Halloween night (only a week late)

I meant to post about this Sunday, but the whole not-being-able-to-sit-up-without-risk-of-puking thing kind of put a stop to that. And then I was in Belgium til Wednesday and then I ended up having to make an emergency trip to Bretagne yesterday which pushed things back even further. As a side note - SNCF, enough with the strikes! Between waiting for the train and being on the train, the whole round trip took almost 11hrs. Plus 120€ for the last minute tix to boot!

Anyways, here we go. Those of you on Twitter and Facebook may have noticed that FND's (Friday Night Drinks) were canceled last week. Yep, that's right people - no rhum-rhums were consumed and hell did not freeze over. Instead, a bunch of us participated in the Undead Invasion, which was essentially a Halloween Scavenger Hunt. I'm not very creative, so dressing up for Halloween has never really been my thing, but I still like to celebrate it and figured this would be a good way. I roped a few people into being on my team (Jasmin, Kendra & Anna), and while the four of us were not quite sure how it would be, we ended up having a ton of fun. We put up a tough front in the picture below, but I'm telling you, we screamed like little girls anytime a zombie came near us. Oh yeah, forgot to mention, they had live zombie actors "guarding" all the clues.The way it worked is they gave us a map and six different clues. Once we found the clue, we then had to figure out what it meant, using one of two different deciphering methods. The six answers together formed an ancient incantation that would send the zombies back to their graves.

Here's an example of a clue:

Location: Near the intersection of Colbert's Hotel and the shop that makes blood flow

Guidance: Find the plaque honoring the late anatomist. Take the very last date listed and add its middle two digits. With this value, perform the simplest arithmetic on the values below to get your coordinates, over and down.

1 2 3 4 5
1 G H I J Z
2 F A B L Y
3 E D C M X
4 Q P O N W
5 R S T U V

Luckily the playing zone was roughly the Notre Dame/St Michel area (not far from where I live), so I didn't have much trouble figuring out where the clues were. And my fabulous teammates were pros at solving them. While we didn't win -maybe because we *ahem* stopped off for a drink & fries during the race- we still had a great time. Running from all of those zombies and then walking for twelve hours straight the next day probably contributed to me being out of commission on Sunday, but man, I'd do it again in a heartbeat!

**In case anyone's interested in doing next year, it's held in Paris, several different cities across the US and in Brisbane, Australia.