Bittercreek was celebrating national Bike-to-Work day by giving out free beers if you showed up on a bike. I’ve been running around crazy busy lately, so I didn’t actually succeed at biking to work, however, how could I miss the free beer?! Can’t. I drove home, snagged my bike and snagged some biker babes on the way downtown. Online, it said the free beers only lasted until 5:00PM, but we were a gaggle of cute young girls, so they extended the happy hour for us. Sticking to sours as usual during the summer months, we made our way to the empty dance floor. I’ve hit that stage in my life where I could really care less about what people think of me. I care about me, myself, I, and the amount of fun I’m having. Thus we made a fool of ourselves, and danced by ourselves to the DJ in Pollo Rey until it was time to head to Spacebar for 10 Barrel Brewing’s Scavenger Hunt.
There were only 17 teams allowed and we were one of the last to sign up. Some of my other friends weren’t able to join the search because the team slots had maxed capacity rapidly. This was their first scavenger expedition, so judging by the turnout for their initial event; it will only get bigger as time goes on. The early bird gets the worm! Many teams had googly-eyes and funny costumes to represent their teams. Costumes were worth bonus points, but we somehow missed the memo on wearing costumes. We also got extra points for a clever team name, which of course, had to be sexual being that we’re a bunch of immature 25-year-old children. We dubbed ourselves the “Chowder Muskets,” which obviously trumped all the other team names on the raunchy Richter scale. Extra points for us!
Since there were so many of us, they staggered our starting times. As one of the last teams to report, we were one of the last teams released. The objective of the game was not only to make it back to Spacebar in the quickest amount of time, but also capture the additional bonus points along the way. I was on a team with my big bro from university, who luckily is a Boise native. We received our first clue and he immediately had us heading toward the first landmark. One after another, he knew the answer to every single clew in a matter of seconds! Before I even got done reading and understanding each clue, he would be shouting and running in another direction. We were neck-and-neck with another team most of the time (mind you, they were released before us, so technically we were lapping them), but our team sneakily misdirected them by shouting a fake answer to a clue. The opposing team scurried off in the wrong direction and we shamelessly laughed about our keen deception.
The hunt included 8 checkpoints, where we had to perform individual actions in order to obtain extra credit. My favorite task was, “Take a picture of a funny bumper sticker,” where us Vandals snapped a pic of a BSU Bronco just to troll. There were individual actions required at every checkpoint (most of them including buying and drinking 10 Barrel Beer). I will say this was the one area we may have cheated on the scavenger hunt. With every drink purchase you were supposed to win 2-extra points. We usually bought two drinks at every bar checkpoint we entered. Since we had a team of 4, we would scavenge the restaurants for wounded soldiers, or old dudes that wouldn’t mind us holding their beers to pose for a photo-op. Though this was technically cheating because we gained extra points for beers that weren’t ours, I don’t feel bad about it. Cleverness wins the race, and it’s not our fault the other teams couldn’t figure out this imminent flaw in the system.
Since 10 Barrel was all about the extra points, and we figured everyone else would easily have them completed by the end of the adventure, we decided to invent our own list of “EXTRA extra points” to brag about once returning to home base. By this time we were several beers deep and really admiring our own inventiveness. We knew our inventiveness would set us apart from the rest of the huntsmen. Our self-inflicted extra points included, high-fiveing every police officer we ran past, taking “team espresso shots” at Dutch Bro’s, and buying a homeless man a slice of pizza at Wise Guy’s. These were all embellishments along the way, so they didn’t set us back timewise. Arriving back, not only did we conquer in the timeliness category and the capture of every single extra point on the provided list, the judges also appreciated our initiative in creating our own point system. That’s right Boys (Boise), WE WON!!!!
Always,
Eventure Squad
