Scavengeroogle: A Google Maps Scavenger Hunt To Waste More Of Your Time On

All right folks. Here is our first attempt at a Bounty! If you haven’t already done so, please read the post that explains what a Scavengeroogle Bounty is since they are a bit different than our normal clues.

I found this little feature that reminded me of an antique key while just surfing around Google Maps. I think this is a good starting one because it is very well defined and quite visible. You can see the key from about 14/18. Word clue for this bounty: “144 Seq”

The prize for this particular bounty is a 1999 copy of the Sonoma Valley Visitors Guide. I have another one of these so I decided to make this the first prize. It is from 1999 because that’s when my wife and I went on our honeymoon. We took a trip up through San Francisco and then through the wine country, staying in Sonoma for a little bit. The wine country was really nice… although at the time they were already starting to charge for wine tasting at many vineyards which I think is pretty sad.

Although the price on it says $5, I believe you can actually get this free buy requesting it through one of the Sonoma city visitor guide sites. Although, you won’t be able to find this “out of print” 1999 version though, hehe!

Like I said, this first one is an experiment… I am hoping that the bounty is not collected for at least a few days. In particular, I know clues have to be more difficult, but I am not sure how diffciult…

[Edit: I can’t believe how fast Judy solved this one… according to her it only took 1/2 an hour (though she did mention she had to use a dictionary of abbreviations to get “Seq”)! I’m going to have to investigate how to make the clues more difficult. I wonder if not putting any word clues might be too hard?]

Bounty Name : “Antique Key”
Submitted by: Scavengeroogle Admin
Status : Collected by Judy B.
Time Elapsed: 16 hrs, 7 minutes
Word Clue : “144 Seq”
Magnification Needed: 13/18

Reward: 1999 Sonoma Valley Visitor Guide

I’m trying something new with bounties by putting the “solution” as part of the “read more” part of the entry. Anyhow, I had expected a fairly quick solution, but the ink was scarcely dry on my “New Feature: Bounties” post before this first bounty was collected! Congrats to Judy B, who says of her bounty hunting process:

Took about a half an hour, but I looked all over the world before I pulled out an old dictionary with geographical abbreviations. I started looking around Sequoia, and found the Key before I even realized there was an Ave 144. Very nice hunt!

I actually abbreviated Sequoia on a lark, and like I had thought quite a few people wrote in to mention that they thought they were on the right track attributing 144 Seq to mean 144 Sequence… more than one person mentioned Fibonacci sequences interestingly.

Anyhow, so there goes our first one… I was actually hoping to stockpile about 2 or 3 bounties that were live before any were found. You are all so ravenous! I had some free time this weekend which is why I decided to launch the new feature. Hopefully, I will get some time to put up a few more. You can expect the word clues to get a little harder though!

Solution to “Antique Key”