City Solve Urban Race

This post is way overdue.

For Crystal's past birthday, all of my friends and I participated in a self-made city scavenger hunt (The 1st Annual DC Scavaganza). I had so  much fun during this scavenger hunt that I wanted to do another one, an official city one, with Shawn once he was back from his 3 month work trip in California. So I signed us up for the DC CitySolve Urban Race.

The way the race works is that you start at out a signle location with all other teams, where you get a clue that leads you to another location to get a packet of clues.

And so you get a list of clues that, once solved, will lead you to various locations throughout the city. You are to take a picture of yourselves at each of the locations to prove you figured out the clue. Once you figure the clues out, you return to the starting location.

Now Shawn and I were about the only team who were trying to use an old fashioned map and the method of calling people for help with clues, as we are not very smart with DC history or directions and we don't own a fancy iPhone or iPad.

This, as you can imagine, did not work out well for us.

After heading out for our first location (Sweet Green in Dupont Circle), we got very lost (it is quite easy to get lost in circles that have multiple roads with the same name intersecting them!). Since I am a very competative person, I got frustrated right away.

Then, Lindsay sent us on a wild goose chase for a location that doesn't exist- it had something to do with "bar" and rhymed with "swank" or something to that extent.

Lindsay's answer: SPANKS. When we consulted Lindsay for her Googling expertise, the answer she gave us was a "Bar called Spank." Makes perfect sense right ? So we run all around the city looking for Spank, a bar which actually used to exist (and Bailey has a very funny story about loosing some of her belongings at Spank), but was not the true answer to the clue.

Correct Answer:  Hank's (oyster bar).

So we ate of most of our time being lost and looking for imaginary locations.

Us in front of where the bar Spank used to be.

We ended up successfully finding all of the locations (except Hank's, which is OK because you are allowed to skip 1 clue). We only used metro 1 or 2 times, but effectively ran throughout the whole city by foot.

We were grumpy at each other most of the time, as most of our pictures reflect. Notice that we get farther and farther apart.

And, we took sooo long to figure out the clues and get pictures at all of the locations, by time we got back to the original location, we were one of the last 15 teams to arrive and they had already done the awards ceremony. So all around the scavenger hunt was a LOSE. We did not have fun, we were lost, we did not even make it back in time to see the final ceremony (even though we made it back before the official end of the race).