Treasure Hunt Clues

A lot of people have the image of treasure hunts as something from the
movies where spectacle wearing old men dash through old tombs avoid
traps. Maybe you have experienced a kids treasure hunt with a bland
piece of paper instructing you to collect bits and pieces from around
the house and garden. But there is another kind of treasure hunt, that
you can do – the car treasure hunt.

The Car Treasure Hunt is a much more advanced hunt and requires a bit
more planning on behalf of the organiser. The first car treasure hunt I
came across was run by the university auto sports club. It had quite a
large following each week.

The start of the car treasure hunt is obviously the planning that goes
on ahead of time. From a participants point of view, it all starts by
being given a clue sheet. Working with a recommended map with enough
road detail you start to unravel the hunt.

Using the map the first part of the task is to work out the road. Often
the route is not given to you instead you have to work it out. Instead
you are given clues to the route which are often based on the shapes of
the route junctions. So for example you might be given a series of
tulips. Each tulip is a small diagram of each junction, but all the
drawings are turned so that you enter the bottom of the diagram and
leave either left, right or at the top of the diagram. For example take
the right fork might be described as a tulip bulb (where you come from)
with two curved (leaf like) lines. The right line will have an
arrowhead to indicate the place to exit. In a four way junction there
would be three leaves indicating left, middle and right.

By stretch out the junctions into a series of tulips you can describe the path you need to go.

There are lots of variations of this method. So instead of tulips you
might have clock times, where the hour hand would be the exit point and
the minute hand the entry point. This then gives you the shape of the
junction without the detail of the number of roads. The clocks might be
drawn or written in number form to add another level of difficulty.

Added to the description of the route are the clues that you need to
find along the way, this is just like a normal treasure hunt. These
clues would be either in between junction descriptions to show where
the answer can be found or marked with letters to indicate the position.

Car treasure hunts can be a lot of fun and it all starts with a good set of treasure hunt clues.