagery!
POAP Collections
I’ve gotten a few POAPs that are officially part of a collection. The Ethereum Merge and POAPathon Krampus PAOPs are examples of this. It would be cool if there was an official collection that these were part of and that was part of the event pages. You could even unlock a collection POAP when you have all the POAPs in that collection. Some groups do that now but it is manual.
Unique POAPs
I would love to get a POAP every time we do an escape room. But it would be even cooler if my specific instance of that POAP had additional data like the time it took for us to escape, how many clues we used, and our team name. If an issuer could add one off metadata to a specific claim code it could unlock a ton of use cases.
We escaped from “The Mafia” room at Reykjavik Escape in 38m 44s with no clues! 🔓 Our first escape room outside of the US, and the only escape room in Iceland. Room 44!
We escaped Video Game Mayhem at Trapped in 56m 59s! The room was setup for the adult version. We did this room in 2019 setup for kids and finished it in 53m. We didn’t remember much of the puzzles. Room 39!
