30th December - First Day of New Year weekend

I caught the train to Shrewsbury from Oxford Road just after lunch and met Phil at the station. We had an easy journey to Quinta and found that we were quite early. Sarah, Anya and Mike were in the foyer sorting out food and the notice boards. After a very welcome cup of coffee I went upstairs to find the room that I would be sharing with Wendy. I was pleased to see that it was quite a good sized room with one single bed, one bunk bed and one double bed. I unpacked and then went back down to the reception to find that the fire had been lit and quite a few others had arrived. We sat and chatted about what we had done over the Christmas break.
At about 7pm we all made our way into the dining room for our evening meal. The manager of the centre gave us a warm welcome. The meal was really good - roast beef with roast potatoes and vegetables followed by apple pie and custard.
Afterwards I set up the lounge ready for the quiz with some help from Phil and Jon.
I was encouraged to see that most people decided to take part.I started off with the general knowledge round and used all 30 of my questions. As the quiz went on though I realised that we had more questions than we needed so I made the music and seasonal rounds shorter. I was surprised at how well everyone did with Phil's bible characters round - I think that having larger teams helped. I also discovered that Susannah is doing a similar theology course to Phil so her team had a slight advantage. We ended up having two teams tying for first place. It was a good job I didn't buy chocolates as prizes as Kay (predictably) was on one of the winning teams. After the quiz Anya brought in some apple punch that she had made. It was very welcome as reading out the questions had proved to be quite a strain on my voice. I was pleased to see that everyone enjoyed the quiz though.
Tim, Paul, Kay, Julie, Karen and I ended the evening with a couple of games of pool and table football before going to bed just after midnight.