Day 4: Philly to Princeton

Upon awakening on the middle day of the race, we found ourselves in one of the oldest cities in America at a Comfort Inn.  Todd looked out the window of our otherwise underwhelming hotel room to realize that we had a surprisingly nice view of the Delaware River.

The hotel was nice enough to provide us with a complimentary breakfast, and I was particularly excited to find that apparently in some parts of the country biscuits and gravy is considered part of a continental breakfast, so I made good use of those.

As we made our way to the car, it became clear that this leg of the race would offer a new challenge for us... water falling from the sky.  We had conquered the heat and humidity already on past days, so rain proved to actually be a welcome challenge.

We met Josh and the other teams at City Hall, where we learned that the team of two guys that are doing the entire race with us decided to officially name themselves "Kangaroos Can't Jump" after a trivia answer they gave on that night in Baltimore that raised a few eyebrows.  Josh handed us our starting packet for the day (another couple of 11x17 scrolls) and we did what any sensible hunters would do - we found the nearest FedEx/Kinko's and got all of our materials laminated - the photos we were seeking, the answer sheet, and even a tourist map we'd picked up!

Dan actually had a grease pencil that he'd been carrying around for several hunts, but never found a use for it, and the combo of the grease pencil and the laminated materials made for the most pleasant imaginable experience you could have hoped for in the rain.   You could be standing in the downpour and casually write clearly and legibly on the map or cluesheet and it worked like magic.

So the first set of clues was actually another photo hunt containing ten locations that once identified basically made a pretty straight path from City Hall to the art museum with the famous Rocky steps.  Along the way, we visited some cool statues and monuments, but two locations and their associated puzzles really stood out.

The first was a plaza just outside city hall that turned out to be an amazing location that had all sorts of large stone replicas of oversized game pieces from various games including Monopoly, chess, Sorry, checkers, dominoes, more.  This was a real treat and a Gamer's wet dream of a site (see below).

Besides picking a great site, Josh really did it justice with a very clever (and even pretty difficult) puzzle that used the BINGO pieces surrounding us in the plaza to encode a message that relied on the letter distances from the highest pieces we could see for each BINGO letter we saw.

Right after that, we visited the famous LOVE statue in Philadelphia, where there was another clever puzzle in which we had to take a string of letters and wrap them similar to the way the word LOVE is written on the statue.  This led to us to another actor - this time a *man* in red - who was actually quite animated and had a pretty lengthy rehearsed interaction ready for us.  He handed us each a "paper balloon" and told us something about going straight as an arrow, and thinking about how to unfold the puzzle, etc.

We quickly unfolded our paper balloons to find a doctored photo of Poe wearing sunglasses and sporting the caption "Let's Rock This".   We considered many options about what we might do until finally we noticed that the phrase "Let's Rock This" fit into our answer sheet, so on the off chance that was just it, we called to confirm and sure enough, it was.  That was a pretty uninspired finish to an otherwise cool puzzle, and we still aren't sure why the actor's speech contained so much extraneous information.

As we continued to make our way towards the famous Rocky steps, Jonathan stopped for a quick anatomy lesson at an interesting, but unmarked statue.

We were unable to determine whether the man in this exhibit was enjoying whatever it was he was doing.

Eventually we made it to the steps, and then put together the ten answers we had collected into the meta which required us to climb the steps to find a pigeon statue at the top.  We took this opportunity to run to the top in Rocky fashion.  (See the video - not sure how to link to an unlisted video in Blogger).

What you can't tell from the video is that every step along the way, Jonathan had all sorts of things flying out of his pockets as we ran up the steps - spare change, grooming products, credit cards, etc.  Each item of course hit me like shrapnel as we went, the real reason for my third place finish up the hill.  Fortunately I got my revenge when his iPhone flew out of his pocket at the top of the steps, and I made sure he'd switch to Android by stepping on it and making sure the crack that had surely formed from the initial impact would be large enough to cut his fingers when he swiped.  (Ed. note: some of this paragraph may have been embellished in various ways...)

Once Jonathan recovered from the shock of his damaged phone, we made our way to the pigeon statue, where we collected the data we needed to generate a phone number (804-643-0917, if you'd like to call and listen for yourself) that played some Rocky music and some nice thematic impressionism that told us to go back to the National Mechanics Bar (where we'd ended the leg the night before to pick up our next clue) and to tell Evelyn that we were Rocky Balboa.

Before we grabbed a cab to get back to our car and on to the next wave of the day, we stopped by the Rocky statue to put together a quick little something of our own.

At the bar, Todd dazzled Evelyn with his spot-on Rocky Balboa mumbling, and she handed us our next clue in the form of a black skull with a scroll in its mouth, along with a laser pointer.

This puzzle turned out to be pretty awesome.  While we were in the process of interpreting the flavortext's reference to the "Newtonian 33" (a reference to Newton's heat scale), one of us also noticed that Todd's hand on the skull had started to make some of the black turn a little white.  We whipped out the lighter and the black just melted away to reveal five different phone numbers!

Each of the phone numbers on the skull answered with a short poem describing a specific gravestone in a different cemetery scattered around the Historic Waterfront area of Philadelphia.  We ate some Philly Cheesesteaks for lunch (Todd won the roulette!) as we worked out the locations,  then made our way around the cemeteries collecting the data we needed, this time just plugging everything into a straightforward acrostic.  The acrostic took us to a sculpture honoring Irish immigrants where we were supposed to look for rocks near a man carrying a chest.  It took us a bit to find the correct man carrying a chest (there were two on the sculpture - a fact that evaded us for a while), but eventually Jonathan spotted what we were after - a small plastic bag containing three more clues.

Dramatic re-enactment of Jonathan's discovery of the clue, with Rich playing Jonathan.

We quickly scanned the clue and found that the first clue was going to use the laser pointer!  It led us to a small replica house on a plaza, with specific instructions on how to line up the laser along the side of the house in a specific location, and find the date where the light shined.  Below is Jonathan holding the laser along with a close up of where the light hit the date "1644".  (Unfortunately, there had been a small bug in which the data we needed to collect here was mistakenly already on the clue sheet, so we didn't technically even need to visit this site, but we are glad we did, because it was really cool the way it worked.)

The other two clues had us revisit sites we had already been to earlier in the day (just by chance, as Jonathan was eager to see the Liberty Bell, so we took a little detour.)    One was the grave of Benjamin Franklin and the other was the plaza near the liberty bell.  Putting together the answers from these three locations generated the messages "FREEZE THE BACK OF THE SKULL ANSWER SHEET".

Having no good way to freeze anything in our car or in the rain, we found a nearby 7-11, but were temporarily thwarted by a very strange posted policy on the freezer, seen below.  McCueLa was not impressed.

Once we committed to buying some things from the establishment, we went ahead and stuck our clue sheet in the freezer, where text magically appeared!  It told us to pose as the signer to get our next set of clues.  We went back once more to the National Mechanics Bar (where we bumped into the Kangaroos still working on the skull puzzle), where Dan did the requisite pose to get our travel puzzles to solve en route to Princeton - one to determine the location and the other to determine the password.

 

On the way the Princeton, we made short work of the location puzzle - a quick movie audio identification, take-the-first-letter puzzle, but were stumped for the whole drive on the password puzzle.  After getting to the location and showing Josh the puzzle, he realized he had made a mistake and the puzzle was essentially unsolvable as a result.  He apologized profusely, and it was certainly easy to forgive him when we found out that he had written the puzzle the night before, just for us, so we'd have a little more than originally intended to work on during the drive.  I'm certainly willing to give him a mulligan on that one given how good everything else has been so far, and he's doing all this for basically just 8 people.

At the bar, we shared stories with Josh and Rachel (who showed up not long after us), and Todd won yet another round of CCR to end up with an impressive ending score of 1.857.  We then had to skip out to take Todd to the train station for his voyage home, and to pick up Wei-Hwa for his union with our team.

After the ceremonial passing of the skull, and the tearful goodbyes as Todd left the team, we headed back towards the hotel with our fresh new teammate in tow with high hopes for tomorrow.  We will certainly miss the constant source of laughter and puzzle-solving insights that Todd provides, but I think Wei-Hwa is going to be a great new addition to the team for the rest of the race and we're excited to have him.

The only cause for concern at this point is the fact that Jonathan has been having an increasing amount of foot pain on the last couple legs, and we're not sure why.  We're definitely hoping it gets better, or as Todd put it, we may have to shoot him.

I'm not even sure why I agreed to this part, but the rest of the team insisted I end with a pic of me eating.