Day 2: Full writeup (sorry, no audio book yet!)

Hi everyone!  We're in the van driving from Baltimore to Philadelphia as I write this, which is a good opportunity to catch up with the blog.

Day 2 started in DC, at the same location (the Lone Sailor statue) as day 1.  Instead of a photo chase, we got a scroll with text winding in a spiral and a number of funky symbol-shapes:

Basically it hinted at four locations and gave something to do at each one:

• "Barrel" beneath the castle: This was the chain of monkeys (barrel full of monkeys...) in the Smithsonian.  It wasn't exactly beneath the castle per se, but it is in a lobby heading into the (extensive) basement.  When we showed the clue to a friendly docent they immediately knew what it must be and pointed us in the right direction.  This was a really awesome site.  Mapping the sequence of "monkeys" to the labeled symbols on the clue sheet, we got "TWO ZERO".

• "Seek the station where iron horses run for...": A clue pointed to a particular statue of Thales at Union Station and the word next to it, which is "FIRE".  "Use that which you see now, upon a raven's wing": We used our trusty lighter on the Ravenchase logo of the puzzle, which neatly evaporated in the shape of the word "Call" ("you will find an answer to help your answer sing" -- cluing that we'll get a phone number).
• "Now seek within the halls of art quite grand and fine...": The clue pointed to a statue of Mercury ("quicksilver's man", in the clue) in the rotunda of the National Art Gallery.  The statue pointed to the ceiling, where a skylight had a particular pattern of panes that let us transpose ciphertext on the cluesheet (much like the manhole cover the previous day -- though this one was a bit cooler).  The ciphertext decoded to a message which pointed us to a statue of Calliope (in the same museum), where we extracted a word which served as a Viginere key to get the answer: "SIX EIGHT ONE".
• "Finally you must seek upon the circle round, there behind the zodiac for Antipodes is found...": Todd immediately recognized this as referring to an installation of statues representing the Chinese zodiac.  Behind that is a replica of the Antipodes code sculpture, which provided data for row/column readout, yielding "SEVEN FOUR ONE EIGHT".

So all that added up to a phone number, except that it's missing a digit.  Turns out we missed some monkeys!  They continued down the stairwell past what we thought was the bottom.  Anyway since Washington's area code is 202 we were able to guess past that.

Calling 202-681-7418 gave us a message which told us to visit the Eastern Market (a shopping area in D.C.) and visit a "capital place of many stories" or something like that, and to find ... I forget the exact clue but anyway it took us to Capitol Books and look for Tess of the d'Urbervilles.  As mentioned previously it was a pretty cool moment where we found a hollowed out book with a CD, a cipher wheel, and some rolled up papers.  I was getting stuff from the van when they found it, so they had me discover it for myself while they videotaped the reaction, which you can see here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yvW9LaSSe0

We knew we were going to Annapolis next so we started driving as we solved.  The wheel is actually a neat little trinket, though in reality it's just a Caesar/Vigenere rotation device:

Josh had warned us about a "crotchety old man" who might talk our ear off.  That turned out to be the bookstore proprietor, who was actually totally friendly.  It was a pretty awesome little bookstore, packed floor to ceiling with books, including the upper floor which you reached with a tiny stairwell -- we joked that Rich had to be greased up to fit.

The CD was a series of songs whose titles spelled out VISITORSCENTER.  I was carefully updating the spreadsheet with Shazam and so on when Todd (who is following along on his iPhone) calmly says "okay, guys, I think we're going to the visitor's center" and I was like "what, how did you solve that??" and he pointed out the obvious.

There were two clue sheets.  One was a sparse crossword grid with no clues or numbers, but occasional pairs of squares in grey.  The other had a little verse:

Well done my friends, my wheel is yours

And now to find your way

A serenade to the town and crypt of JPJ

Listen well, your path unfolds

And once you reach place

A password spoken wisely

May help you in the race

America the beautiful

Each state, here placed upon

Shall show you how the wheel aligns

And that which must be done

... followed by a series of letter triplets: FQI, ZDV, KWB, JSR, CCU, FTI, TAD.

The crossword grid filled in with the 50 states, which you could do by starting with states that have unique lengths and then working from there.  The grey squares gave letter pairs: RH, TA, EX, RI, FO, HI, XI.  Using those with the triplets and the code wheel in a straightforward way gave us BATTLESHIPS, the "password".

When we got to the Annapolis visitor's center, one of the staffers recognized us as a team (I have no idea how, we're so discreet in our matching T-shirts and clipboards, ha ha).  Upon presenting the password, she gave us a new clue sheet.  We asked if they had a place we could sit and solve and she nicely showed us to a lovely conference room which was amazing!

The clue sheet there was a series of photos.  We thought about asking staff for help identifying them but figured we'd do it on our own.  As before some of them were easy and some were harder; as before we didn't quite have all of them when we decided to start walking:

• An "ancient fountain", with a picture that includes a mere corner of the fountain and a historic but nonfamous building across the street: We didn't get this until the very end, when I was able to find it online including the important text.  We did catch a glimpse of it on the way out of town.
• A grave site outside a church, where we read words off a headstone.
• The crypt of John Paul Jones.  This was a spectacular crypt under the chapel at the naval academy.  We read some words off a plaque.
• A plaque outside Bancroft Hall describing the building that used to stand there.
• A statue outisde the harbor, again taking words from a plaque.
• The inscription on the ground at the Thurgood Marshall memorial, which I mentioned yesterday (using water to make the words readable).  We felt kind of bad for spitting on the ground at his memorial!  But not so bad that we didn't solve the clue.
• Text from a statue outside the state house.  The plaque had dots between words in some sort of old fashioned way.  The clue sheet had a diagram of the plaque with only the dots, and numbers in the positions of certain letters.  After a certain amount of squinting and dot-counting we got the answer.
• A statue of a Native American (actually a former ship masthead) on the naval academy grounds, where we read some years off to do that odd "back and forth" cipher they like to use.
• The hardest one: A view from a window onto a commercial city street.  We found this by identifying a landmark (the dome of the naval academy chapel) and triangulating from there to get nearby.  We stopped for lunch (and to solve the meta using the data we had so far) at Sugarbuns (recommended!), and showed the picture to the proprietor who immediately knew where it was -- just down the street. It was a view from a museum and a reference to the plaque at the window.
• A bench in a garden near the Charles Carroll house, again with some words from a plaque.

The answers all fit into a meta sheet (which we got with the clue), which used an acrostic to transfer the letters into a big grid.  Above the grid were fragments of letter patterns (e.g. I, N, G in a diagonal, or a 2-by-3 box with E, H, R, C, L, O), which we colored in on the grid as we found them.  After coloring them in we used them for a "Double Bacon cipher" (clued by flavor text), which is actually just 0-based binary.

That decoded to "GOTOPOESGRAVFORCLUES" (sic).  We drove to Baltimore to Poe's grav(e) (first stopping at the Poe House -- that one's in a seriously sketchy place).  There are actually two Poe graves in the cemetery: A sizeable monument near the entrance, and his original grave near the back.  The clue was at the original grave; we spent a while staring at the monument but eventually found the other grave with a hint from Josh.  (He was worried that the clues might have gone missing; we were able to reassure him.)

Around about this time Todd got an insect in his eye, the subject of yesterday's caption contest.  He was back in the van poking at his eye, which he had finished when we got back with the clue.  He looked at it and immediately said "Oh, that's the Gold Bug cipher!" (quite apropos of the location, of course).  We joked that the bug was actually a "flavor bug" planted by GC to help us get the a-ha.

We had a Man vs Machine race decoding the Gold Bug cipher which told us:

"WELL DONE MY FRIENDS YOU HAVE MADE IT FAR ITS ALMOST TIME TO HIT A BAR FROM HERE WHAT YOU NEED TO DO IS USE THESE TIMES TO CRACK THE CLUE SEEK WITHIN THE SKYLINE NOW AND FIND THE TIMES YOU SEEK WITH HANDS NEVER LAGGING THEYLL LEAD YOU TO A TREAT"

Also on the clue sheet was a series of times (9:45, 12:00, 10:50, etc).  For once in my life these were not hidden Semaphore!  Instead, "SKYLINE" hinted at a reference to the Emerson tower, a famous Baltimore landmark:

As you can see the clock has letters around the outside, so each time generates two letters.  That spells out:

"SO BRO LETS ZOOM MORE BEER REST LOOMS WATER STREET TAVERN"

(Some of those letters aren't on the clock, those were embedded literally in the list of times.)  That was the end location for a long day!