Urban Challenge.

[saxikath]

My coworker L and I did Urban Challenge in Boston today. Basically, it involves finding 12 checkpoints throughout the city by figuring out a set of clues. We were lent a camera phone for the occasion, and had to get a picture of us at each checkpoint.

It started off with the Trivia Challenge, which was a set of 30 multiple-choice trivia questions. Your score on this determined the order in which you left HQ to start the race. We got 23 right, which was enough to put us into the first group! So we took off, and soon were running all over town.

We'd never have made it without lemurtanis's mad Net research skills. She could take the information, "We're looking for a cafe in this general region of Boston that has the same name as a chain of restaurants that the organizers think is a rip-off of White Castle sliders," and figure out that there's a southern hamburger chain called Krystal's, and a cafe called Krystal's in the right part of Boston. Yay!

We got all our checkpoints right (we skipped one, because we found the "Skip Chick" (her term!) -- by getting a picture of us with her, we got to skip one checkpoint), and finished 31st out of about 140 teams. Apparently, a lot of people got at least one checkpoint wrong, disqualifying them, so it's possible that we'll end up being one of the top 20 teams, and thus qualify for the national challenge in Miami in November. I doubt we'd go; neither of us have much money or vacation time to put into it. But, not too shabby for a couple of rookies, especially with one as out of shape as me.

Comments

[meranthi.livejournal.com]

Awesome!! Is it pairs only or are teams available?? I'd love to try this sometime.

[saxikath]

Pairs only, though some of the teams had support squads doing lookups & stuff.

[meranthi.livejournal.com]

I don't see how you could do it without it...

[saxikath]

No, me neither, but some of the teams seemed to have lots of people supporting them. There was one group of maybe eight teams that seemed to all be from the same company, and they had people solving clues and then waiting near the checkpoints to point them in the right direction when they got close!

[leighjen.livejournal.com]

I can't wait to see the pictures. Do they post them!

You are rocking cool!

[saxikath]

Well, I don't know if they do, but here's us with the Skip Chick.

[leighjen.livejournal.com]

What a great picture! Were you wearing the same t-shirts? Where were you?

I would love to here all the places you went. :-)

[saxikath]

We weren't wearing the same shirts, but we happened to both choose light blue. A lot of teams did have matching shirts.

That picture was on Hanover St. in the North End. It was actually the first picture we took, because the Skip Chick happened to be right on the way to our first checkpoint!

I didn't save most of the pictures, because as the day went on, we got sweatier, and the pictures less attractive. :) But our checkpoints were:

- An apothecary shop with a big gold mortar and pestle outside it, in the North End, clued very directly. The clue quoted the "vessel with the pestle" routine from The Court Jester, which amused me.
- Dello's restaurant, also in the North End -- I expect this is one of the ones that people got wrong, because you had to add up the number of letters in a bunch of state capitals, and if the result was even, the checkpoint was Dello's, and if it was odd, the checkpoint was another restaurant called Dino's.
- The next checkpoint would have been City Gym near the Fenway, but we skipped it, because the clue was weird and we couldn't figure it out.
- Emack and Bolio's, on Newbury Street. lemurtanis kicked butt on this one, by anagramming OIL SACK ABDOMEN in seconds flat.
- Krystal's Cafe, in Bay Village (near the Theater District), as mentioned in the original post.
- The Japanese Lantern in the Public Garden. Another either/or clue that I bet tripped people up; it depended on whether the Matt Hooper character in the novel of Jaws was dead or alive at the end. (Apparently the answers are different for the book and the movie.)
- Winthrop House at Harvard. A tough clue; had to figure out that "Reagan's favorite vision of America" was "a shining city on a hill," and that John Winthrop had used that phrase.
- A bust at the end of Memorial Hall at Harvard. Not so hard from the clue, once I stopped insisting that the place at Harvard that you'd find reliefs of Cicero and Webster was the law school.
- A store called Motto in Harvard Square, clued by giving a list of several state mottos.
- The Littlest Bar, a bar near Park St. in Boston. Clued by "Judging strictly by the name, this bar is to Boston what electrons are to elementary particles."
- Jessica's Deli, a pizza place near Quincy Market. This one was really tough; all we had to go on was that it had a hanging sign in the shape of a slice of pizza with pepperoni, mushrooms, onions, and green pepper, and was within a half-mile of Quincy Market. We basically wandered around until we saw another racer start jumping up and down, and went that way. A passerby had pointed us in the right general direction, but I'm not sure we would have checked that side street without the other team. (The other racers, with a few really hard-core exceptions, seemed very nice; there was a lot of "we'll take your picture if you take ours" at the checkpoints.)
- The Bell in Hand tavern on Union Street near Quincy Market. We had to solve a math problem, which gave us the street address.

[(Anonymous)]

When David and I did Urban Challenge in Atlanta, we had both read on the website that teams should wear matching shirts if possible. Without consulting each other, we both independently decided that the only way to make that work would be to wear our Enigma t-shirts that we'd gotten at the previous NPLcon. We both grinned when we saw each other and realized that our logic had paid off.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Sounds like it was a lot of fun...

[otherbill.livejournal.com]

You rock. :-)

[mixedborder.livejournal.com]

Congratulations!