Super Hunt

For those of you who are not familiar with Minnie’s moonlight madness, it is a scavenger hunt in Disneyland after everyones has left the park. You gather together in teams of 4 and this year there were about 350 teams. It starts after the park closes and ends after 1 am. I think I got home around 2 in the morning.

My team consisted of Rob, Rob and Scott. At least one member of the team needs to be a Disney employee, one of the Rob’s is a co-worker of mine and sits in the next cube over at work. He has been with Disney for at least 10 years and is a walking Disney encyclopedia. This was his 5th year at the hunt. The other Rob and Scott are longtime friends from junior high. last year they had another girl as their fourth, but I had mentioned to Rob that I wanted to play several months ago so I hope the other girl’s feeling weren’t too hurt when he didn’t ask her to play again this year.

I’m not much of a Disney buff, but what I lack in knowledge I make up for in quick strategy thinking. I think I also helped in the moving quickly part. These guys weren’t to thrilled in my power walking strategy as they were sweating buckets, but I think it paid off in the end when we finished with only 5 minutes to spare.

There is a 50 question quiz in the beginning that we all do together. They go through the questions very quickly so if you don’t know it you are stuck because there isn’t enough time to look the answer up. Oh, by the way you are allowed to bring books and stuff. So rob had several resource books to look up stuff with. Rob was amazing, he knew the answers before the multiple choice answers even came up. We only had to consult the books a few times.

Then you go get your first clue, there are 10 clues you have to answer. You decide ahead of time if you want them to be all easy or all hard or a mixture of the two. The harder ones have a greater point value and the easier ones usually require a bit of walking to complete. Last year Rob chose 5 easy and 5 hard. Seeing that they came in 27th...out of 350, he was feeling pretty good. So he advanced to 6 hard and 4 easy. The first ones we got were very puzzle-ey. We didn’t have to go anywhere in the park. We did crossword puzzles and word finds. The last five were all over the place, off to Tomorrowland and then to Frontier Land and back to Fantasyland. The last hour was exhausting and my poor boys hadn’t done that much exercising in awhile.

My favorite clue was in Tomorrowland, we had to count the points of the star under the big rotating water ball, the birds from the submarine ride, the martians from a sign, how many moons on another sign...etc. They all represented a letter that went into an algebra problem. Then you had to solve the algebra problem. It was fun. When it was all said and done, Rob (smarty pants) ended up knowing the answer before we even went and hunted down everything, we just wanted to make sure. Plus they tricked you by making you find numbers that weren’t even in the math problem. Trixie!

So the night was over, we were so tired and we had a great time. They only announce the top 3 winners that night, and we were not them. So we left feeling great but tired...and a little deflated that we didn’t win. But seriously, when you are competing with folks who live and breathe at the park, we didn’t have much of a shot not having the home court advantage. We joked the whole ride home that we came in fourth, and they just didn’t have enough time to congratulate us.

Anyhoo..Rob got the results back today and what do you know...we did come in fourth!!!!!!!!!! Hot damn! How totally rad is that? They went from 27th to fourth, I am taking total credit for that to. Just teasin’, it was so not me, but a major group effort with a ringer.

my boys...scott, rob and rob...so tired


Not too many times will you get to experience the park when no one is there. The moment on our way out was quite a sight. I couldn’t leave and not implant that memory. It was very cool but Disneyland is just not Disneyland without kids with cotton candy stuck to their faces and folks running around with hats on that they will never wear again.