We had our best Gumshoe ever this year. The Gumshoe is 5K puzzle hunt around my neighborhood that raises money for the local foodback and senior center. John is really good at puzzle hunts. His team won against other MIT grads when he was there. I like easy puzzle hunts. This one is not easy.

Thirty clues, most of them 4 steps long. It's got clues that ask you to find a number that happens to be on a telephone pole embedded in another number. You need to think in puns, think obliquely, look at your environs in a new way. Is the hazard a pear falling on your head, an electric wire, or a dangerous dog? The answer might be on the ground, on the side of a building, nestled in a garden, almost hidden on the side of a building. You've got to know port from starboard and which way water flows. You're also walking 5K over hills in the ninety degree heat.

This year we made our lives easier by splitting the puzzle in half, so when we got exhausted and cranky, we quit for the day. I brought lots of water and ice packs. We also made fair use of the longitude and latitude markers, so if we thought the tree hanging over the alley was the "living roof," John could check if we were in the right place. And once, when we were really stuck, we called the puzzle master. In other words, we didn't obsess; we had fun.

There was a nice balance to our hunt this year. We all figured things out or spotted them first. David was just as apt to have the answer as the rest of us. And, as always, we had the fun of exploring our quirky neighborhood.