Post Hunt

Josh and Sonia and I participated in the 2009 Washington Post Hunt on Sunday afternoon. We teamed up with Hunt veterans Daniel and Sara, who came down from NY for the event. That's Sara, Josh, me, and Sonia during our lunch break in the Old Post Office Pavilion. What is the Hunt? It's a wacky puzzle-solving competition dreamed up for the Miami Herald in 1984 by humor columnists Dave Barry and Gene Weingarten and editor Tom Shroder. They all used to work together at the Herald, but now both Gene and Tom are in DC at the Washington Post.

My very first Hunt experience was the 2001 Miami Herald Hunt in Hollywood, FL, where I was part of a team that included Daniel and our mutual friend Homer. Through some amazing combination of beginner's luck and brain power, we won first place (a week-long Caribbean cruise!), and have been trying to re-create that victory ever since. We've been to 5 more Herald Hunts, and had varying degrees of success in solving all the puzzles, but haven't made it to the top 3 again. On each trip, we lobbied Tom and Dave to bring the Hunt to DC, so we were overjoyed when they announced the first Washington Post Hunt last spring. My sister flew out with a couple of her friends, and although we had enough people for two teams, neither of us made it all the way through the final puzzle. We had fun, though -- enough for Sonia to come back this year to give it another try.

This year we managed to solve all the puzzles correctly, but we got sidetracked on the final puzzle, and by the time we got ourselves back on track and arrived at the correct solution, at least three other teams had beaten us to the punch. Bummer. At least we felt good about being able to make it all the way through the endgame. That's a lot further than most people get. Even Dave, Tom, and Gene claim that there's no way they could solve the Hunt if they hadn't thought up the puzzles themselves.

If you are curious to see what the puzzles are like, check out the link at the top or visit the Tropic Hunt Archives -- a site maintained by a die-hard Hunt fan -- for detailed descriptions, photos, and video. He hasn't updated the 2009 Post Hunt page yet, but I'm sure he'll get to it soon. Most of the puzzles are pretty silly, and Dave Barry is routinely booed when he explains how to solve them at the end of each Hunt.

And now back to our regularly-scheduled Green Renovation blog...