Had fun last night at Jayson Wechter's Chinese New Year Treasure Hunt.

(I'd won a pair of tickets from sfist.com. Thanks, Jon!)

We'd never played before and were in the Beginner category. Hundreds (and hundreds and hundreds!) of people showed up to pickup their clues before getting the rah-rah-rah and go-ahead from Jayson hisself 'round about 5p at which point we all ripped open our clues and hunkered down to plot a plan before taking off from Justin Herman Plaza. We had until 9p to solve the clues, write down the treasure answers and get back to the Plaza to turn in our scorecard.

Oh, those clues were tough, tough, tough, even for my comrade-in-arms, his nibs, who is a fifth generation San Franciscan.

As we hunkered down for our initial clue solving, a middle-aged man in suit and tie stopped beside us. "What is going on?" he asked.

"A treasure hunt," we replied.

"Oh."

We thought we had it tough until we bumped into our DiMaggio Playground cohort, GregC, whose team was doing the challenging Master Hunt. Whoo boy. Those clues are far beyond my wee comprehension.

We didn't get all the clues, didn't find all the treasures, but we had fun and then headed home to roast lamb and parsnips with mashed potatoes and lamb drippings gravy.

Next year we'll have a better idea of what's in store, what makes sense to bring (brighter flashlights for one), and what can be left home. (I should've left my heavy HarleyD corduroy shirt home instead of carrying it along in my accoutrements bag -- we were moving too fast to ever get cold -- and it was just an added burden.)

Besides GregC, we bumped into a flock of wild RNs who used to work with his nibs at the startup in South City. I'm sure there were others in the crowd we would've known, but there were just sooooo many folks out hunting last night, not to mention the thousands who lined the streets of Chinatown for the New Year's parade.

Labels: life, San Francisco

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:34 PM|| |