Day 3: Baltimore to Philly

To kick things off, it's worth mentioning... today is Dan Egnor's birthday!

After a long stint at last night's bar playing trivia and downing several free drinks that can be best described as liquid paper and ice, we awoke a little wearier than the night before.  Well, at least I did...I awoke with a pounding headache and a very shaky stomach. When my breakfast arrived, all I could do was stare at it. The thought of eating anything, especially chicken embryos... well, it wouldn't have been pretty.  I grabbed a piece of white toast and wandered around the lobby periodically groaning with a glazed look on my face.  Normally this would have aroused suspicion but we were in downtown Baltimore.

As 10AM approached, we headed over to the famous Constellation ship in the Baltimore Inner Harbor, where we were delighted to be joined by Rachel Petterson and her mom, who were going to be doing the rest of the hunt all the way to Boston.

Today's start consisted of three clues each that involved a different location near the city.

1) We were handed a sheet of famous Baltimore Orioles that required visiting Camden Yards baseball stadium and indexing into their retired jersey number plaques.  This led to a statue of the famous Brooks Robinson where we used his nickname "Human Vacuum Cleaner" as a key to another Vignere cipher.

2) We went back to Poe's graveyard, where we were tasked with finding six clued signs which allowed to us to fill into an acrostic style cross, which generated another phrase.  I was determined to get another bug in my eye (I even stuck my face into an anthill), but despite my efforts, no critter took the bait.

3) We solved a series of clues around The Washington Monument (in Baltimore, no less!) that combined into a third phrase.  I missed the entirety of this one, as I was busy going through a background check and cavity search just to use the bathroom.

Taking these answer phrases together led us to "Ripley's Believe it or Not" museum in the Inner Harbor.

Arriving there we decoded a message that instructed us to find "the woman in red near the bush."  (Luckily we got the order of the words correct, or that might have played out quite differently.)

Sure enough, outside, there was a woman in red, who handed us our next set a clues.

(Jonathan's scroll is pointing up)

This next set of clues was another group of "Find the photo" and figure out the mini-puzzle associated at that location.  Many of these are pretty simple, usually involving finding a word or phrase and then using that data somehow to extract an answer or decode another phrase (via shifting or some other mechanism).  Not difficult from a puzzling standpoint, but the upshot of this is that we get to see a lot of cool sites and locations.  

And we got to see Larry Hosken. 

We handed him a dollar and thanked him for the Black and White game. He seemed appreciative and confused. 

During this leg we went to several noteworthy sites such Federal Hill, the mast of the ship S.S. Pride, the Katyn Memorial, William Donald Schaefer statue, Seven Foot Knoll Light House, and the "smalti vortex" at the African History Museum.  

Or you could use our more descriptive names, which were "the Midol Crampon Climb" "Ship buried in Baltimore Landslide of 1887" "Giant Torch with Dangling Vikings" "Guy With Prescription Hailing a Taxi" "Scrotum Light House" "Spinning Top with Giant Reefers."

The final of these clues involved a mural on the side of the Baltimore Aquarium which looking at only greens, oranges, and reds and matching them with a drawing translated to a phone number.  Calling these gave us our meta clue which revolved around 4 people buried in Greenmount Cemetery, including most famously John Wilkes Booth.  After defiling this traitor's grave, we held up pennies to honor ol' Abe. 

Finding these gravestones and filling data into grids allowed us to decrypt another Vigenere (pronounced VIG-GOO-JEE-NAIR-EYE-ROO-EE), which yielded our final destination in Philly, which was the National Mechanics Bar.  Another great day... we're having tons of fun and seeing lots of cool stuff. 

And we close with another photo of Rich eating.