Every year, our team at work decides to get together to hang out and partake in some team-bonding experience. Last year, we ate on a patio at a nice eatery. Some wanted to do the same thing again. Others wanted a change of pace. We held a vote. Doing an escape room ruled supreme. I had never done an escape room in my life, so I was looking forward to it. My manager was to do some research and come up with a list of escape room venues for us to choose from. Well, he fell ill and this task slid. Who did this task for him instead? Yep, me. I am known for being a decent researcher and planner on our team. I frankly enjoyed breaking away from doing regular work to figure escape rooms out. I was already trying to solve a puzzle! I did a combination of researching escape rooms on my own and polling friends. One of them suggested going to Daydream Adventures. She loved the immersive, magical forest escape rooms that this place had to offer. It has two escape rooms: - Dream portal - Escape cave The latter option was more expensive at $43 per person for roughly an hour. Our team went with the dream portal option at a more affordable $33 per person. My manager made our reservation online. You book online and pay when you are there. The place accepts credit and debit cards. My manager paid with a debit card to ultimately expense it. In the past, I used to do all that. It was nice taking a break from doing expenses. Daydream Adventures is a few businesses down from Our Spot, my favourite eatery to get one of six different grilled cheese sandwiches. There is street parking on Danforth Avenue. It's Green P and you need to pay. The two men in our group and I all parked on side streets. I parked on West Lynn Avenue, which was midway between this escape room, and where we were heading afterwards for refreshments and nourishment. Parking on side streets is free. I met most folks in front of the store. My friend had already entered the place before I had arrived. I didn't realize that he was there until we texted. The sign on the door said that you must wear a mask. It confused me to see people coming out of the place without wearing any. The escape rooms are downstairs. The stairs are narrow and the place is dark, minus the neon lighting near the steps that guides you downstairs. There is a sign that says to watch your head. I am a couple of inches shy of being six feet and I cleared fine. If you are perhaps 6'2" or taller, you will hit your head on the ceiling. It's dark downstairs. It's also cool, but was lacking air conditioning. There is a reception desk and a long bench. We all sat down before we got our welcome from the friendly staff. I asked about masks. It's up to you whether you want to wear one. Our group are at least triple-vaccinated (I'm the outlier with four), so we were comfortable putting our masks away. There are two separate washroom stalls to the right of the reception desk when you are staring at it. I used one at the end of the game. It was clean. Between these two washrooms is a large chest in which we placed our purses and bags. Once you close the chest's lid, it automatically locks. It unlocked for us when we were done playing. We got an overview about the game and what we were about to do. We had George, a mini chest with horrible teeth. He was our lifeline and would answer all our questions when we got stuck on a puzzle. My friend held George at first, but I ultimately held toothy guy for the whole game. We asked George a ton of questions throughout our game. The dream portal was beautiful and magical. Each puzzle was challenging, and required a lot of communication and teamwork. It was awesome. There were mushrooms that made sounds when you touched them, which was one puzzle. We had to remove three branches to solve another one. My friend and I had a tough time loosening one that went through the tree truck. We are so used to each other that we swapped places without saying a word and got the tree trunk out. I enjoyed that we celebrated puzzle wins and all tried to figure out everything together. We didn't escape the room, though. We likely needed another ten minutes more, but we did so well. I thoroughly enjoyed my first experience at an escape room. We got to take a group photo at the end. We went to collect our belongings out of the chest. We thanked all staff who helped us have a good team events and walked upstairs to leave the place. I had a wonderful time seeing my colleagues, both new and one whom I hadn't seen in two years! My first escape room experience was fun and enjoyable. I loved it and would return here for more fun. (373) read more