Professional Scavenger Hunters

In our Scavenger Hunting debut, Team Om dominated the annual West Potomac Rugby Scavenger Hunt Fundraiser. Thanks to careful planning and reading the rules we finished with 123 points (to 2nd place's 81.5 points). Our softball inspired team consisted of myself Jenn, Joel and Mary's dog Reagan.
Our strategy was to read the questions carefully and come up with our route for the day and then have as much fun as possible along the way. The two key points we settled on were that we all needed to be in every picture to double the point value and that we had to make our way to the embassies (the loophole of the hunt appeared to be Ben awarding a point for each embassy!), and I'd say that strategy paid off. Although a good number of our points came from the embassies (and I have 37 more shots just like the one of us in from of the Chilean embassy!) we only spent about a half hour up there so we definitely didn't sacrifice the fun of the full scavenger hunt experience to win. We also couldn't have pulled it off without our official mascot Reagan (a natural redhead) who kept us relaxed and quite approachable by everyone we had to interact with (including a woman who filmed us for the Travel Channel as we scavenged around Eastern Market - she was drawn to us by Reagan and not the three of us making mooing noises as we put some folk-art hermaphrodite cows in compromising positions to check off the photo requirement which was listed as... "With Cow Sex"). Shown are some photos of us "Petting a Pug", "In a Convertible" (a Jennifer in a Convertible.. sofa), "In a Fountain", "Playing Chess in Dupont Circle", "A Bowling Pin (3 points for holding it)", "Wearing a police hat", "With a person on the street named after their home state", and of course "1 point each embassy" (there's Luxembourg, Turkey, Togo, and Sudan in a single shot!). For our efforts (and $20 each donation) we were rewarded with $100 (which turned out to be $80 when I actually counted it later - I swear!). And of course I took the opportunity to jokingly declare myself a professional scavenger hunter on the Travel Channel! We'll be back next year to defend our title... but for now, I'd better focus on getting some sleep before flying to Africa in the morning. Next post to come from Senegal Insh'allah...