Chinese New Year Treasure Hunt

Every year there is a treasure hunt in San Francisco on the same day as the Chinese New Year parade. I had never heard of it but Anna organized a group of seven of us that grew to eleven the day of the hunt this past Saturday. There are different levels and since it was most of our first times, we did the beginners' level.

The weather could have been worse but not by much. It was raining off and on when we all met at the starting point near the Ferry Building to get our clues. They start handing out all the clues at 3:30 pm but ask that nobody open them. Then at 4:30pm they hand out the score sheets and everyone starts by getting in there groups to solve the first parts of the clues, which are locations where the answers can be found. For example one clue read:

Shakespeare named a play about one of these men, who lived in a city where only Jesus could walk across town without getting wet. Where it is east-bound and dead-ends at a building that makes a point, you'll see a reminder of men who were saddled to their work.

This takes some knowledge of San Francisco plus a map, phone book, web-enabled phone, and some deduction skills. Once we had all the locations figured and marked on the map, we started the hunt itself going from location to location. At each location the second part of the clue requests the answer that one must find there. For the clue above, the second part read:

Who did Majors keep company with?

So at that location you had to find a plaque or sign or something that had what you were looking for, discover the answer, and then move on to the next one. The boundaries keep you within the embarcadero, china town, and north beach area but you cover a lot of ground.

Since we were such a large group we didn't move very efficiently. There were seventeen clues and we made it through about half of them before half the team gave up and stopped to eat dinner. With the more committed members of the team left and more streamlined size we started making good time. We only had a little over an hour and half to go before we had to turn in the answers at 9pm and we still had quite a few answers to find. It was Kai, Vero, Jessika, Amancay (two friends from Venezuela), and me. We were moving quickly and finding the answers with relative ease but time was ticking.

We got to the third to last clue location and were probably as far as you could get from the starting point, near Washington Square in North Beach, with maybe 45 minutes left and we still had one clue we hadn't figured out. We started running towards the next to last clue location while we figured out the last clue on the way. Of course we had to run straight up Telegraph Hill to get to the other side only to find that the street we were on didn't go all the way through. After detouring a block to the right and then back we found the penultimate answer with twenty minutes to go. By this time we had left Vero and Jessika behind and it was just Kai, Amancay, and me running full out to the last clue location, which we solved and raced to the end. We ran through the four Embarcadero buildings and arrived at Justin Herman Plaza where we filled out the answer sheet and delivered it at 8:59pm. Of course it turned out that we needed four people minimum on our team to qualify but we were just happy to finish it on time, even if we did lose people along the way.

Bend 2008

My friend, Mike, and his wife, Yen, bought a house in Bend a few years ago before things got out of hand and then proceeded to crash. Right now they are still living in the Bay Area and rent the house to tenants for the time being. We went up in 2006 for 4th of July and stayed at the house before they rented it out. Now they've been going up every year for Presidents Day and renting a house for the week. Vero and I have gone up for part of the time as well and this year was our third time. Last year Vero learned to snowboard at Mt. Bachelor (and I dislocated my thumb). This year we went to Mt. Bachelor again and Vero was improving quickly. She's linking turns and occasionally going on a blue run. I took this video on our first day out: