Admittedly, in Tom Cruise's case he was hanging upside down in an attempt to infiltrate a CIA computer and save the world, whereas I was just trying to get my hands on some food, but overall, I think my mission yesterday afternoon was far more impossible.
Don't let the chirpy smiles fool you...
We spent Monday pitting our wits against Moriarty. And frankly we lost.
The location for this meeting of minds was the Hidden Valley Discovery Park near Launceston, which is basically a park-based version of a puzzle app.
You start out here, at Moriarty's Mansion, an apparently small and misleadingly-named house...
I should point out that Toby's not throwing up there. He was actually loving it. No, really.
Anyhoo, you're given an electronic key card, and in the tradition of all good 'room escape' games, you're informed that all you need to do is get out. The house itself is a labyrinth of odd rooms, locked doors and weird corridors...
... and it's only afterwards (quite a long time afterwards, in our case) that you realise the house you see on the outside is only a small part of it. It actually extends across the first floor of the visitor centre via a connecting tunnel, but you're so disorientated when you're in there, you lose all sense of direction and have no idea of the scale. It's ingeniously constructed, with some brilliant effects...
There's no time for hanging around though...
... (well, maybe just a little bit of time)...
... because along the way, you have to attempt six of Moriarty's Missions - electronic puzzles which are activated using your key card, and range from the fairly easy to the fiendishly difficult. They all have a time limit, which is based partly on the electronic clock which counts down as you attempt the challenge, and partly on the time it takes Toby to realise that the rest of his family are engrossed in a brainteaser, and perform a room escape of his own.
When you eventually make it out, you can insert your key card into a slot in the visitor centre and it tells you which challenges you completed...
I defy anyone to complete that Fuel Rod mission. I was standing on a chair at one point, and then lying on the floor. It was like The Crystal Maze. But with more hair. And ultimately I think my team let me down.
Anyhoo, our next challenge had us running into the undergrowth...
... dashing across ditches...
... and looking puzzled on paths...
The Indiana Trail involved finding wooden posts, following ropes through the bushes, discovering tags, identifying animals, collecting letters and adding up numbers. It was particularly enjoyed by Lisa, as she got to sit on a picnic bench for half an hour while I scrambled through the vegetation with the kids.
By the end of it, I fully deserved the home-made steak burger they served me in the cafe, and was right up for visiting a hobbit...
That's him in the window. And fortunately, he invited us in...
Lisa and Toby headed off to the adventure playground at that point, leaving me and Amelie to conquer the hedge maze...
... and then attempt the Sherlock Holmes Trail. I have to say, this was my favourite part. From the starting point at one end of the park, you have to follow clues, each one giving a pointer to the location of the next, which could be anywhere in the park. For the intelligent lateral thinker, it's a simple matter of going from point to point. For us, it was a criss-crossing circuitous route covering what felt like twenty miles. And that was just to find Clue 2.
For me, the highlight of the entire day was clue number five, which we found on the underside of a shelf in an outbuilding, and which read: "4 red dots, followed by 6 yellow dots, followed by 14 green dots. Behind the 12th green dot is hidden your next clue".
I kid you not: we spent an hour wandering around the park looking for dots. Well, *I* did. Amelie gave up after twenty minutes and Lisa forced me to go and get her a coffee. But I refused to be beaten. Apart from brow-beaten, obviously. Having scoured the entire Hidden Valley without success, I suddenly noticed a tiny pattern of coloured dots on the back of the park map I'd been carrying with me the whole time. I poked my pen through the 12th green dot, made a hole through to the aerial map of the park on the other side, and it marked a location at one end of a small wooden bridge. Arriving there, I searched the entire structure without success, before getting down on my hands and knees, and finding the next clue on the underside of one of the wooden fence slats, exactly where the map had indicated.
I may be slightly nerdy (although still very much a man's man, obviously), but I loved that.
But not as much as Lisa, who had said to me 45 minutes earlier "Are there any dots on your map..?". I'd ignored her, obviously. Besides which, she was wrong. They were on the back of my map.
Unfortunately, it had taken so long to find clue 6 that we ran out of time to find the seventh before the park closed, which was gutting, as we were less than half way through and I was having the time of my life. We did, however, bask in the glory of completing the first five clues, adding up the answers and getting the right total...
After which Amelie did her victory pose on the railway bridge...
All in all, it was a fab day out, made even better by the almost complete absence of human beings...
Although the three in that photo come close. I'm not saying we were right to take Amelie out of school for four days, but frankly if it means saving hundreds of pounds and getting the tourist attractions to ourselves, her education can go hang.
0 comments:
Post a Comment