On Christmas day Joyce said we should be ready to leave around 1:30, and that we should put on clothes suitable for being outside. Right at 1:30 we heard a knock on the door. At the door was a wrapped package, and by the time we got to the door, whoever dropped it off was already driving away. Here I can be seen looking into the camera as I think to myself, "what is this?"
Joyce then opened up the package, which was the first clue to our Christmas day scavenger hunt! (The event was set up by someone else. Though Joyce arranged for it to happen, she didn't know any more about the clues than we did.)
The first clue took us to Walgreens. As we drove up I suggested that perhaps we all had to get the H1N1 vaccine before they gave us the next clue...
Fortunately I was wrong, and we just had to pick up some pictures at 1-hr photo.
Those pictures took us to the giant tire swing in downtown Grand Rapids.
At the tire swing we picked up a large sheet that had a bunch of holes cut out of it, and the name of the library at Calvin College. We figured out that we needed to hold it up to the plaque in front of the building to get our next clue, which read "Classifieds personals gr press".
We then went to Sarah's house which is nearby to grab that day's paper, which had our next clue. This clue references a book that was a childhood favorite of Becky's, and said that "The King" (Bernie) should choose who calls the given phone number...
This clue took us to the windmill at the post office in Holland.
This clue then sent us to JP's, which is Becky's favorite coffee shop.
Hidden in the sculpture outside of JP's was a bag full of puzzle pieces.
Once assembled, the pieces told us where we could find our final treasure.
At the last stop, we found a wrapped package full of treasure chest Christmas ornaments, and a note reminding us to always "treasure the time we have with each other." Here we are all holding the ornaments, which will always be a great reminder of what a fun day we had, and how blessed we are to have such wonderful families.
This Extravaganza '09 was a blast, and is certainly something we will talk about for a very long time. This whole adventure took us about 3 hours, and could have been much longer if Sarah hadn't caught a mistake I made in reading one of the clues...
The clue that took us to JP's involved counting the number of times the words "Just for now" are sung in the intro of this song, and then doing some math on that number to arrive at our address. However, I didn't catch the part where it said to just do this for the intro of the song. Instead, we listened to the song multiple times through, counting the number of times it was sung in the entire song (which is somewhere around 120)! In addition to being a bit obnoxious, the results of that number would have taken us to some random address on 98th Street instead of 57 8th Street! Many thanks to Sarah for catching my mistake before we drove all the way out to 98th Street. And a fair warning before you click on that link above: that song is still stuck in my head two weeks later.
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