G-san, U-chan and I made another trek to Flushing Meadows Corona Park to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the 1964 World's Fair. For the closing day festivities, they had organized a scavenger hunt. I could scarcely believe that we were expected to sink a good solid 4 hours of our lives into the hunt, but I was game to try a few clues and bail when it got too tedious. It turned out to be a lot of fun - a combination of running around to collect tokens, solving tricky questions, and doing a few photo ops. Needless to say, we needed every minute of the time allotted, and actually ran out of time to collect all the tokens.
Smartphones were allowed, so we spent a lot of time upfront sitting at a table in the Queens Museum trying to figure out exactly where we needed to go and to track down as many answers as we possibly could before we started wandering about. This investment of time allowed us to outperform many of our competitors; we got 33 points out of a possible 39+ (as compared with many folks who got only 8-10 points).
One of the coolest parts of participating in the scavenger hunt was being able to go into the places where you ordinarily have to pay admission... or where you
ordinarily cannot go at all, such as the
New York State Pavilion's
Tent of Tomorrow:
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| A view of the Observation Towers from the Tent of Tomorrow |
(More after the jump)
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| A portion of the mosaic that is being restored |
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A pair of roller skates in the center of the Tent of Tomorrow remind us of a former use of the space
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Afterward, we headed to the Queens Theatre to get our answers graded. We took a look at the World's Fair themed Lego constructions on display:
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| The New York State Pavilion, in Legos! |
They actually offered prizes for 1st through 4th place finishers. We weren't really in it for the prizes, as we knew we were not experts in FMCP lore or the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs; there would surely be lifelong Queens residents and World's Fair buffs who would have an edge over us. Besides, all the prize packages included Knicks tickets, and we kidded around that if 1st prize got 2 Knicks tickets, the penalty for last place would be 50 Knicks tickets.
But the guy who graded us was really impressed by how well our team did - apparently we'd done the best of everyone he'd graded so far. So we started getting our hopes up a little that maybe we could win second prize (by far the best of the lot, as it provides a family membership to the Museum of the Moving Image among other, less desirable, prizes). Alas, it turned out there were people who got all 39 questions right, and got extra credit for posting their scavenger hunt photos on social media. But really, it was all for the best. How on earth would we have been able to get rid of Knicks tickets?!
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