The Happy Final Results

Hi family!
We arrived in Seattle Friday night, met our team for dinner at Buca di Beppo, and stayed with the Johnstons. We sat in the Pope room of the restaurant, where Pope Benedict XVI watched us eat. KIND OF creepy. Not gonna lie. One of the waiters at the restaurant WAS Andy Leon's clone. My dad got a picture of him, and it turns out, his real name is Andrew. Crazy!
We played some Guitar Hero early Saturday morning before we left for the Science Center.
In the preliminary round of the competition, all of the teams present twice to two different sets of about three judges. Luckily, for both our sets, there was at least one cute judge, so I wasn't TOO nervous. Ha. Wait until you see how "un-nervous" I was...
After we presented twice in the morning, it was about 11:00. We went to have lunch in the Center House, and Ailis had some gross looking chili-cheese fries. I had an orange Julius and a cheeseburger and non-gross fries. Yay.
We went back to the Northwest Rooms where we would find out if we made the Top Five. Turns out, that we were the last of the five in "no particular order". We were a little nervous. The top five teams then had about an hour to move their models into the presentation room. They were sequestered after they drew numbers to see what order they would present in. We were four, which was sort of bad because then we'd only get to see one other team's presentation.
While we were waiting for our turn, we practiced our presentation, and got some tips from one of the cute engineer judges. Some of the other teams played games. Lame.
When it was our turn to present, we were ON FIRE. The nerves were gone, which was weird, because I was practically crying during the preliminaries. It was SHOW TIME!
After the final team presented, the officials tried to take up time so that the judges could tally the scores. It was agonizing.
After the tallies were tallied, one of the judges gave a little speech, it is needless to say that my mom was in tears...the main points of the speech were to value Reading, Fitness, and Friends/Family. He also told us to tell our parents: "Even though you are completely dysfunctional, I love you and thank you for raising such a perfect child." I'm sure my parents heard that a total of four times. From each child.
Finally, the lady that always announces/butchers the names of the winners stepped up to the podium. She announced fifth and fourth places, and then finally third. Then she asked us if we wanted to hear about her life in Rhode Island instead of hearing about the winners. We said no, and she said "When I lived in Rhode Island, I'd never traveled to...Flathead, Montana. In second place." Which was a tricky way of saying that we won, because the school from Flathead, Montana came in second. Which means we got first! And we're going to Washington, D.C.! In February! We also got the People's Choice award for our model, and $15 Barnes and Noble cards.
After the competition, we went for a celebratory dinner at Kells, walking from the parking lot to Kells in the pouring-buckets of rain. So here are some photos to chronicle the event!!!!!
Love you all, and thanks to the Barracudas, (you know who you are) for critiquing us, we'll probably need it again in a week or two!
Ciara (and Moira)