How I Spent Saturday
On Friday night I went to bed just after 7:30 p.m. to wake up at 3:30 a.m. to get to the airport in time for my early morning flight. All went according to plan and Jet Blue was terrific. I got my rental car and waited for Adam's flight to arrive, which was also on time. Aside from one night of driving my mother home from downtown Lakewood, I hadn't driven since MichiCon in July 2007 so I was pretty nervous, but South Florida proved to be wonderfully easy to drive around. Not that I didn't make any wrong turns, which I did repeatedly, but I never thought I'd crash the car while trying to recover.
On the way to the hotel Adam and I went to a sandwich shop where he had a bagel, which made me laugh a little because we had just left New York. After a wrong turn I found the hotel. They didn't give me the suite I'd requested due to a problem with their website, so they offered to reduce the rate to $99/night. SWEET! The "efficiency" where we stayed was very nice and probably around the size of my apartment. We didn't see any other guests so we weren't sure if anyone was taking advantage of the "clothing optional" option. We got dressed for the beach which was incredibly close, and I went right into the water. Adam was in and out but I stayed in for ninety minutes. Nothing makes me happier. The sky was looking ominous so we convinced each other to get out of the water. As soon as we were out the skies opened and the rain came pouring down. We rushed back into the room to watch a 1980s movie classic that somehow we'd both inexplicably missed: Teen Witch. It was so bad it was good and we were sorry we'd missed the first half hour. At least we caught the white rap interlude.
I felt so comfortable driving that I just pointed the car south and drove...we had smoothies and tried to go to the International Swimming Hall of Fame but it was closed. I was looking at the Fun Map during Teen Witch and noticed the Dania (rhymes with "mania", not "Tonya", according to Adam) Jai Alai center. The two of us had entered CESTA, PELOTA, and FRONTON into enough crossword grids to last us a lifetime, so we had to go. I finally turned down Fronton (Adam said he preferred Egg Drop) Blvd. in Dania to find a fairly large um...arena? With only about fifty people at most in the entire audience. We caught the last three games and it was interesting to watch this different sort of sport. Adam and I found some programs and saw that people bet on the results as if the players were horses. Despite the empty audience some people were yelling as if it were a major event: "You such, Ikeda! Get out of here!" "Get off the fronton" would have been more amusing, but it was still funny to see people get so worked up. It was 5:20 or 5:30 so it was time to head up to Brian and Trip's house for their pre-Hunt party. We had been told that there would be a "surprise", so I was hoping it would be a good one.
It was raining pretty hard by the time we got there. Trip, Brian, Todd, and Eric were there when we arrived, and afterward Dave, Justin, Kat, and Elaine got there. The house was as beautiful as we all saw in Wordplay. The perfect hosts offered me a drink and since I was driving and had given up carbonated sodas in July 2007, I decided to have a V8. Adam, on the other hand, had three vodka and tonics.
After we finished the pizzas that we'd ordered, it was time for the surprise...Trip had made a Herald-style Hunt around his house! What a great surprise!!! We each got a cartoon map and a list of numbers with weird sentences, just like they have at the Herald Hunt. Since four of us had done the Herald/DC Hunt at least once and four of us hadn't, we paired off into experienced/inexperienced pairs: Adam/Justin, Eric/Dave, Todd/Kat, and me/Elaine. Trip gave us co-ordinates for four of the clues while the fifth would be scattered throughout the house in plain sight.
I had a lot of trouble orienting the map with the house, but Elaine knew right away that one of the locations was the mailbox. The rain had subsided when we went outside, but I hung back as others charged for the mailbox...and ended up soaking their feet in a puddle. Hurray for laziness on my part! Poor Elaine's feet were soaking wet. There was an envelope there for each of us, but I didn't open mine until later. Elaine got out of her soaking shoes and we went to their Apple desktop. I heard music so I knew that had to be important. Elaine identified "Hey 19" while I got "Route 66", and 1966 was one of the numbers on the page. (Each clip ended right before the number was about to be sung.) Trip revealed during the hunt that "Sign of the Times" was in between the two songs since only one (or was it none?) of the teams identified it. The number 1254 was also on the list.
On to the game room where we found a Scrabble board with many different-colored tiles on every space. Elaine saw a "2" in white tiles. It was a little hard to see at first because it reminded me of one of those color blindness tests with all of the other colors creating a distraction. The word "FIVE" was written in blue tiles on this same board, while "VIII" was in red. Across the board was "USAUSAUSAUSA..." with all U's in red, all S's in white, and all A's in blue. I knew that Trip wasn't that jingoistic and correctly took it to be a clue to the order of the three numbers and got the answer: 825.
The next location was a linen closet. When we opened it there was a sign on the middle shelf that said something like "Fill in the grids with what you see here. No, not the towels and blankets [they were on the top and bottom shelves], just what you see here. If you get angry when you read the answer, just try looking at it a different way." (I know my wording is off, Trip, sorry about that.) Well, there wasn't a whole lot there. We saw a stuffed fish (not a real one, a stuffed animal), and a picture of the Devil from The Joker's Wild. And that was it, but the grid had space for two four-letter words and three five-letter words with five spaces colored green. What? I figured that FISH had to go in one of the four-letter spaces, but that meant that one of the five-letter words had to start or end with F. Not DEVIL...not SATAN...OH, SHELF! DEVIL crossed SHELF nicely, so I was able to fill in four of the green squares to get L*VID. It must be LIVID! But how do you read that another way...oh, yeah, Roman numerals! Elaine put them in order to get DLVII, or 557, which was on the list.
We then, finally, opened the envelopes from the mailbox to find...Sudoku! D'oh! I actually like Sudoku, but I tend to screw it up. Nine of the squares were colored gray, but none of the squares had numbers in them. Each of the seventy-two white squares had a clue to something in the house, like the number of yellow cushions in the living room or the place Brian's team's standing in a pinball tournament. Clearly I suck at counting, and Elaine got more of the numbers than I did. I tried to fill in the numbers using Sudoku logic and messed up somehow. Elaine also fell into traps, but she had a potential answer that did work out to one of the numbers on the list.
The fifth of the first-round puzzles was scattered around the house. Puzzle #1 was a map of Connecticut with the word "Connecticut" blacked out and "11 - 4 = ?" which lead us to CONNECT. Puzzle #2 was a thermos with "7 - 4 = ?", or THE. Puzzle #3 had "Darwin" blacked out along with "6 - 3 = ?" for DAR, and Puzzle #4 was a Herald Hunt T-shirt with "6 - 4 = ?" for TS. Connect the darts...la la la la...so we went back into the game room to look at the dart board...and nothing. I had noticed, though, that there were some darts on the map. We drew lines from Dart 1 to Dart 5 and saw what looked like a backwards 4, but it was one of the numbers on the page...
We were the first team to have all of the numbers (or at least to tell Trip that we did) and a while later all four teams reconvened to the living room. Trip's final clue was "May the fours be with you." I tried looking at every four letters...nothing. The fourth word of each answer...nothing. Then, finally, we realized that it was every four-letter word in each clue, which worked if the backwards 4 from connecting the darts was actually cluing a different number: 1, which was definitely plausible. This gave us the sentence:
"TAKE EACH BONE FROM THIS HUNT THAT TRIO WILL FORM YOUR NEXT STEP"
Bone? What the hell...Elaine then wrote "B-1." B-1! At B-1 in the map was a can of paint. Paint...paint...trio of paint? Elaine remembered that the Sudoku had co-ordinates. At location B-1 was an 8. Trio? From my Scrabble playing I knew that the board locations could have co-ordinates so we ran back into the game room. Eric and Dave were also there but I immediately saw that the board had co-ordinates written on the sides and at B-1 was the letter V. Paint...8...V...OH!!! I didn't see how the paint fit in (later we found out the paint can clued "can". Oops.) but no wonder Trip and Brian had cans of V-8 in their house! I'm so glad I quit drinking carbonated sodas! (Did you think I just mentioned that detail earlier for completeness?) We ran to the kitchen and when I opened the refrigerator I saw that one of the cans of V8 had four darts in it, so I threw one at the ceiling lamp and it shattered into a million pieces revealing the prize!
Okay, that's not true. There were four darts but they didn't have points or feathers. What they did have, though, was a message taped around each one saying something like, "The prize is in the one room you did not enter as part of this hunt." Elaine knew that was the master bathroom and I immediately ran the wrong way. She reeled me back, we went to the bathroom, opened the shower door and HOORAY! There was a basket on the shower floor with a "WINNER" ribbon and various books, pumpkin Peeps, a Wordplay DVD, etc. WE WON! Elaine and I divided the spoils and I also took the stuffed fish and the remaining V8s because I was the only person there who drinks it.
OMG, that was so much fun! Trip, you really outdid yourself. Actually, Trip outdid the actual Herald Hunt. It was fun hanging around with Brian and Justin (my team) and the others at the actual Herald Hunt, but it wasn't as clean or elegant or interesting. I'll let someone else blog about the Herald Hunt. Thank you, Brian and Trip, for letting us in your house, and thank you, Trip, for running such a wonderful Hunt!
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NYT Fri. 11:55
NYT Sat. 11:39