Our Disney Scavenger Hunt

I'll spare you any suspense, and tell you we did *not* win the D23 Scavenger Hunt. However, we survived. And that, in itself, is a win.

Our Scavenger Hunt swag: lanyard tags, iron-on patches, and a canvas bag.

Imagine, if you will, having three hours to find approximately 150 hard-to-find things scattered throughout an entire theme park filled to the brim with slow-moving tourists and strollers and massive bottle-necked crowds, and also that it's about 100 degrees in the shade. Then imagine many of those hard-to-find things also involving tedious puzzle-solving and letter-counting, and that you have to do two parks back-to-back each day, with maybe 20 minutes in between for lunch and bathroom breaks.

Like I said: survival was its own reward.

The highest-point clues (which of course were the ones we wanted most to solve) involved multiple steps which had us all scrambling from one end of the park to the other. For example: "Find such-and-such plaque in Town Square and list the 67th, 108th, 21st, 51st, 49th, and 57th letters. Unscramble the letters to form a word. Now find an attraction with that word in it. Go to that attraction. Find a poster listing the date it was opened. Now find the shop in Liberty Square with an address matching the last two digits of that date. Write the name of that shop as your answer."

And that was just one.

There would be about 15 ten-point clues (per park) like that. Roughly another 15 were five-pointers, which had multiple steps but all in the same area. The remaining 6o or so were all one-pointers: ie "Find the buggy on a Main Street Window. List the name of that shop's proprietor."

To make it harder, all the questions were mixed together so nothing was arranged by location. This meant our first five to ten minutes was spend speed-reading and marking each clue by the guide map - although the ten-pointers always threw a wrench in the works by making us retrace our steps many times over.

In addition to the park crowds, we also had our fellow Hunters to contend with. With over 500 teams (comprised of two to four people each) in the running, almost every long-puzzle location had a crowd to jostle through - and since we were all counting letters and words on itty-bitty plaques and signs, and people would stick their hands and fingers in the way to count along...yeah. Tough.

Everyone keeps asking if it was fun or not. Umm....kind of? I guess we still haven't decided, although I'm pretty sure I'd do it again. There was a real thrill each time we found something - especially the four-and-five step clues, and you do reach a point when you couldn't *possibly* get any more drenched with sweat, and therefore you just stop worrying about it. Heh.

We tried to guzzle lots of water or Gatorade while zipping through the crowds, and we re-applied our 50+ baby-block sunscreen several times, but even so there was a time or two when I was sure I was going to faint. I pushed myself to my limit, and there was actually something really satisfying about that. Like going to battle. Only with more funny hats. And blisters.

It was also nice to have something that demanded our complete attention for almost the entire time that Blogger was down. We knew there was nothing we could do about our posts disappearing or the site being inaccessible, so at least this kept our minds off it.

There were ways it could have been better, of course - a cooler time of year, a less-crowded time of year, or if the organizers had made sure all the clues were actually *in* the parks. (At least one clue per park had the necessary item missing, broken, or shut down, resulting in lots of wasted time.) I also wish we could have had more interaction with our fellow hunters, since the few we did chat with on the trams or monorail seemed really fun. Quite a few came in from out of state for the hunt, and many had special team t-shirts made up or they dressed alike - one pair of ladies even wore matching pink tutus and tiaras both days.

A team t-shirt we spotted on the tram on Day 2. Isn't it awesome?
(The art is by one of the ladies' brothers, Joshua R. Stones.)

UPDATE: Aaaand the results are in! John and I made a not-too-embarrassing 146th out of the 520 teams competing. The top three winning teams were comprised of professional Disney bloggers, authors, and pod-casters, so the few online boards I've visited since are full of less-than-thrilled competitors. Still, it's hard to be believe that any Disney trivia nut - no matter how hardcore - would know, say, the exact dates when each shop on Main Street was founded, so I don't see how they'd have *that* much of an advantage over the rest of us.

While I don't begrudge any Dizgeek using his/her trivia knowledge to their advantage, it is a shame to learn how widespread the cheating was. Lots of teams split up, helped other teams, used extra people, or got cast members to help them. John and I saw some of this (teams peeking over our shoulders, or copying down answers we'd just blurted out - and one team was even sitting on the answer we were hunting, so it was only random luck that I thought to ask to see behind them) but frankly we were too absorbed in our own hunt to worry about anyone else.

We were very careful to follow the rules, though, as I never let John get more than a dozen feet away from me, and we refused help on more than one occasion from eager-to-please cast members (who really *should* have known better, heh). Still, it makes me wish the grand prize had been something small, so that the urge to cheat would be gone and we could've all just had fun. I think dangling a Disney cruise in front of people is just too much temptation.


So, now that you've slogged through my lengthy report, I'll reward you with a (potentially) fun idea: John and I think it'd be awesome to make our own Disney scavenger hunt. One that you guys could download and print out for family vacations, say, and that combines trivia with hunting so you learn neat little factoids about the attractions and whatnot while you go. I'm sure these probably already exist out there (the Hidden Mickeys books come to mind), but I love the idea of making our own. What do you think? Is that something any of you Dizgeeks would like? And then - and I know this is just CRAZY talk - maybe we could even arrange a timed hunt for any of you who wanted to come to Orlando. You'd compete for...uh...whatever I have in my pocket. Yeah. But...not in a dirty way. More like a Hobbit way. (Trip to Mordor optional.)

So...[hopeful grin]...thoughts?