I went back to Maryland last weekend, both to see my family and also for the Washington Post Hunt, this year in its second incarnation.
I spent the first day with my sister in:
which (contrary to what its benches may boast) I heretofore largely knew as the crime-ridden metropolitan area that just happened to surround Camden Yards and the Baltimore Aquarium. Emily lives there now and is more familiar with the parts of the city that aren't featured so prominently in The Wire, so Em took me around to a couple places before we met up with my parents for dinner in Inner Harbor. The most memorable, for me, probably being the excellent dive-y joint called Nick's in Mount Vernon where we dined on Blue Point oysters on the half-shell, softshell crab sandwiches and drank Clipper City beer while perched precariously on what appeared to be a barrel.
yum.... Maryland blue crabs
Having been in California so long, I'd forgotten how scarce brick was out here. In those Baltimore, where seismic activity is less of an overriding concern, it seemed to be the material of choice:
On Sunday morning, we drove back down to DC for the Post Hunt, picking up Wei-Hwa (who I lured out from California to be my Hunt buddy) on the way. We all took the Metro together down to Freedom Plaza, where we met up with our fourth teammate (Doug Hoylman), the NPL crowd (who Wei-Hwa and Doug seemed to know) and the guys from Boneless Chicken Cabaret (who won the Post Hunt last year). Freedom Plaza was packed; we guessed that something on the order of 8000 people showed up for the Hunt, which is not too shabby for a day where thunderstorms dominated the weather forecasts. The Post Hunt suggests teams of four, which means about 2000 teams participated.
The Post Hunt works like this:
The guys behind the Hunt (Dave Barry, Gene Weingarten and Tom Schroeder) publish all the start materials in that weekend's edition of the Washington Post Magazine. This includes a FAQ, a map of the Hunt Area, an answer sheet and an explanation of last year's puzzles (so a pretty much a standard kit). You also get a list of five gag questions that supply one half of the coordinates for the all of Hunt puzzles. At noon, in Freedom Plaza, they announce the second half of the coordinates, which gives everyone present the locations of the five initial puzzles. You have three hours to solve all of the starting puzzles (although for veteran puzzle people, this is more than enough time to solve all of the puzzles, enjoy a leisurely lunch and do a light tour of downtown DC -- we finished the initial puzzles in a little over an hour).
Each of the starting puzzles, which can be done in any order, solves to a number which -- if correct -- corresponds to an entry on the answer sheet. These five entries, read in order by increasing numerical value, are one half of the meta puzzle. You receive the second half of the meta at 3pm, when all teams are asked to reconvene at the start location. From there, it's a straight race to see which team can solve, decipher and then follow the meta instructions first to win the event (this seems to usually involve handing your cellphone number to someone at a particular location on the map).
This year's puzzles were quite fun -- sort of on the BANG level, but with more red herrings (quite a few of the puzzles just had a lot of extra information in there that simply wasn't relevant, so maybe more like Stanford Game-esque). Wei-Hwa and I didn't have the highest of expectations, based on our run-through of last year's puzzles and the practice puzzles on the site, but this year's were pretty cute (and definitely well-presented, as well). Here's the a photo of Wei-Hwa at the first puzzle (although it was the weakest of the five, in my opinion, but the only one I took a photo of):
It's a large posterboard with images of various commodities, listed by name (oil, gold, corn,
kobe beef, silver, something else), price, and small, irrelevant graph of past pricing trends. Two staffers in Uncle Sam costumes stood next to it, throwing fake $100 bills into the crowd while announcing that this was the "Post Hunt Stimulus Package". Each team had to retrieve a bill, notice that the word "God" (from "In God We Trust") had been changed to "Gold" and then simply take the list commodity price of gold as the final answer. So, not the most complicated of puzzles (while practicing with Wei-Hwa, I definitely tended to over think the solutions), the other ones were a bit cuter: my favorite one was just a man silently handing out small slips of paper that read "Find the missing letters in what I said." My sister recognized him as the author of the First Person Singular column in that weekend's issue of the Washington Post Magazine, and sure enough, the three paragraph description of his job (a watch repair man) never used the letters 'S', 'I' or 'X'. I'd read the column on Saturday morning, while scouring the Magazine for potential hints, and hadn't even noticed that he never used the word "is" -- so I thought that was rather well done.
We had two hours to kill after solving the initial puzzles, so we had a quiet lunch at the Old Post Office Pavilion, while trying to backsolve the meta (with middling success) and then took a quick tour of different sites on the map that we thought might be relevant (one of the answers mentioned cinematic posters, so we went to every theatre within the Hunt radius, with no luck).
At 3pm, the meta phase began. Dave Barry stood up on the stage and played a song clip, "Old MacDonald had a farm", on the guitar (this was the 1/2 of the meta clue we didn't have). We got through the first couple steps of the meta pretty well, screwed up the third step a bit (sloppiness) and then red herring'd in a major way -- coming up with a reasonably plausible, but completely incorrect alternative puzzle solution that left us sniffing around the White House lawn (where we ran into a couple teams following the same red herring). By that time, the Hunt was over. The meta was quick this year (compared to past Miami Tropic Hunts and last year's Post Hunts). And quite a few teams had solved it correctly within the first half hour, (with, I think, something of a footrace to the end for the win, since the end locale was so close by).
So, no $2000 for us, but I had a lot of fun anyhow. I think I'd go back to do it again next year (although I don't know if I would necessarily do it if my family weren't in the area). We met up with the NPL crowd and Todd and Jack from Boneless Chicken Cabaret at the Elephant and Castle for a post-Post Hunt happy hour, where we bored Emily to tears by talking about puzzles for several hours.
Good times! Capped off Sunday night by hosting an impromptu board game night with Wei-Hwa and Justin (one of the NPL guys who happened to live on the Red Line and thus rode the Metro back with us) at my parent's house, where I lured my mother into playing with us! The next morning, I caught the 6 am flight back to CA, with a stopover in Cincinnati, where I ate an early breakfast (5 am California time) at:
That's right, friends - airport Chick-Fil-A!! Why drive the hour to Fairfield when you can fly 8 hours to have a Chick-Fil-A chicken sandwich in an airport food court? In retrospect, it turns out there are two Chick-Fil-A locations within 10 minutes of my parent's house, but really, I was a bit too busy stuffing myself with as much East Coast seafood as I could get my hands on to realize I was back in Chick-Fil-A country (also Dunkin' Donuts country, but I don't really like donuts or coffee).
Edit: Apparently there's a lone Dunkin' Donuts out in Antioch. Perhaps Ian can try it out while home for the weekend.
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