US Open

Last week I went to US Open in for my robotics competition. The competition was in Council Bluffs, Iowa probably because of the cheap venue. I qualified for US Open back in October in my first qualifying competition where I had a completely different robot. I left for Iowa Wednesday morning arrived in Omaha, Nebraska in the evening. It was a short drive to the hotel in Iowa and on the way the roads seemed so empty for someone used to LA traffic. When we got to the hotel we were surprised to find that the hotel we were saying at was right next to the convention center where the competition would be held the next day. There was even a covered walkway connected to the hotel straight to the convention center so we didn't even need to go outside. We then went to a steak house across the river from Omaha where we had a panoramic view of Omaha and delicious Omaha steaks. The next day we unpacked our robots and headed to robot inspection. We checked out okay and starting looking at the other robots there. They weren't to impressive for a national event but that was because all the good teams were only going to worlds. The matches started out bad for my team because in the first two matches our robot broke. The next matches were a lot better and by match three we were in first. We continued like this until the end of the qualifying matches where we got paired for our final match. In the final match teams one and two get paired up, teams three and four get paired up etc. The team that we got paired with had a very long robot so we both couldn't get up the ramp. They also threw their balls so they tended to miss. In the finals match before us the alliance scored an impressive 125 points. Finally it was time for our match and we did pretty good but our alliance partner missed three balls. We scored a total of 116 points but if we didn't miss those balls we would have scored 128 and won. On the way back that night we had a connecting flight through Minneapolis. Our first flight was a little late and the tram at the airport was broken. Not only that our first flight landed on the opposite side of the airport as our other flight and we had to run all the way there. We barely made it on the plane and we were exhausted. By the time we got back home it was pas midnight and I went to sleep.