Going of my classmate Eric Thompson’s post on law students being competitive…I would have to agree, law students are definitely competitive, so much so that our Student Government Association (SGA) held a scavenger hunt/race around the city for us with prizes for the top three teams and the team with the best costumes.
When race day arrived, things did not look good for our team. We originally had four people but one had to drop out because of school work. Another one had injured his neck while swimming, but was going to push through and compete anyways. Nobody of the remaining three had a smartphone, which the instructions said would be helpful to look up answers to the clues. Thankfully our phones had cameras so that we could take photos of ourselves at the various sites/objects on the scavenger hunt.
At the start, we opened the clues envelope. Slight panic! We discovered that we knew four of the sites, but would need to look up the remaining clues. We decided to walk from school to the Kenmore T-stop and call people on the way to get the answers to the clues. Thank goodness we had such obliging friends! Once we reached the Aquarium (we figured this was the furthest point and we’d work our way backwards), we had figured out what all the monuments were and realized that they were thankfully in a somewhat of a straight line.
That being said we ran the entire way back to the finish line, which was at the Dugout, a bar near the law school. I calculated it afterward, and it was almost 4 miles long. We almost knocked over several people, got yelled at when we asked people to take our photos and had to stop repeatedly to tie our shoelaces. At first we saw other teams at a few sites, but after the fourth or fifth monument we saw nobody.
There were several bonus questions that we could answer to get minutes knocked off our finishing time, like taking a photo of us eating a donut with police officer, but we only did a few of them. Sadly, we had bought donuts but the only police we saw were busy at a traffic accident.
We were the first team to arrive at the Dugout (in fact, we arrived just a few minutes before the organizers arrived there). They had told us it would take two to three hours to complete the scavenger hunt, but after completing the surprise puzzle they had for us at the Dugout, our time was 1 hour 36 minutes. We didn’t know if we had won for certain because all the teams would need to arrive and their bonuses needed to be subtracted from their times. After two hours of waiting for other teams to arrive and waiting in anticipation, the verdict was in. The second place team’s time was twenty minutes or so more than ours. VICTORY!
Three of us were in a state of exhausted euphoria and didn’t really know what to do. We thought we had a chance to perhaps win, but we didn’t know that we would win and win by a landslide (all the other teams had times over two hours). We still don’t know what to do with the prize money. I went to sleep that night at midnight and woke up at noon the next day. Totally worth it.
The winning team
