Who needs Indiana Jones?

Sunday Lelaine, Sam, Alison, and I participated in the Post Hunt. It is a big scavenger hunt involving brain teasers created by Dave Barry, Gene Weingarten, and Tom Schroder. They started it in Miami in the 80s and decided to do it in DC for the first time this year. Several thousand people participated, including several teams who came from Miami just to play. Although we did not finish among the winning teams, and although I was really excited for it but ended up not helping the team very much, it was great. Lelaine, Sam, and Alison were great. Me...not so much.

It began with answering five questions in the Sunday paper. The answers to those questions were combined with five clues to give the locations of the five puzzles. You then had to go the five puzzles and determine the answers, which are numbers. You are given a sheet of 100+ possible answers. Each of the possible answers have an additional clue associated with it to be used in the final puzzle. After trying to solve the five puzzles in three hours, Dave, Gene, and Tom provided the final clue that helps make sense of the additional five clues. This probably makes no sense, but if you are really interested this gives you a run down of the entire game.

I was able to answer the first five questions that helped us identify the locations of the five puzzles, but after that I was pretty much dead weight.

Puzzle 1 - Fortune Cookie
For our first puzzle we received a fortune cookie with the fortune reading "He who has discerning taste will know success". The cookie supposedly tasted like coconut. In the Post Sunday Magazine, there was an ad for a fake movie theater with a movie "Coconut" playing at 11am. Thus, the answer was 11. This was the only of the five puzzles we missed. We were on the right track - we thought the answer was hidden in the Sunday Magazine - but we guessed it was a highlighted number in a review of a Chinese restaurant.

Puzzle 2 - President's Race
For the second puzzle, we came across a park with the four President's from Nats games in a race with a "mature hooved male ruminant" (we thought it was a reindeer). The name of the race was "A Time for Change." Each time the mature hooved male ruminant finished first, then Washington, then Lincoln. We watched a few races without any clue and involving theories involving the sum of the number of reindeer pulling Santa's sleigh or the number of points on his head (10) and the President's: Washington (1), Jefferson (3), Lincoln (16), and Teddy Roosevelt (24 or 26?). Then I realized - or maybe it was Alison or Sam...or all of us at the same time - that the race involved the word "change", several of the participants are on money, and the announcer kept talking about who would finish "in the money." The answer was 126, as in "a buck twenty-six". The mature hooved male ruminant is a buck, Washington is on the quarter...even though I insisted it was Jefferson... and Lincoln is on the penny.

Puzzle 3 - Chinatown Gate
Next we went to 7th and H to the Chinatown arch. Volunteers handed out sheets of paper with translations of Chinese characters and kept saying that you had to see the entire thing. We identified three characters on the arch that appeared on the sheet, but that translated into "too small / think / vastly bigger". I was stumped and went to walk through the crowd to see if I could overhear a smarter team shout out the answer in a Eureka! moment. This didn't happen, but by the time I got back one of my three teammates had figured out that there was a character on the sheet of paper that looked like the entire arch. The translation for it was "Angry Men". The answer to this was 12, as in the play.

Puzzle 4 - City Museum
Outside of the City Museum were three signs reading "13_?", "14_?", and "15_?". The City Museum also happened to be in the Sunday Magazine that day in the section where there are two nearly identical pictures and you must identify the what is different about each. In yesterday's there were 12 differences. Lelaine figured it out quickly that the answer would be three differences between both pictures and the museum. After looking very closely, it was apparent that both pictures in the Magazine used the letter "U" in its proper place in writing on the museum whereas the actual museum has "V's" instead of "U's". Thus the differences were V, V, and V, or in numerical terms 555.

Puzzle 5 - Comics
I missed most of this one. While walking to it a bird decided to relieve itself directly over me. Luckily it was raining out, so I had on a jacket. While I found a hotel to clean up, they rest of the team solved this one. It involved comedians telling jokes with words revealing a hidden code in the comics page of the day's paper.

At this time we thought we had solved all five - remember we were wrong on question 1 but didn't realize it - we decided to go get lunch until the final clue would be announced at 3pm. We thought the five clues were "seek letters that end with a PS", "the 1st letter is the 14th letter and the 3rd letter is the 13th", "all the cardinals are present and accounted for, pontiff (but which ordinal is missing?)", "the answer for you begins with me", and "if the second comes after the first, what comes after the third."

Turns out the pontiff clue was wrong. In its place should have been "All you need to do is remove eds from the middle, and the solution is right in front of you!"

Final Puzzle
Dave, Gene, and Tom took the stage to a great deal of excitement. Three winning teams would win a trip to Florida, and we thought we had a shot. The final clue was simply this: a large pair of crossed swords, assembled on the stage for our contemplation. This, combined with the "remove eds from the middle and the solution is right in front of you" clue was supposed to tell you the answer was in the crossword, which just so happens to be in the Sunday Magazine. We figured this out after about ten minutes. But because we didn't have the correct five initial clues, we thought the answer was in Sunday's crossword, not the solution to last week's ("the solution is right in front of you!").

Long story short, we figured out part of the puzzle, likely involving Caps and home. What we didn't realize were the other clues were 'former' and 'name'. We got to the Verizon Center and found a sign saying "Think Like a Roman". This is where the game ended for us. This is Gene's explanation for what happened to those who knew what was going on:

Anyway: The former name of the Washington Capitols' arena was the MCI Center.

What help can "MCI" give you? Well, it's a Roman numeral. As a Roman numeral, it becomes 1,101.

And the really, really clever noticed there was a building address on the map of 1101 K Street.

At this point, all but about 10 teams were out of contention. (We had spies at various critical places.)

In front of 1101 K Street was a sign. It had gone up just minutes before. It said, "For Opportunities in the District, Call TODAY. And a phone number was given.

If you called the number, you heard a recording. Tom told you: "No, we said call TODAY."

No matter how many times you called that number, that's the message you got.

What you had to figure out that by "call today" we meant call today's date, in the district, namely: 202-518-2008. If you called that number, you got Tom again. A recording. And he told you to write your name on a slip of paper, along with your cell phone number and the Roman Numerals that got you to that site (that would be "MCI") and bring it to the man in a Red Sox cap standing at the intersection of Maple and Elm.

No, the Hunt was not over yet.

There IS no intersection of Maple and Elm in Washington. But there was on the "Solution to Last Week's Puzzle" grid on the crossword page. The answers "Elm" and "Maple" intersected in the lower left, just as we'd asked Merle Reagle to do. If you superimposed that grid on our map, you saw that we pinpointed the spot for you, with a little L, which actually was the letter of intersection in the crossword puzzle. If you ran there and found the man in the Red Sox Cap first, you won The Hunt.


If you are still reading this, you are probably confused. Kind of like me during the game. But it also means that you found this somewhat entertaining. If you think this is at all fun, then you should join us next year for the second Post Hunt. Or in Miami in October for this year's Tropic Hunt.