Black Von Treasure Hunt

25 Sep 07 @ 10:15 AM  category » adventure

Big hand for Felix and Michelle Salmon, who are organisers par excellence of fun actitivies. This past Sunday they arranged a Pirate Treasure Hunt around Wall Street, Battery Park and the South Street Seaport. The planning - which they said took two months - was meticulous. There were maps, and clues on envelopes, with more clues if you really needed them *inside* the envelopes. There were about 40 of us - 6 or 7 teams of 7. Our lot were on bikes and rollerblades. We pitied the team on foot. One of our lot was in fact on foot, but Oliver was a stud and cycled her around on his handlebars all day.

I learned a lot about downtown Manhattan on this trip. I've never been to Battery Park, and never knew Castle Clinton was an Opera House when it was built. I'd never heard of the oldest drinking establishment in the city - the Bridge Cafe - and I didn't know that Alexander Hamilton was buried in the Trinity Church graveyard. Nor that the Deutsche Bank building is on the site of the home of the Pirate John Pitt.

Anyway, there were points for arriving at the pub (St. Dympna's, on St. Mark's) first, with the least number of opened envelopes, and more points for the Pirate flag and the map we made, and the song we created. Our song was spectacular, and got 17 out of 10 points, but that might have been to make up for the fact that I failed to read the instructions properly and spent ages drawing a detailed map of the area but forgetting to mark on the map where we had been. And we didn't pay attention to the carefully written notes on the back of the Pirate pix that were at each location, and hence couldn't answer any of the quiz back in the pub...still, the Stunning Cunts song was memorable, with a chorus that got them all singing along:

We are a bunch of Stunning Cunts,
Stunning Cunts are we,
We're hotter, and wetter and slicker than you
Because we love the sea. (aside: - men)

You get the idea.

But it was the hunt for the Grand Prize that really made me laugh. Felix told us that there was an individual in Tompkins Square Park in possession of a treasure chest, and the first person to bring the chest to him by the fountain in the park would win the grand prize.

You have likely never seen about 20 grown up New Yorkers dash out of a pub, sprint down the street, and then run madly about in Tompkins Square Park in search of a treasure chest. It's a highly amusing sight. But after about 10 minutes I got bored, since everywhere I turned there was another pirate, but no chest. Still, seeing a bunch of crazy people harrassing the locals in the park, asking them if they had a chest - that was amusing.  I thought Felix had been too clever by half and in saying an "individual" rather than a person, he meant it was sitting in the hands of a statue or something. So I wandered around looking for statues (there aren't any, except one on top of the fountain).

Much to everyone's frustration in the end, it turned out that there was no chest on display. An elderly black lady (the mother of a neighbour, I believe) had the chest wrapped up in a shopping bag. And the winner of the prize had literally gone round the park asking everyone with a bag if they had a treasure chest.

And the prize? A (to be) custom made 24 carat gold pirate tooth (cap, to fit over your own tooth). Ha.

Lots of fun was had by all. I am noodling on themes for a rematch later in the year.