Last week, Megan had her 12th birthday. We split the festivities into two parts: a party with her friends over the weekend and, later on her actual day, our own family cake-eating and present-opening.
I think the party was a big hit. Megan had invited two of her good friends for a sleep-over, and once they were fairly settled in, I asked them to sit down on the sofa while I, trying to be stern, announced that they had to follow certain rules of the house. All three girls gave me a curious look, but when I told them the first rule was in the bottom of a small chest of drawers in the living room, the jig was up and the scavenger hunt was on.
Our plan was this: Suzanne and I had prepared a series of clues, and while the girls were figuring one clue, I'd run to the next place in town to hide the follow-up clue (we couldn't leave all the clues out ahead of time because all sorts of things could have happened to them). When the girls were on their way, Suzanne would send me a text message warning of their imminent arrival.
Clue 1 was a quickie little poem that told the girls to find five brown envelopes around the house. Inside each was a puzzle piece of the neighborhood. Once the girls put the pieces together, they'd see an X at the park down the street and a message that said, "Find the man in the black hat."
I had to wear the black hat, so as soon as the girls were dashing around the house, Alex, Colleen, and I scurried to the park. I sat on a bench, hat on head, and waited. The girls must have run the entire way because they made it a few minutes later and asked me if I had a clue for them. I handed them a brown envelope that had this inside:
This is the Cadillac Ranch, which is just a bit out of town. And if the girls didn't get it, there was a second clue near the park's swings that told them to paste the longitude and latitude into Google Maps.
Once the girls ran home to use the computer, we drove off to the Cadillac Ranch and waited until we got Suzanne's text message. Unfortunately, I hadn't quite planned on a delay between Suzanne's phone and mine, so when I got her message saying she and the girls were leaving the house, I saw them coming up the road behind us.
Alex and I darted to the Cadillacs buried in the ground and dropped off the next clue, much to the consternation of the strange guy with the red goatee who was spray painting the very car I had circled on the clue (people spray paint these cars all the time - it's an encouraged expression of art that usually ends up as misspelled descriptions of human anatomy). Seconds behind us were the girls who ripped open the clue and knew exactly what it meant. (This one asked them to find a large heart, which they understood to be a sculpture downtown.)
Once again, Alex, Colleen, and I zipped away in my car and made it to the heart sculpture downtown just as Suzanne was pulling up on the street next to us. This clue was a little tricker. It simply had HE + a picture of the Washington Monument. It meant for them to go to the Helium Monument, which is right outside the Discover Center science museum. In case the girls didn't get it, I hid a second clue by a horse sculpture (there are a lot of these horses in Amarillo). I used a substitution cypher on this one and shifted the letters of the actual clue by four, and if they needed help with that I placed a guide to decoding the clue in the back of the van.
Once at the Helium Monument, the girls ran around looking for the next clue. While they were doing that, Megan read aloud one of the plaques about the monument and one of her friends rolled her eyes and shouted, "It's Saturday! We're not supposed to be learning anything!"
Suzanne wrote this clue. It was a clever fill-in-the-blank, the first word being: "Snoopy's nickname is _________ Cool." The next word was a nickname of someone Colleen and Megan knew at school. The answer was the name of a nearby restaurant called Joe Taco. That's where we had dinner.
During dinner, the waiter gave out the next clue. He passed out four envelopes. Each contained one picture: a school, a house, a rock, and the word big with a slash through it next to a theater marquee. The girls got this one right away. After dinner they were going to see the musical School House Rock at the Amarillo Little Theater. Megan was jazzed about that one!
The play was tremendous fun, and afterward the director gave the girls their last clue by telling Megan he had an itch on his back. He asked her if she could scratch it. (Megan knows him very well, so this isn't as odd as it seems, although her friend Abby did say, "Well, this is creepy.") When Megan did, she felt the envelope under his shirt. He yanked it out, giving them the final clue, which was, "Go home and eat cake."
And toot sweet, that's what we did. Happy Birthday, Megan.
Sounds like a great creative party!
Posted by: mark | January 22, 2010 at 03:04 PM