Passport to Provo

Taking a selfie in the Google Fiber store was our first task

Still playing some catch-up.  A couple weeks ago, I had a great time participating with Gerrit and Elisabeth's family in Passport to Provo, which was an effort to break the world record for largest scavenger hunt.  The event was sponsored by a number of partners, most notably Google Fiber, Cotopaxi, and some downtown Provo association.  I hadn't heard anything about it until Elisabeth mentioned it when I went to babysit the kids the Fri before.  They were already all signed up thanks to her diligence, so when they invited me to join them, it was a pretty simple matter for me to register on their team last minute.  I'm really glad they told me about it, because I had a great time!


We got to the Utah Valley Convention Center where everything was based out of fairly early, which was fortunate, because getting checked in took quite awhile, even though Elisabeth had already done several things, like pick up the passport to be stamped, the day before.  After we signed in, we went outside to wait with the rest of the folks.  There was quite a bit of waiting, because they technically couldn't start the event until everyone was officially signed in.  The official stuff mattered because there was an actual rep from the Guiness Book of World Record there to make sure everything was done properly.  However, we noticed that some people had already begun before the all clear, so it seemed to make sense to just get started for the sake of the kids.

The first stop we made was to the Google Fiber HQ.  There were a few challenges to do here, like take a selfie and post it to Instagram and ride one of the Google bikes.  Playing leapfrog with your team also happened close to here.  The HQ really was quite nice, and Miles and I enjoyed checking out Google Fiber TV in the sweet lounge area they had.  The bikes were also fun, though I couldn't really figure out why they needed them.  I mean, they would make sense at the Google campus in California, since that's a larger space, but seemed mostly for show in Provo.  I guess that's why they were eager for someone to use them on the scavenger hunt!

Next, we headed down to Pioneer Book, which was really quite an interesting old bookstore.  I'd rather like to go back and explore it more in depth at some point.  The challenge here, which was one of my favorites, was to read a book passage out loud while wearing a hat matching the book.  For us, Miles read part of The Cat in the Hat.  I was pretty disappointed by the folks reading Shakespeare's "To be, or not to be" soliloquy while we were there.  It's only one of the greatest passages of literature ever written, but everyone was giving it such flat, lifeless delivery.  I felt a little disgruntled to see it so abused!

We moved on to a big theater venue downtown, where Miles told a joke for the judges while Elisabeth posed with the Hipster bigfoot that was supposedly "hidden".  On the way out, we met a lady with a cute dog that Molly was pretty delighted with.

 


From there we had a decent trek over to a park where challenges included items like going down a slide and picking up a piece of trash.  Molly liked going down the slide so much that she insisted on going down a bunch of times while Elisabeth was waiting to get the passport stamped.  The last item in the park was to fly a kite.  They had a ton of them that were all tangled up.  Gerrit and I spent some time trying to untangle at least a few, but finally determined it was a fairly hopeless task and I picked up a kite that had been carefully laid aside and managed to get it up for a bit with Miles' help.

More walking ensued afterward and Miles had pretty much had it, so we ended up putting him in the stroller while I carried Molly as we trekked on.  I didn't quite realize how much of a workout carrying her all around Provo was giving me until the next day when my arms were crazy sore!  Fortunately, she was happy to walk some of the time.

Next we stopped at Velour, which is a small music venue.  Here, Gerrit and Elisabeth took the kids up on the stage, to lip sync/more like dance to some music.  This was a pretty fun thing to check off.  It was an interesting place and it was also entertaining to watch the groups before us do their thing.  The venue lives in infamy for Gerrit and Elisabeth because it was where a JPL concert was held back in the days that mom was still excited about him.

We hit a few other little stores with some less interesting challenges after that before we stopped a Sodalicious, which was another big stopping point.  It's one of those artisan soda places that seem to be popular around here right now.  They had samples of a new flavor with blood oranges and the challenge was to make up a name for the soda.

After finishing there, we did some more walking around to hit a few other peripheral task like donating books at the United Way and taking pictures with a few murals downtown.  Miles was quite excited about the Mario mural.  After hitting these various tasks, we had done enough to go back to the convention center and claim our t-shirts.  We wanted to do this a quick as possible to limit the risk that they might run out of our sizes.  It turned out that we didn't have much to worry about as there seemed to be plenty of shirts.

We each got a nice silicon slopes shirt from Google Fiber as well as a hideous hipster bunny shirt from the downtown Provo concert series people.  It's seriously the ugliest shirt I've ever owned, but I guess it's supposed to be "cool."  It's actually a good quality shirt, so I've been wearing it to exercise when I don't really care too much what people think of me.  Ironically though, the first time I wore the atrocity (both to the laws of nature and the aesthetic sensitivity of innocent people subjected to looking at it), I happened to run into one of my coworkers biking the Provo River Trail coming the opposite way I was running.  It's the ONLY time I've ever seen anyone I know there, and of course it had to be the day I was sporting the ugliest shirt I've ever owned!  Fortunately, he said he didn't notice it when I mentioned it later, but he was probably just trying to be nice or perhaps the experience was so traumatic he blocked the memory. :)

 

In the room where we got the shirts there happened to be a pile of huge legos which the kids ended up playing with for a long time while the adults rested.  Ironically, the kids pretty much perked back up with plenty of energy as soon as the hard trekking around was over.  We had some time to kill before the after party started where they would announce results, so when the kids were ready to move on, we went to drop the shirts off at the car.  On the way there, we happened to run into Coto and Paxi, the Cotopaxi llamas, making their way back to the convention center from a park we didn't go to.  It was nice to run into them this way as we got to spend more time enjoying them without being rushed along.  The kids definitely loved getting to meet them up close.

 

Next we decided to crash a wedding expo that was being held in the convention center at the same time, but not related to the Passport to Provo stuff.  It was interesting to check out some of the vendors and the kids got a bit of food.  We went to a restaurant and got some food in the interim as well, even though we knew there would be hors d'oeuvres at the after party. The kids definitely needed something more substantial to tide them over as we hadn't eaten in a long time.  We also had time to stop by a very cool map and flag store and a game store Gerrit used to play Magic at back in the day.

The after party itself was very cool.  They'd set up the terrace of the convention center very nicely with big Google-colored fountains, a stage, and dance-floor.  Plus, the terrace already had a great view and a swanky feel to it with some lights strung overhead and such.  We all got down to eating pretty quickly, and the food was all quite good even though it was fancy.  There were big bouncers all around the perimeter as well, so the whole atmosphere and all the trappings did make me feel rather like a VIP with special privileges and exclusive access, which was fun.

This was the pic on Instagram

While we waited for the big announcement from the Guinness record keeper to see how we'd done, a DJ was pumping music while a big screen displayed shots from the Instagram feed for #PassportToProvo,  Though the whole place was packed, the only people out on the dance floor were among the various kids in attendance.  Miles and Molly had a great time getting out there with the rest and dancing around while making new friends.  At some point close to the big announcement, one of our pictures which I'd posted to Instagram came up on the big screen prominently.  This also made me feel pretty high profile!

Finally, the moment we were all waiting for arrived.  After counting all the wristbands she had personally cut from each participant, the Guinness record keeper gave the final results.  The standing record had been set by the University of Chicago in 2011 with 923 participants.  We had more than doubled that amount with a whopping 2,079 participants!  Everyone was naturally delighted to be part of a new world record and the party energy amped up considerably.

Soon after the celebratory cake was cut and the headliner musician started is set.  I think the guy's name was Ryan Innes.  Some dude that was on The Voice.  The horrific hipster bunny was supposed to look like him, I guess.  Turning someone into a demented rabbit seems like a poor way to honor your citizens, if you ask me!  We listen to a couple of his songs, which were only okay for me, while we ate our cake.  Though the party was going to continue until 11, we were all pretty beat and left at that point.

Overall, the event was super fun!  The tasks were very entertaining in and of themselves and the free stuff involved was also very nice.  I'm really glad that Elisabeth invited me to come along, because it would have been a shame to miss such a fun event simply because I wasn't aware of it.  Be sure to check out her blog for a different perspective on the event.  It certainly feels good to be a world record holder, for the time being at least!