Day 6 - New York to Boston

I was tasked with blogging the first day's writeup and I tried to set the bar at a reasonable height in terms of length and detail. But since then, our recaps have gotten more and more elaborate to the point where multiple photos and videos are posted alongside complete puzzle walkthroughs. Honestly, if I had known such detail would be available, I would have just stayed home and read the blog.

Well it's my turn again to summarize our daily adventure. (In fact, I'm rather late in doing so and there is a real danger at this point that Dan's Day 7 writeup will be posted before mine. If that does occur, just pretend that we looped back to New York after Boston.) Sure, I could follow my teammates' examples and go bigger and grander, but I still believe there is something to be said for conciseness. Brevity being the soul of wit and all that.

Day 6 starts off with us in New York, ready to take a big bite out of Manhattan. (Get it? Because New York is the Big Apple. That's the kind of wit you can expect from this post. You just can't maintain that level of cleverness if you allow yourself to just run on and on with your descriptions.) Our hotel was just across the street from Carnegie Deli so we started off the day ordering some of their monstrous sandwiches. Rich and I couldn't decide between pastrami or corned beef but we solved that puzzle handily by ordering one of each and splitting them. To spare our readers the suspense and difficulty of such a dilemma in the future, I'll tell you now... pastrami was better.

Besides being conveniently located to delicious cured meats, the hotel was also only 4 short blocks and 2 long avenues away from the starting location at the Grand Army Plaza located on the southeast corner of Central Park. This leg's main section of puzzles was similar to past legs' comprising 6 locations that needed to be identified from poems and which could be visited in any order. However, for the first time, we also received a group of bonus puzzles that were designed to be solved sequentially. Reaching the end of the bonus puzzle chain would reward a team with a 3 hour reduction to their overall time. We were also given 5 CDs and a scroll of puzzles that were to be used to solve the ending location and password while driving to Boston later.

As usual, we immediately looked for a good spot to sit and identify the puzzle locations. Dressed as we were in sandals, unwashed shorts and t-shirts ornamented with giant buttons proclaiming our various puzzle names, we thought the most appropriate place would be the lobby of the nearby Plaza Hotel. This turned out to be a perfect place as the crystal chandeliers provided soft yet excellent lighting. We fit in perfectly with the rest of the patrons and so it was a bit surprising when not two minutes after sitting down, we were approached by an employee who inquired in a polite but snooty manner if we were guests of the hotel. I mentally prepared the huge scene I was going to make complaining about the discriminatory practices of the Plaza's hotel staff, but Dan defused the situation by claiming we were waiting for a hotel guest to join us and that we would be gone shortly. The staff member looked at us dubiously but good manners forbade him from proclaiming us liars and he had no choice but to mumble under his breath as he stepped away.

If you have the means, I highly recommend solving here

 One of our clues could be solved from just a subway map and Dan set about doing just that. We needed to identify the unique subway lines that serviced each of the listed stations and taking the letters of said lines, we obtained the answer GRATS FELLAS.

I guess I'm supposed to caption each photo

The other main clue locations were quickly identified and we saw that they covered a good portion of southern Manhattan though a few were clustered around Central Park along with the beginning of the bonus track. We jumped in a taxi and got a ride to the west side of the park near the center.

I could break this into sections for each bonus but I don't want to

The bonus chain started off at Belvedere Castle and we found the clued plaque without any difficulty. The clue showed several lines connecting the eyes of the man engraved on the plaque to different sections of the text and Rich suggested we take the letters that came before each section. This resulted in BOLOENDS but as none of us had recently been to a rodeo, our neckwear was woefully insufficient and we did not know how to proceed. We explored the castle a bit because, you know, it's a castle and they're cool, but then we had to move on to the next bonus location which Dan and Wei-Hwa and just identified as the nearby statue of Wladyslaw Jagiello. (Wei-Hwa tried telling me the name several times but he insisted on pronouncing it with the correct Polish pronunciation which meant I kept saying "Gesundheit".)

Would a caption really add any value to this?

We reached the statue and again were completely stuck. We suspected that the solution to each bonus would provide necessary information for solving the next one in the chain and so while Dan and Wei-Hwa looked up the remaining bonus locations, Rich and I set about trying to crack the Vigenère clue from the first bonus. At one point Rich noticed that using OLDB as a key gave SEEK as the start of the decrypted text while around the same time I decided the key should be 8 letters and end in BONES. We wisely combined our two portions into the most likely key candidate, JAWBONES, and set about trying to parse the almost readable plaintext. Meanwhile, Todd (who I thought we had successfully gotten rid of), independently came up with the much less likely key of OLDBONES. His choice had the benefit of being an anagram of BOLOENDS and a very slight advantage in that it resulted in completely legible text detailing how to solve the second location.

The last four words on the statue (AGGRESSORS AT GRUNWALD JULY) could be assigned the letters A-X and then used as a polyalphabetic cipher key to decode the encrypted text. Which in turn told us to use the last three words off the statue of Balto in Central Park. We actually didn't solve this part until after we had decided to visit the fourth bonus location (prior to the third because we obviously didn't fully grasp the concept of a linear set of clues). Of course we had no idea how to solve this fourth location so Rich took careful pictures of the entire Richard Morris Hunt Memorial before we left for the third bonus location. It turns out he did this to prevent us from having to return; at the time I just thought Rich had some weird obsession with Richard Hunt.

Rich took like a thousand photos and this was the most interesting one

We arrived at the statue of Balto, grabbed the last three words (ENDURANCE, FIDELITY and INTELLIGENCE), placed them in a 4x7 arrangement with the last three cells blank and then treated the provided numbers as coordinates to obtain our next message lickety-split. (Lickety-split may not mean what I think it means.) This message told us to use the letter frequencies from the text at the Richard Hunt Memorial to decode the next bonus clue.

Counting the number of times each letter appeared in the text allowed us to assign each of the numbers in the cryptotext a range of letters and then choosing the appropriate letters would result in the answer message. We had to solve such ambiguous message phrases several times during this week of puzzling and rather than being annoying as I might have expected, it ended up being quite a bit of fun. Once done, the decoded message hinted at using some name for the Statue of Liberty (Richard Hunt designed her pedestal) as a Vigenère key for the last bonus clue. Unfortunately, as the clue indicates, there is more than one name for Lady Liberty (I lost count around 348) and we were initially unable to finish the bonus clues.

I've decided captions are more trouble than they're worth

We had spent a long time on the bonus track (possibly more than the 3 hour reward) and we were running out of time so we decided to start solving the main clues; the closest of which was at the Alice in Wonderland statue nearby.

This clue was much more straightforward. Alice is surrounded by lines of poetry and we assigned letters to each line as instructed by the puzzle text. Taking the appropriate letter for each line provided gave the question "WHAT WAS MIMSY?" and we entered BOROGOVES onto our answer sheet.

The above clue was solved at Strawberry Fields using a plaque with 5 columns of country names. Taking the first letter of each of the indicated countries gave the answer, "ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE". Flush off the last two quick solves, we hightailed it to a subway station and caught a ride to Times Square.

Wei-Hwa and Dan solved this clue at the Times Square Visitor Center while Rich and I tried a bunch of different keys for the still unsolved bonus. We probably should have helped them because it involved counting a bunch of triangles and I think they ran out of fingers. It solved to LIEUTENANT COLONEL.

We caught another subway to Washington Square Park where we found the above-mentioned plaque at the corner of Waverly and University. We entered the quote from the plaque onto the periodic table and used the provided elements and subscripts to select letters resulting in ILLUMINATI. To reward ourselves for our brilliance, we made a small detour to Amorino to gorge on gelato. Then it was off to Battery Park for the last clue!

This was a wordsearch where we had to find several strange words that were on a flagpole in Battery Park. The remaining letters led us to The Sphere nearby where we got our answer of MARCH 11, 2002. We were now done with the main set of clues!

It was sometime either right before or after the Battery Park clue that Rich cracked the bonus clue cipher with the key of THE NEW COLOSSUS. We had tried just NEW COLOSSUS earlier to no avail. Thankfully, he revisited the idea. The final bonus message instructed us to create a picture illustrating the poem on the Statue of Liberty's pedestal. I think we can all agree that we did so admirably.

McCuela is not impressed with the chosen preposition in the above photo

The New York leg took us almost 7 hours and we still had a 4+ hour drive to Boston ahead of us. And the CDs and driving puzzles that we needed to solve so we would know where exactly we were going. I would share pictures of said puzzles with you, our faithful readers, except I don't think we ever took any and I can't locate the paper copies right now. But they were based on various games (Mad Gab, Monopoly, Twister and Scrabble), each consisting of a paper portion and corresponding CD, and they were a lot of fun.

The Mad Gab CD played a bunch of sounds that we had to put together into famous sayings. We then had to order and index into them using the clues on the paper portion.

The Monopoly CD played 22 songs, each of which would clue a location on a Monopoly board (like "Under the Boardwalk" for instance). We were also supplied with a Monopoly board with words on each of the squares. Taking the locations and their associated words in order gave us some coordinates.

For Twister, we were given a strange version of the Twister board along with a felt doll-like figure with movable arms and legs. The CD sounded out hand and feet movements. Moving the doll appropriately spelled out letters using the Dancing Man cipher.

The Scrabble CD played famous movie quotes where one word was missing from each one. Placing those words on the Scrabble board in the places specified allowed us to get another answer.

Each of the board game clues solved to a location in Boston. The center of the 4 locations was the ending location, Mr. Dooley's Bar.

The fifth CD was used to obtain our password for the day. It sounded like garbage but Dan figured out that it needed to be played in reverse and Wei-Hwa quickly converted the sound files on his laptop. This gave us a Vigenère key and a bunch of cryptotext which decoded to CAUSE WE ROCK LIKE AC/DC.

All in all, a long day of excellent puzzling and this was our favorite leg so far. Only one day left!

(I'm sure the intelligent readers of this blog are fully aware that I'm actually posting this after we've completed the entire hunt. In fact, I'll be immediately publishing Dan's Day 7 writeup right after this one. But please allow me the illusion that I completed this on time.)