A puzzle of epic proportions

2019 has become the year of the puzzle in this household.  For Christmas, my husband received a Star Trek puzzle with a whopping 3000 pieces:

It was made in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Original Series and contains elements and characters from all 79 episodes.

I never knew they even made puzzles with that many pieces, and even though we are Star Trek fans, this puzzle seemed way out of our league.  However, in a moment of insanity weakness, we decided to give it a try.  First thing we had to do was to put the second leaf into the dining room table so that we would have room for 3000 pieces.  This puzzle measures almost 3 feet by 4 feet!  Here is what 3000 puzzle pieces looks like:

Remember, that's a dining room table with two extension leaves in it.  Here's another perspective:

So, where to start?  The biggest elements in the puzzle were the space crafts in the top portion so we started there.  It took maybe 10 days to get this far:

Then it was time to get cracking on all the characters at the bottom.  I started sorting out any pieces that looked like part of a face:

My puzzle version of "facial recognition".

If you're a fan of the original Star Trek series, you can probably pick out Sulu, McCoy and Khan among others in the photo above.  It took probably another 10 days to get the bottom half of the puzzle complete.  Here is a detail shot:

One might think we were all finished at this point, but one would be wrong.  We still had all these pieces left:

The outermost edges of the puzzle on all four sides were SOLID BLACK!

It was at this point that I pretty much threw up my hands and said "forget it".  I mean, really, what evil puzzle maker creates two rows of solid black pieces?

My husband was stalwart and persisted.  He worked on it little by little over the course of about a week until he finally finished the whole darn thing.  Here it is, or most of what would fit into one photo:

You can only get so far above a dining room table with your camera to get it all in one photo.

The only sad part is that there were 2 puzzle pieces missing! Wonder how much time we lost looking for those?!

In all, it took close to a month of work to get to the finish line. But that was okay, we were not in any hurry.  During it's construction we had a lot of fun remembering the various characters and episodes.  Sometimes we'd pick out a certain episode on Amazon Prime and re-watch it just for fun.

We lived with the finished puzzle on the dining room table for a while, and then....it was time to pack it up.  (There was no question of preserving it with 2 puzzle pieces missing anyway.)

So we ceremoniously broke it up and put it back in the box until, well, until I don't know when.  I took photos of the two areas where the pieces were missing and stuck them in the box so that if there is a next time, we will be prepared.

Good bye for now, Star Trek puzzle!  Beam us out!