To the Pursuit!
Nov. 2nd, 2025 07:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hnpccMuch to my surprise after a seven year hiatus a new public amazing race pursuit was announced and Kirsten and I obviously signed up immediately. Unfortunately it was going to be a reduced version, but hey we'll take what we can get. So we searched our wardrobes for the oldest event t-shirt we had which turned out to be from the 2013 one. I also had the 2014, 2015, and 2016 shirts - apparently I never throw anything out. I'm pretty sure the orange shirt I found was the unbranded 2018 one.
Off we headed to find the start line which proved to be not at all where we thought it was a Federation Square (i.e. under the big TV) but was cunningly hidden behind construction signs on the Flinders St side of Fed Square. It was also in direct sunlight which made checking in hot and tricky - in line with the progress of time and technology check in was now via a QR code which I could not see for the life of me on my phone. Kirsten's phone chose this moment to restart, so both of us needed to sign the consent form on my phone.
The next change in time and technology was that instead of clue sheets we all downloaded an app, registered our team (again difficult with the 31oC glare) and logged in. Fortunately Kirsten's phone was working again so we were able to both get set up in the app ok. Then we sat in the amphitheatre, did a Mexican wave, had the preamble, watched the app release the questions at 2pm on the dot, watched the organisers finish the preamble and set off only 5 minutes after the official start time. I'm amused to realise this is an improvement on and yet entirely consistent with previous events.
Like everyone I was reading through the clues during the last bit of the preamble. There were three challenges, 8 photo challenges and 8 collect challenges. It was a bit trickier to plot out where we were going with having to go in and out of each challenge to get details so we ended up just starting to head towards challenge 2, while checking out the collect and photo challenges. Then we realised we were quite close to a photo stage, so detoured.
Photo challenge: Rock and Roll. This involved heading to AC/DC lane, finding the enormous statue of Bon Scott and taking a photo of us doing our best Rock performance.
Fortunately there were other teams as the statue was at least 2 metres above our heads and taking a selfish while doing a rock performance with the statue in view by ourselves would have been... complicated.
We all alternated photo taking, realising along the way that you had to take the photo in the app as it wouldn't let you upload photos from your camera. I think at this point we were one of the first teams there.
Photo taken and a queue developing behind us we headed for the next photo challenge, which was in Treasury Place.
Photo Mission: Bolte and Dunstan. We were moving slower than some of the teams by this point so followed them across to where the statues of Victoria's two longest serving premiers were located on the south-east side of the Old Treasury Building.
This left us free to head to our first Challenge stage, which was located near Coles Fountain in Parliament Gardens, and was described as a squid game challenge. What it turned out to be was cutting out a predetermined shape from a slice of honeycomb using a toothpick without breaking the shape. Neither of us watched squid game but amazingly Kirsten had read an article on that exact challenge and knew that the truck was to get the honeycomb wet. So we poured water on it and cut the circle out pretty quickly, then ate the remaining honeycomb. One down!
A bit of reading while walking had given us a bit of a plan of attack. There was a challenge close to the QV building, a photo challenge in/around Chinatown and one at the end of Croft Alley. We started head for the last location, and midway found ourselves walking past the Chinese museum which had Chinese lions out the front.
Photo Mission: Lion Dance. This involved us doing our best king fu moves with the lion in view. Again it was fortunate that we had other teams nearby to swap photos with!!
From there we hustled to Croft Alley to find the sign for the now closed science-themed bar, the Croft Institute. Amusingly this was a location in the 2016 race, which I distinctly remembered doing an Operation-themed task at. Somehow we'd ended up by ourselves again but at least this was a relatively quick selfie and the sign was at a normal height. We were already heading out as people were coming in and directed them to the sign.
The next challenge was at Booth's karaoke at the QV building. Stupidly we didn't follow the google maps directions (more new tech!) and missed the entrance, wandering around QV for about 5 minutes before finding the right place. That was a bit annoying! The task itself was a choice of singing a Spice Girls song or Mr Brighteyes - Kirsten claimed not to know that latter song so we went Spice Girls. The video was hilarious, a very cheap knockoff with three European women who looked... not even remotely like the Spice Girls, and who had about three dance moves total. Not sure what was funnier, that or finding out some of the lyrics are worse than I realised.
We collected the points and headed towards another photo challenge, this time in front of the State Library. The clue was to take a selfie at Architectural Fragment, which proved entertaining to get both of us plus the statue in frame. By the time we did it the teams had really spread out, so we uploaded an upside down photo with bits of our heads and the LI from the statue in focus.
From there it was straight down Swanston St past a collect challenge ("which animal at the corner of Bourke and Swanston St has wings?") - we didn't need to go there for the answer, I've known since 1995 it was the pig. It used to fly in front of the Windiws 95 ad, heh.
Past that to the corner of Little Collins and Swanston Sts to find two carvings of Roman numerals and add them together for the answer. One was a quick find, but we couldn't see the other so took a break to do a photo challenge to find "Larry Latrobe" in front of the Town Hall.
Fortunately they had a photo of Larry Latrobe, which is a small dog statue, but we still walked past it at least twice before finally getting the extremely awkward selfie with what could have been a very blurry anything behind bits of our faces.
Back to the numerals and other teams had arrived and were clustered at one end - which is when we found out the second set of numerals was behind a guy in hi-vis who was sitting in front of it. Still adding up 1994 and 1832 proved pretty fast and we headed to Royal Arcade for our next photo challenge.
Babushkas has apparently closed some time since 2014 when I was last in the arcade and fortunately there was another team who were happy to take a photo of us with the shop sign visible - given it was 2m above our heads again it would have been challenging!
At this point we had one challenge left, 90 minutes to go and no idea where it was located other than "William St". The team at Babushkas also didn't know, so we all headed off in different directions to try and find it. The clue was "T74288E G2733E", we needed to enter via the rear or side entrance and not run in there.
We decided to take a tram two stops up to William St and see if we could spot other teams. We got off and headed north towards Flagstaff Gardens, with no teams in sight. I tried putting in 2733 William St, which somewhat surprisingly gave us the Royal Mint building. We crossed over, noticed there was a garden behind and headed through a wide open gate into it. We knew pretty much immediately that it was the wrong place - no flags, no other teams, some nice white balloons.
A woman with quite startling vivid blue eye make-up came hurrying over.
"Excuse me, are you lost? This is actually private property, we just had a wedding..."
We examined that yes, we were lost and showed her the clue.
"Did they direct you here? Was the gate open?"
No love, we teleported through it, eyeroll.
We explained that no one had directed us and yes the gate was wide open (and still was actually). She walked around to both escort us out and (belatedly) close the gate. At this point we decided to try the Immigration museum which has "Tribute Garden", so we caught a tram two stops down and hurried to find it before the Challenge closed at 4pm. It was 4.45pm.
We hurried in and found the challenge staff, other teams and quickly checked in for the challenge. Part one was to count the silver plaques with writing around three sides of the courtyard. I headed for the first wall, realised they were 6 high on that side and counted along the bottom row to get the first number. The second wall was also 6 high so I repeated my bottom row counting and multiplication, adding it to my first number. The third wall somewhat annoyingly had rows of 12 or 13 so I counted those vertically, adding them to my total as I went. I headed back to the staff person with 573 as my answer. Much to my surprise it was correct, and I called Kirsten over for stage 2. This was to make an origami heart following a set of instructions, which she completed very quickly.
We headed out with two minutes to spare, as one team person was saying "I've counted three times - it's always 263!!" I think she missed a wall.
With 30 minutes to go we moved quickly to the Sandridge bridge to find the countries where 7,127 and 15,692 Victorians had been born in. After a bit of searching we answered Fiji and South Africa and headed off for our penultimate photo challenge at Flinders St Station photo booth. Amusingly quite a few teams saw us in front of the Fiji board and headed straight there, which meant they still needed the second number... which at least was in the direction they needed.
The photobooth is just near where I catch the tram up Elizabeth St so that was a quick and rightward up selfie.
This left us with the final photo challenge and the collect challenges. The photo challenge was to find a coin with the date of 2005, take a photo with our team number and upload. We had 4 coins (all mine) between us - dates 1983, 2000 and two from 2006. We dived into as EasyMart and explained what we needed to the staff, who very obligingly searched through the $1 and then 50c coins until they found one. We bought drinks from them as well!
That left us with the remaining collect challenges, which were brain teasers. One we had no idea on, neither did the internet, so we guessed. One was a count the triangles. One was a what is next in this sequence. One was a "what number is this" from an incomplete digital display. We guessed pretty much all of them except the last which would only let you enter the correct number.
I showed all of them to Dean when I got home, he had no idea either.
We crossed the finish mat at 4.25pm, with the number challenge not completed - we gave up guessing and wanted a drink. While we were ordering food and drinks the triangles and the brain teaser we had no idea about came back as incorrect, which dropped us from equal 5th to 9th out of 65 teams.
Which is our best result ever!!
We listened to the final wrap up, which to be honest we couldn't hear a word of due to where we were sitting, finished our drinks and headed home.
I hope they do it again, although the full race would be challenging with app based rather than clue sheets, and also with no maps. I hope they do provide maps with the app for a 6 hour event.
Amusingly another team had the same 2013 t-shirts, and my Facebook memories for today brought up a photo of me in the 2016 race!
I would prefer fewer brain teasers and more location based collecting - and not just because I can't count triangles accurately!
All up though it was a fun day, and I reckon we could have shaved a bit of time off that finish.
Off we headed to find the start line which proved to be not at all where we thought it was a Federation Square (i.e. under the big TV) but was cunningly hidden behind construction signs on the Flinders St side of Fed Square. It was also in direct sunlight which made checking in hot and tricky - in line with the progress of time and technology check in was now via a QR code which I could not see for the life of me on my phone. Kirsten's phone chose this moment to restart, so both of us needed to sign the consent form on my phone.
The next change in time and technology was that instead of clue sheets we all downloaded an app, registered our team (again difficult with the 31oC glare) and logged in. Fortunately Kirsten's phone was working again so we were able to both get set up in the app ok. Then we sat in the amphitheatre, did a Mexican wave, had the preamble, watched the app release the questions at 2pm on the dot, watched the organisers finish the preamble and set off only 5 minutes after the official start time. I'm amused to realise this is an improvement on and yet entirely consistent with previous events.
Like everyone I was reading through the clues during the last bit of the preamble. There were three challenges, 8 photo challenges and 8 collect challenges. It was a bit trickier to plot out where we were going with having to go in and out of each challenge to get details so we ended up just starting to head towards challenge 2, while checking out the collect and photo challenges. Then we realised we were quite close to a photo stage, so detoured.
Photo challenge: Rock and Roll. This involved heading to AC/DC lane, finding the enormous statue of Bon Scott and taking a photo of us doing our best Rock performance.
Fortunately there were other teams as the statue was at least 2 metres above our heads and taking a selfish while doing a rock performance with the statue in view by ourselves would have been... complicated.
We all alternated photo taking, realising along the way that you had to take the photo in the app as it wouldn't let you upload photos from your camera. I think at this point we were one of the first teams there.
Photo taken and a queue developing behind us we headed for the next photo challenge, which was in Treasury Place.
Photo Mission: Bolte and Dunstan. We were moving slower than some of the teams by this point so followed them across to where the statues of Victoria's two longest serving premiers were located on the south-east side of the Old Treasury Building.
This left us free to head to our first Challenge stage, which was located near Coles Fountain in Parliament Gardens, and was described as a squid game challenge. What it turned out to be was cutting out a predetermined shape from a slice of honeycomb using a toothpick without breaking the shape. Neither of us watched squid game but amazingly Kirsten had read an article on that exact challenge and knew that the truck was to get the honeycomb wet. So we poured water on it and cut the circle out pretty quickly, then ate the remaining honeycomb. One down!
A bit of reading while walking had given us a bit of a plan of attack. There was a challenge close to the QV building, a photo challenge in/around Chinatown and one at the end of Croft Alley. We started head for the last location, and midway found ourselves walking past the Chinese museum which had Chinese lions out the front.
Photo Mission: Lion Dance. This involved us doing our best king fu moves with the lion in view. Again it was fortunate that we had other teams nearby to swap photos with!!
From there we hustled to Croft Alley to find the sign for the now closed science-themed bar, the Croft Institute. Amusingly this was a location in the 2016 race, which I distinctly remembered doing an Operation-themed task at. Somehow we'd ended up by ourselves again but at least this was a relatively quick selfie and the sign was at a normal height. We were already heading out as people were coming in and directed them to the sign.
The next challenge was at Booth's karaoke at the QV building. Stupidly we didn't follow the google maps directions (more new tech!) and missed the entrance, wandering around QV for about 5 minutes before finding the right place. That was a bit annoying! The task itself was a choice of singing a Spice Girls song or Mr Brighteyes - Kirsten claimed not to know that latter song so we went Spice Girls. The video was hilarious, a very cheap knockoff with three European women who looked... not even remotely like the Spice Girls, and who had about three dance moves total. Not sure what was funnier, that or finding out some of the lyrics are worse than I realised.
We collected the points and headed towards another photo challenge, this time in front of the State Library. The clue was to take a selfie at Architectural Fragment, which proved entertaining to get both of us plus the statue in frame. By the time we did it the teams had really spread out, so we uploaded an upside down photo with bits of our heads and the LI from the statue in focus.
From there it was straight down Swanston St past a collect challenge ("which animal at the corner of Bourke and Swanston St has wings?") - we didn't need to go there for the answer, I've known since 1995 it was the pig. It used to fly in front of the Windiws 95 ad, heh.
Past that to the corner of Little Collins and Swanston Sts to find two carvings of Roman numerals and add them together for the answer. One was a quick find, but we couldn't see the other so took a break to do a photo challenge to find "Larry Latrobe" in front of the Town Hall.
Fortunately they had a photo of Larry Latrobe, which is a small dog statue, but we still walked past it at least twice before finally getting the extremely awkward selfie with what could have been a very blurry anything behind bits of our faces.
Back to the numerals and other teams had arrived and were clustered at one end - which is when we found out the second set of numerals was behind a guy in hi-vis who was sitting in front of it. Still adding up 1994 and 1832 proved pretty fast and we headed to Royal Arcade for our next photo challenge.
Babushkas has apparently closed some time since 2014 when I was last in the arcade and fortunately there was another team who were happy to take a photo of us with the shop sign visible - given it was 2m above our heads again it would have been challenging!
At this point we had one challenge left, 90 minutes to go and no idea where it was located other than "William St". The team at Babushkas also didn't know, so we all headed off in different directions to try and find it. The clue was "T74288E G2733E", we needed to enter via the rear or side entrance and not run in there.
We decided to take a tram two stops up to William St and see if we could spot other teams. We got off and headed north towards Flagstaff Gardens, with no teams in sight. I tried putting in 2733 William St, which somewhat surprisingly gave us the Royal Mint building. We crossed over, noticed there was a garden behind and headed through a wide open gate into it. We knew pretty much immediately that it was the wrong place - no flags, no other teams, some nice white balloons.
A woman with quite startling vivid blue eye make-up came hurrying over.
"Excuse me, are you lost? This is actually private property, we just had a wedding..."
We examined that yes, we were lost and showed her the clue.
"Did they direct you here? Was the gate open?"
No love, we teleported through it, eyeroll.
We explained that no one had directed us and yes the gate was wide open (and still was actually). She walked around to both escort us out and (belatedly) close the gate. At this point we decided to try the Immigration museum which has "Tribute Garden", so we caught a tram two stops down and hurried to find it before the Challenge closed at 4pm. It was 4.45pm.
We hurried in and found the challenge staff, other teams and quickly checked in for the challenge. Part one was to count the silver plaques with writing around three sides of the courtyard. I headed for the first wall, realised they were 6 high on that side and counted along the bottom row to get the first number. The second wall was also 6 high so I repeated my bottom row counting and multiplication, adding it to my first number. The third wall somewhat annoyingly had rows of 12 or 13 so I counted those vertically, adding them to my total as I went. I headed back to the staff person with 573 as my answer. Much to my surprise it was correct, and I called Kirsten over for stage 2. This was to make an origami heart following a set of instructions, which she completed very quickly.
We headed out with two minutes to spare, as one team person was saying "I've counted three times - it's always 263!!" I think she missed a wall.
With 30 minutes to go we moved quickly to the Sandridge bridge to find the countries where 7,127 and 15,692 Victorians had been born in. After a bit of searching we answered Fiji and South Africa and headed off for our penultimate photo challenge at Flinders St Station photo booth. Amusingly quite a few teams saw us in front of the Fiji board and headed straight there, which meant they still needed the second number... which at least was in the direction they needed.
The photobooth is just near where I catch the tram up Elizabeth St so that was a quick and rightward up selfie.
This left us with the final photo challenge and the collect challenges. The photo challenge was to find a coin with the date of 2005, take a photo with our team number and upload. We had 4 coins (all mine) between us - dates 1983, 2000 and two from 2006. We dived into as EasyMart and explained what we needed to the staff, who very obligingly searched through the $1 and then 50c coins until they found one. We bought drinks from them as well!
That left us with the remaining collect challenges, which were brain teasers. One we had no idea on, neither did the internet, so we guessed. One was a count the triangles. One was a what is next in this sequence. One was a "what number is this" from an incomplete digital display. We guessed pretty much all of them except the last which would only let you enter the correct number.
I showed all of them to Dean when I got home, he had no idea either.
We crossed the finish mat at 4.25pm, with the number challenge not completed - we gave up guessing and wanted a drink. While we were ordering food and drinks the triangles and the brain teaser we had no idea about came back as incorrect, which dropped us from equal 5th to 9th out of 65 teams.
Which is our best result ever!!
We listened to the final wrap up, which to be honest we couldn't hear a word of due to where we were sitting, finished our drinks and headed home.
I hope they do it again, although the full race would be challenging with app based rather than clue sheets, and also with no maps. I hope they do provide maps with the app for a 6 hour event.
Amusingly another team had the same 2013 t-shirts, and my Facebook memories for today brought up a photo of me in the 2016 race!
I would prefer fewer brain teasers and more location based collecting - and not just because I can't count triangles accurately!
All up though it was a fun day, and I reckon we could have shaved a bit of time off that finish.
