Good morning.
I hurt.
Umm, please insert all of the requisite thank yous and congratulations here. If you feel I should thank you or congratulate you, then consider yourself thanked or congratulated.
I might as well continue the insne account.
Let's see, collage. We had it down to 3 items, desperately trying to find a tin whistle (which ended up being the one missing), a 25 year service award, or an Olympic Spirit passport. At that point, Ubergeek's team finished theirs and took off! That was frustrating. But only a couple minutes later, we had found the last 2 items we needed to find and took off right behind them.
Lo and behold, we get the next clue...and it involves solving a type of logic puzzle that I do
every single day! And, because most people have never seen one of these before, it was a really really easy one for anyone who's done 'em. So I sat down and finished it in mere moments, and headed off to the parking structure, where we were supposed to look for a car with a 5 foot Mickey parked in the handicap section of one of the levels. As we power walked our way over, we passed Ubergeek's team, still working to decipher the puzzle. Knowing how to do those was a BIG advantage for us.
We we went up to Mickey, which is kinda middlish (and had a working up escalator), checked that level, and decided to divide and conquor (we were allowed to split up for this one). I said I'd go up, and sent CP down, we'd meet at the bottom of the escalators. I go up, and found Mickey on the very next floor, so I go straight down, trying to catch CP on the way. I didn't see her. Meanwhile, CP had gone down one level, didn't find the clue, then discovered that, duh, there was only one level below where we started (the original clue had said it wasn't on the ground floor). So instead of waiting at the bottom, she started going UP looking for me. Grrr, so I'm sitting at the bottom, fuming 'cause she wasn't waiting where she was supposed to. I tried yelling for her, but she didn't hear. Fortunately, it only took a couple minutes to meet back up.
So, onto the the tram headed, as instructed by the next clue, to lockers with a string of numbers in hand that Mickey was holding. The numbers were supposed to line up to reveal a locker location and password. Unfortunately, there was some miscommunication by the MA crew, and the people who wrote the puzzle wrote it with a 4 digit locker number (0144) while the person who filled in the number at the last minute (because of course they had to get the locker that morning) went based on what the ticket said, which had a 3 digit locker number (144). Fortunately, I noticed that the string of number Mickey was holding had a leading blank space, so we knew something wasn't quite right. So we fudged it and it worked out. On the tram, there was a team next to us (the eventual 3rd place team), but we lost track of them right after we got off the tram and didn't see them again. But anyway, we got to what we hoped was the right locker area, put in the code, and voila, the locker opened and had a stack of envelopes. The next clue told us to go....to the freaking Howard Johnson!!
Holy geez, that was a long walk. And the whole time, we saw no other team either in front of us or behind us. Until we were almost there and we saw a team LEAVING. It happened to be the team that we saw going up the Innoventions exit ramp, so we were none too pleased, to be honest. They gave us a thumbs up from across the street. I think I might have glared back, I don't even remember.
Anyway, we get to HoJo, find the room number (which was revealed by the 2 post cards we had traded for earlier with the open teams). We were given a choice, a word search or...trivia challenge against David Koenig! Our first instinct was, "holy crap, we can't beat Koenig at trivia!!!" But it was pointed out that if we did the trivia, we could give up and switch to word search...but not the other way around. So, while CP kinda stood like a deer in headlights, I decided we'd go do trivia, and let CP take the reins. Turned out to be easy, just a matter of buzzing in faster than David. All she needed was one right, she got the 3rd one right. The one she got was, "What was the first attraction to use sophisticated animatronics," easy enough. So we were in and out quick.
A quick translation of Mara script, and, oh joy, walking ALL the way back to Fowler's Inn! (the McD's fry shack in front of Mansion). Oh, man that was a long walk, but we knew it was the end, so we pushed through the pain and motored our way back into the park. We saw the orange beret's in line getting into the park too, we realized they must have not figured out the locker thing and were headed in to look for more lockers. Felt kind bad for them, so we were happy to find out afterwards that (after taking a hint and penalty) they were able to complete the course.
So we hit Fowlers, and get our time logged. We happened to notice that we were the second team to finish...and we happended to notice that team ahead of us had a 40 minute penalty! It was then that we were pretty confident that we had won, 'cause we knew the team we saw leaving HoJo was not very far ahead of us. It also explained how they got a head of us, because we were ahead of them at the collage, and then saw them ahead of us at HoJo. They must have used their Jump Start on the parking garage one, thus the 40 minute penalty.
So yeah, we finally got to sit down...which was a mistake because then our legs started to tighten up. It must have been quite a sight to see the two of us struggle to climb the Pirates bridge on our way to our locker. We were (and still are) wrecked.
But boy was it worth it. Despite the early headaches (all of our own doing), we had a blast. It was really a brilliantly designed game from beginning to end. What an amazing experience.