Bakker Bugle Blog

It wasn’t easy – but we’ve finally put our world together. It took two more marathon sessions, but we finished our puzzleball globe. When you last checked in, we had completed Antarctica and the surrounding waters, and we’d managed to hook up with South America.

Next, Will managed to connect Australia and some of south east Asia to the main section.

Some puzzle work escaped the all-seeing eye of the camera. As you can see, Europe, most of Asia and Africa came together too quickly for Will to grab a snapshot.

We must admit that the puzzle has some “cheats” because each piece has a number and an arrow pointing to a neighboring piece. We do believe that the oceans would be nearly impossible without these aids. Here is a view of the inside of the puzzle.

We were able to get most of the land masses connected, giving us what we briefly called “the Pac-Man world”:

At this point, the puzzleball was sturdy enough that we used the stand to hold it up.

Will’s own challenge was the Pacific Ocean. So while I finished the little bits here and there, Will filled out the Pacific.

And then it was time. We had the Pacific ready to attach to the rest of the puzzle.

We thought it would be easy! We were wrong.

We will spare you the 45 photos and 10 minutes of video. It was a lot more difficult than I expected to get it all in there. Finally, between the two of us, we got it together.

We love our puzzleball! It is really sturdy once you get it together. I appreciate having a globe in the house, as it give you a much different perspective of county/continent sizes. Most maps don’t do the southern hemisphere justice.

Hearty recommendations for the puzzleball from this house. Ravensburger had a ton of designs — not just globes. Perhaps you and your sweetie could have a Valentines day challenge!