So, here it is. This is what I did October 19th and 20th, 2002. See the full gallery of pictures (and larger versions) at this location

8:00am Got up. Yeack. It's too early.

9:00am Jeff and Amanda showed up, with the "van", a Oldsmobile or something or other. Too sliding doors, one of which opens by motor. Sheesh.

9:20am Stop for food at the mexican restaurant next to the mexican grocery store across from 7th.

9:35am Heading to the start point. 1500 Seabridge, in Redwood City.

NDA 9:45am The FoBIK Team Registration. We each have to consume some pills (redhot, and a couple of childrens' aspirin). Sign an NDA. We get a booklet of team intros, and told there'll be introductions in a few. The place is looking right over the bay, and it's a dreary, but not too cold, SF morning.

9:55am Orange crush shows up. Very photogenic.

10:05am The natives are getting restless, the mingling continues, but no official announcements of anything yet.

10:15am Safe phrase: "we're not having fun anymore", if you really want the clue answered. Don't take others clues.

10:30am First clue is distributed, after we stuff our faces with food. It's a CD case, with a bunch of pictures on it. We think that the colors in the words "Clue #1" are a hint, since the pictures have colored frames.

Clue #1

Red: pray?

purple: oscar, or awards?

Yellow: trees

Green: cemetary, or tomb or tombstone

Blue: hay (or farming)

--> Lonetree cemetary, Hayward.

10:50am And we're off, northbound on 101.

11:15am We just discovered that we can connect the GPS to the laptop. Now, with Microsoft Streets, we know where we're going, and exactly where we are. Pretty cool.

Oh, and, we just lost another team, who was following us. The wonders of lights changing and people not being able to run them as badly as you do....

11:20am We're there. There's a huge collection of descriptions, with a couple of hand symbols on each. Then there're a bunch of words. We're trying to map them out. Turns out to be the Devil's Dictionary in combination with sign language. We had to find a new sign language reference (on the 'net), because the ones we'd brought didn't match up very well at all.

~1:10pm We decode the last clue - Redwood Road, Anthony Chabot Park, Marciel Gate. We drive there, and, eventually, find the clue in a trashcan labeled "fobik". It is a travel chess set, with two chess games to play, each from a different starting position with a sequence of moves.

1:40pm We haven't decoded it yet, but we're still trying. In time.

2:35pm Oh, after a hint, we find out it was semaphores (coded in the pairs of moves). We're now going to "Go to Lafayette Comunity park, by last ramp rxxk"

er, correct that to "Las Trampos Creek"

4:50pm After finally finding our way to the right park, and then, finally (~30minutes) locating the clue box, we found the rotor cipher. Then we spent another 25 minutes before we discovered the ciphertext, which we fairly quickly discovered the answer was Dinosaur Hill in Pleasant Hill. And now we're on our way.

6:00-8:30pm

Dinosaur Point

We stopped for some pizza while solving the Dinosaur Point clue, which led us to the Sunny Point Mall or something or other, where we got an engineering blueprint.

Mechanophobia

We also tried to find a hardware store, to replace the burnt fuse preventing us from using the power invertor I bought. Ugh. Anyway, solved that, which led us to Port Costa. There, we spent a lot of time trying to find the clue, which was apparently behind the fence on school grounds.... and the locals were already checking up with us as to what was up. Oh well. We eventually (well, Jeff B did) jumped the fence, and got the clue. That was a bunch of plastic chips we had to reassemble into their original shape. That led us to Nantucket restaurant

Nantucket

, just under I80 in Crocket

I-80 Bridge

. There, the clue was missing, and we called game control and got sent along to Black Pt., near Sonoma. We're travelling there now.

9:10pm So, we're at Black Point. The clue is a little book called "Beale's Anotomy", apparentl the book-cipher we'd been clued we'd have. Eventually, we figure it out, and find our way to the Civic Center in Marin.

12:45am

The Marin Civic Center

Wow. Chronophobia sucked. Way too many crude words, way too many options. We finally figured out to go to the public pier by the Acqua hotel somewhere south of Mill Valley.

1:15am Decoding the new clue. This one's all food items, with a list of partial barcodes which we're trying to put to use. Who knows on this one?

Hrm. No more charging, but there's 1:15 left on this charge. 'cause we used it a lot on trying to decode chronophobia. Nonetheless, more than 12 hours remain, and I'm going to have trouble keeping the thing working enough to log. Hrm.

3:50am We took a wrong track

the wrong Battery East

A fogged in Golden Gate, really early in the morning

originally, heading to Battery and trying to find a hiking bridge. Eventually, with some hinting, the last clue led us to a hiking bridge in the Presidio, at the Battery East site near the Golden Gate. There, we rubbed brail symbols, and figured out to go to The Cafe at Castro and Market.

The writing is on the wall...

We are now trying to decode the book from that cafe, which involves some weird story, and filling in a bunch of "compounds" appropriately. I'm just about totally out, and not feeling so well. I went to a local 24-hour cafe, where I got hit on by some old drunk gay dude. Lovely.

5:40am We got to the Caltrain station at 22nd, which was the last clue. Hunting around for a while, and waiting for a freight train to take off, with some suggestions from mission control, we found the next clue. But, we decided we were too far behind (particularly because we keep getting stuck as the last with given clues, and that apparently nobody had been finding the clue at the caltrain station, so we called in and got the next clue... Bay Bridge Inn at 966 Harrison, room 203. I hope we aren't too far behind, but who knows. Jeff B. wanted to work on the clue, but we sort of overrode him, b/c we feel so far behind.

~6:30am We went to the room 203, and found the next clue. Pictures of "dead" FoBIK team, in various states of death. If you lined them up chronologically, each person's sequence spelled out a word, leading us to the next location, a officers' barraks on Treasture Island. This was done by the fingerprints at the bottom of the photos, which were in 5 different places, and present, or not... thus encoding letters of the alphabet.

~6:50am Arrive at the barraks. Eventually find a ziplock with 3-by pieces of blocks, painted funny colors with letters and symbols. We don't know what the answer is yet.

7:45am Assemble the cube , which sends us to Oakland.

8:30am We get to Marret Lake, and we have to unscramble the order of the Oakland skyline.

Instead, we had some breakfast. Then I tried to sleep, while everyone else worked on the clue.

11:15am Finally decypher the clue, and head out of a Public Storage nearby to listen to a Morse-coded message in a cophin. Ken dispatches this quickly, we get redirected afterward to a different location (presumably for catchup), and away we go.

11:55am We're on our way to Saint Joseph's cemetary in Fremont, as directed previously. There's only 2 hours left in the game, so, hopefully this is fairly near to the end of the game, or we might not be given the chance to finish.

2:00pm We finished the graveyard clue, with a heavy helping of assistance from game control. But, we got it, and now we're on our way to Sunnyvale. Supposedly, there're only a couple of clues left.

We can't be far from the end of the party yet.

2:45pm The next clue was apparently cancelled, or there weren't enough, or something. When we got the port-o-let, there was a message telling us to call game control. So, we headed off.... to the next location.

3:15pm We arrive at 328 something or other street, and are eventually ushered in to be exhorcized of the demons which the FoBIK drug would eventually exhibit in us. Parlor bleeding tricks (Ph sensitive paper, salt water) later, we're given a very simple clue sending us to Las Palmas Park, where there is a post-Game reception. Apparently, if we'd gotten there earlier, we'd've had to work harder on that clue, but it was given to us mostly completed.

There we see a few of the clues we missed, had some food, talked with the other teams which had recently finished, saw our progress notes on the "big board", etc.

~3:45pm Head out. Time to be done. We head to my place, clean out the van, sit around for a few minutes, then everyone takes off... Jeff H home, Jeff B and Amanda and Ken to take back the rental van and get back their various cars. I go take a shower.

4:45pm Everyone's gone, I've taken a shower, and now I'm just chilling. I'm actually not tired, despite only having had about 1/2-2 hours of sleep, mostly in snoozes, all night. Yikes. I zonked around 10am, while others were working on the skyline problem, but I never really slept. Ah, well, tonight will be a solid sleep, I certainly hope.