adventure – If we had a Marriage, These Would be its Thoughts

2022 Trip: Part 3 - Erin's 40th Birthday Adventure

July 2, 2022 12:09 pm

I stumbled upon r/ConstructedAdventures on Reddit a few months ago and I was excited to find an entire community of people who enjoy building treasure hunts. The main person behind the subreddit actually makes a living professionally building and running personalized treasure hunts / adventures for people.

I've been building small treasure hunts for the girls' birthdays, but I became inspired to try something grander using some of the techniques discussed in that group.

It just so happened that, after Mollie's wedding, Erin and I would both be back home during our birthdays for the first time probably since high school and this year was Erin's 40th birthday. So I thought it would be fun to build a birthday adventure for Erin which would take her around our hometown. So I spent the intervening months planning, designing, building, testing, and redesigning a nostalgia tour for her and her children to revisit her childhood and let her tell her kids why the places on the adventure mattered.

It all began with a slideshow. When visiting Mom & Dad a slideshow of our childhood is always a hit with the grandchildren. At the end of the slideshow I inserted 3 custom-made slides¹:

Background is a still from a home video of Erin stuck in a hamper.

Pictures are of locations in the house where the item is hidden.

It was fun seeing a room full of people watching the slides process what they were seeing and realize something unusual was afoot. And then they were off to find the items. To the attic to find the chest and to the chimney cleanout in the basement to find the key for the lock^2,3:

An old chest with an old lock and key hidden in an old house. What could be more fun?

Inside the chest were a map of the town and three small chests, each locked⁴. One with a letter-combination lock, one with a number-combination lock, and one with a key lock.

After toasting the recipe and chilling the map the path to the public library was revealed^5,6:

In the library a worn copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone contained a bookmark, which led to Anne of Green Gables with a bookmark leading to Watership Down with a bookmark leading to To Kill a Mockingbird. A final bookmark in To Kill a Mockingbird instructed her to look under the shelf and find a UV flashlight⁷.

When played over the bookmarks the flashlight revealed a message: "Report-card dinners and post-concert treats. Search the railings for that which you seek." And on the map it revealed a path leading from the library to the now-closed Friendly's restaurant at which our family regularly celebrated events.

Three clues were taped to the railings around the building (labeled "x of 3," so they would know how many to find)⁸. One was an Ottendorf Cipher for future use. The second was a QR code of a URL which took her to a website I made with 5 songs to be played. These were songs which I believed were known to Erin and were popular during her high-school years.

She needed to identify the artist and title of each song and fill in the answer sheet (the third clue) to reveal her next destination⁹: "WWI Memorial Green Plaque"¹⁰

The WWI Memorial Green was the location where the marching band would meet for the town's annual Memorial Day parade before it moved to the WWII Memorial Green up the street.

She was directed to the plaque and here used the Ottendorf cipher to reveal the combination to one of her locked chests (the combination was "BAND").

Inside the chest was her next clue:

At one point an old train car on an abandoned set of tracks was turned into an ice-cream shop and Erin worked there. Now she needed to return to those tracks and find the fake rock which was apparently rather convincing tucked under a small plant¹¹.

Inside the fake rock was the key to the second small chest. Inside that chest was the next clue:

Included with the clue was some cash to buy lunch at the Cromwell Diner. The only place in town open 24/7 where you might grab a late night meal while hanging out with friends. Also included was the cipher for the last chest that could only be solved by using the Cromwell Diner menu.

In the final chest was the next clue which led to an ice cream shop we both worked at which was known at the time as "Johnny Cool Ice Cream," but is now known as "Scoops and Sprinkles." Some cash for ice cream was also provided as well as a clue sheet requiring the menu board to solve¹².

The menu board clue revealed the word "SANDBOX" which was a classic treasure-hunt location in our yard for the treasure hunts Mom made for some of our birthdays when we were kids.

The final event was hidden in the sandbox in a Zip-Loc bag (with the edge exposed so that it didn't turn into a massive excavation project). This bag contained the final clue and some maps of the house. On the maps several Xs had been marked, but only some of them actually contained presents. The red herrings could be eliminated by applying a flame causing them to disappear¹³:

Once the false marks had been removed all that was left was to collect the presents!

The Secrets

I designed the slides myself using GIMP. And ordered them printed and mounted from Slides From Digital.
Larger chest from Amazon.
Antiquey lock from Amazon.
The chests inside were small, unfinished wood chests from which I removed the useless little clasps and screwed in bent eye-screws that would allow a lock to be attached. Not very polished looking, but functional.
The heat-revealed writing is lemon juice, my own preparation: 1 tablespoon heated in the microwave for 90 seconds at 20% power, which makes it a little less runny and causes the writing to reveal faster when toasted. Written using a #0 brush using a light table.
The cold-revealed writing is a Frixion pen, first made to disappear by heating it up (see below).
UV flashlight from Amazon.
I really, really wanted this location to reveal just a QR code by pouring water out onto the concrete using a hydrophobic spray. But I couldn't get a stencil to give me a sharp enough result and I had to abandon the idea due to time constraints.
I tried a cardboard stencil (cut with an Xacto knife) but it immediately began to warp when the spray hit it, so it didn't stay flat even with tape.
Then I tried an acrylic sheet (drilled and cut with a coping saw). but it was too brittle and thick and I couldn't get clean enough cuts and the spray couldn't effectively settle into the holes. A thin, non-brittle plastic sheet might work though.
With more time I would have fancied up the webpage a little more, but I burned all my extra time on the stencils.
1. Chumbawamba - Tubthumping
2. Dexter Freebish - Leaving Town
3. Dixie Chicks - Goodbye Earl
4. Bare Naked Ladies - One Week
5. Semisonic - Closing Time
I intended to pre-fill space 20 with a 'q' since I had no Qs in the song titles, but I apparently forgot. The group, however, was smart enough to figure out the missing letter.
Fake rock from Amazon.
I made a last minute font and styling change to this clue sheet and didn't review it enough times and messed up two of the letters. But she figured it out all the same. The image here has been corrected.
Ink that disappears is accomplished via the Frixion pens previously mentioned. When heated they become invisible.

Road Trip 2018: Craters of the Moon National Monument

December 9, 2018 7:44 pm

After our science-y adventures we finally reached Craters of the Moon National Monument. I can vaguely remember going here as a kid at some point. And I think we recreated that trip almost in its entirety.

I can remember hiking up Inferno Cone and the deceptiveness of the climb. When you think you're just about at the top you find out the trail just levels out for a moment and the angle hides the rest of the cone. Heather and I went to the top....

While Jess and Corinne waited at the bottom:

We saw the snow at the bottom of Snow Cone:

And look, pictorial evidence that I was on this trip!

That evening we had dinner at another Culver's, this one in Twin Falls:

And we pushed on to Elko, NV and found a hotel with a pool for the girls to do some swimming. The next day it was all the way home and the Great Road Trip of 2018 was finally over.

Road Trip 2018: EBR-I & Arco Science Park

7:01 pm

As one drives west across Idaho from Idaho Falls on highway 20 there is a whole lot of nothing until, bam, EBR-I and Idaho National Laboratory. EBR-I is open to the public and we decided, what the heck, we likely will never be by here again. EBR-I is Experimental Breeding Reactor One and was able to power its own facilities as a nuclear power plant.

Here is the floor where fuel rods were stored:

We didn't spend much time there (Corinne and Heather were not exactly interested) so it was on to Arco for lunch at Pickle's Place.

Across the street from Pickle's Place is the Arco Science Park. Might as well let the girls burn off some energy. They have a torpedo and a submarine conning tower.

The conning tower from the USS Hawkbill, SSN-666:

Then we were ready for our main destination of the day, Craters of the Moon National Monument.

Road Trip 2018: Grand Teton National Park

6:40 pm

After our Dinosaur Dig adventure we began our return trip west. We drove out past the end of civilization into the wilderness until we came to The Hatchet which is pretty much entirely by itself along Highway 287. We watched the sunset behind the mountains wreathed in smoke from the fires raging across the country and went to bed.

The next morning it was up and out to try to get into Grand Teton National Park while there was still parking available. We made it, but not by much. We stopped in a shop to pick up some snacks for our hike up to and around Moose Pond. Sadly, we didn't see any moose. But it was still quite pretty and calm.

This sign was suspiciously similar to the signs in Jurassic Park....including the arrow which looks like you could peel it off and point it in any direction.

Once we finished our hike we drove to Jackson Hole and rode the gondolas up the mountain.

Hey, when Heather insists I take a picture of her making a silly face, it's going to end up on the internet...

After Grand Teton we headed into Idaho. I had originally hoped to get all the way to Arco, but it became clear that was not going to happen. So we found somewhere to stay in Idaho Falls, ate some Culver's for dinner, and called it a night.

Road Trip 2018: Wyoming Dinosaur Center

September 30, 2018 11:38 am

After the family reunion wrapped up, we headed up to Provo for Jess' brother's wedding. Then we drove up in to Wyoming to the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis. We thought this would be a fun and unique experience in light of Heather's long and continuing interest in paleontology.

We signed up for a "Dig for a Day" package where we got to go out to one of their active dig sites, work on the site, tour the nearby Sundance formation, work in the lab, and have a personal tour of the museum.

We were a little concerned with how well it would work out given the girls' ages, but it was a blast. Our guides, Seth and Emily, were fantastic with the girls. They found age-appropriate tasks for them both and kept them engaged and excited about the trip. The only downside is just how far out in the middle of nowhere Thermopolis is; but if you've got kids interested in paleontology and you happen to be anywhere in the vicinity, I highly recommend the experience.

We got to work on Foot Site which has been active for ~20 years yielding over 550 fossils so far. One primarily finds diplodocus bones there.

Here come a lot of pictures:

Heather found a fossil! When found, fossils are marked with white-out and an identifier is written on the white-out. So the white-splotch she's pointing at is the white-out. In this formation, the fossils are a dark grey color among the light tan of the surrounding rock.

As the discoverer of the fossil, she got to put her name in the site tracking book on the entry for the fossil. This information will follow the fossil through its scientific life cycle.

I found a fossil too! One of our guides made an initial determination that it's a chevron from the tail of a diplodocus. That will validated once fully excavated. It's fully embedded in stone, so I spent quite a while carefully chiseling away stone. After being encouraged to be a little more aggressive I managed to break the fossil twice. But that was no big deal, some super-glue and were back in business.

My approach to finding the fossil was to estimate the depth of the existing fossils on the site and then simply move a few feet over and work my way down to that same level. And it worked!

Kyle's Fossil. This is about 4 inches of exposed fossil and the guides estimate it's probably about half of the bone.

We had lunch at Foot Site and did a little more excavating. Then we drove out to the Sundance Formation. Which is the shores of an ancient sea. Here fossils of clams and other sea creatures are just littered all over. At Foot Site they catalog all the fossils and return them to the lab for scientific evaluation. At Sundance, anything you can find you can keep. We have a 1-gallon bag of fossil-containing rocks from here.

It was hot out on Sundance, so we shortly returned to the air-conditioning of the lab and learned a bit about specimen cleaning. I believe the guides said that for every hour on the dig site you end up spending about 6 hours in the lab. We used dental picks, toothbrushes, and pneumatic chisels to carefully remove the rock surrounding some vertebra.