80 of 100: Puzzling Adventures

Our friend Lynn found a website, puzzlingadventures.com, that offers, for $50 each, brief walking tours of various cities, guided by questions to be answered. There's one in Monterey, so five of us gathered the other day at the starting point, 100 Foam Street, and set off as team Wilderness Rangers, puzzling away for 34 stops over a few miles. It took us along Cannery Row, where yes, we learned some new things about this touristed area that none of us ever visits—because hey, we're locals. It was fun. It turns out, there is tons of informational signage and plaquage and murals galore about the history of the area, going back to pre-colonial times (though curiously, the tour also included several random segues into the 20-some golf courses in the area, none of which are anywhere near Cannery Row). We learned about Monterey's Filipino heritage, the first canneries, author John Steinbeck and his friend the marine biologist Ed "Doc" Ricketts, and more. I took a few pictures.

Doc Ricketts lives on, in statue form, near the place
where he was killed in 1948. You usually find some
flowers in his hand, placed by an admirer.

A cannery workers shack near the Monterey Bay
Aquarium, saved for posterity. And Lynn, checking
her phone for the next stop on our tour.

John Steinbeck and a few of his colorful characters,
Yuletide-ready. (The guys on the left are playing
Texas Hold'em, just so you know.)

A mural of times past on Monterey Bay.

One plaque includes the first part of this fabulous opening paragraph of Steinbeck's book Cannery Row:

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen" and he would have meant the same thing.

When I say "the first part," I mean it stops at "laboratories and flophouses..." Yes, the plaque includes the ellipsis, suggesting that something good follows. And seriously, the crux of the paragraph is precisely what follows. Who authorized that plaque? They should be fired. 

These puzzle adventures exist elsewhere too—46 states plus DC, as well as Canada, Mexico, Portugal, and the UK. They occur in 27 cities in California: San Diego alone has seven; San Francisco two; LA five. For what they offer, they seem a little pricy to me. There were many typos, and poor instructions on how to enter answers caused us on a few occasions to miss our first guess—which means we came in 48th out of 100 other teams that have made the trip. Of course, clumsy phone fingers also contributed. And did we really care? Nah. And golf courses? On Cannery Row? Really?

But the five of us spent an enjoyable couple of hours on a perfect day, followed by G&T's at Lynn's. What else really matters?

(The concept isn't unlike that of Adventures Labs, an app sponsored by geocaching.com, only Labs tend to be ten stops max—but they're free.)