In which I work my ass off for, well, for fun. Apparently.

Last night I went to Elisabeth’s bachelorette party, which did not involve male strippers and booze.

It was a scavenger hunt.

It started at the Farmer’s Market at six PM sharp, wended its way through Oby Nelson park, the graveyard, Chatauqua Park, and all of the open businesses on the town square, and it ended at Chloe’s house at about ten-thirty for pizza and beer.

We had to ask the Farmer’s Market vendors embarassing questions to get clues to give to Farmer Doug to get additional clues. We had to kiss Adam Perkins on the lips, throw watermelon at each other…

…pour water out of cups attached to our heads into cups attached to our teammate’s head, break water balloons with a Bic pen while blindfolded…

…collect flora in the dark, take headstone tracings in the dark, collect things like BBQ sauce and pickled ginger from various vendors on the square, buy produce and light bulbs and matches, go to the fire station, record various sounds, take various pictures, and in general accost strangers for weird things.

It was actually kinda stressful. It felt more like working than relaxing, what with the hurrying and the talking to strangers and the running around feeling stupid, but it was my first scavenger hunt so I may not have had exactly the right attitude.

I can’t express my admiration for the amount of work Chloe did setting it up, though. She’d gotten all of the Farmer’s Market vendors in on the game, she’d gotten four or five people to go to the various locations and run our little tasks (she’d even collected Pabst Blue Ribbon racing jackets for them to wear, so we could find them at each place), she’d made up the lists and made copies and devised a point system. She’d set it up so that each team ended up with bags of produce from the market, which she and her boyfriend then used to make pizzas and salad. She’d gone, in a nutshell, totally overboard designing this scavenger hunt and it rocked.

If you like that sort of thing.

I really didn’t enjoy knocking on a stranger’s door at 10:21 pm to ask them to come out on the porch for the “photo of the team with an unfamiliar family on their porch” picture, worth 100 points. I didn’t mind kissing Adam (50 points), nor did kissing the blue room bother me (100 points), but interacting with strangers at their door weirds me out. (It was too much like canvassing for OSPIRG, which I only did for a month one summer but I truly hated it.) It was just our luck we got some International MIU students who didn’t really seem to know what a scavenger hunt was, but they were nice enough to pose for a picture with us.

I did like visiting the fire house, though. Who doesn’t adore firemen! My favorite part of that was watching Ali jump six inches when the guy started the siren up. She’s so cute.

Oh, yeah – I was on a team with Ali and Rachel Black. Those chicks rock. And Elisabeth apparently loved the scavenger hunt, and that was the whole point. Best wishes, e!