Katie arrived to Brazil a day early to help out at the venue and advise on what tasks had been forgotten.  She left her hotel around 9:45am and took a ~30 real taxi to the venue.  She found it impossible to communicate with the front desk that she wanted to leave her luggage at the hotel and pick it up later in the day – so she ended up lugging her backpack, robot bag, and larger backpack to the venue.

Once at the venue she found Mariana, the ‘local’ SPL coordinator.  Mariana was currently working with someone from the Humanoid league to design the support structures for the goals.  After they designed a spec using the various rule books, they turned it over to the wood workers.  Then we worked on assigning teams to tables and setting up the various computers for GameController and the OC.  Katie also pointed out that the fields need wireless routers to be setup.  There are still lots of tasks remaining that hopefully happen overnight.

We also checked into our team’s vacation rental condo today.  Katie went back to Xenius Hotel to pick up Mike, and then we walked down the beach sidewalk to the vacation rental.  We went to check-in at 3:15pm, but had trouble communicating with the doorman.  He let us sit in the condo lobby, and we eventually figured out that the condo was being cleaned.  We went up and the lady was still cleaning.  But she called the owner for us, which made things a bit clearer. As we were settling in, Patrick and Ryan arrived.  Katie left shortly after to head back to the venue, but Sanmit and Jake arrived later.  Katie caught up with all of them as they were finishing dinner at a beachfront bar, and we walked on the sidewalk where she picked up an acai and some pastries.

Once we got back to the condo, we all worked on our laptops for a while.  Tomorrow is team set-up day 1, which also means JT will arrive in the evening.