A Whole New World: You don't have to be a pirate to hunt for treasure... St. Guilhem-le-Désert Part deux

After a rather-lengthy absence from the blogosphere, I will now commence the retroactive blog posts... Ready ? Go !

So this particular one dates back to the weekend of June 2...

A magical weekend in many respects, the highlight was definitely my return to St. Guilhem le Désert for an outdoor adventure team treasure hunt. If you recall previous posts mentioning the deserted tranquil nature of the village last time I went, this time that was absolutely not the case. It was bustling with people and the town was filled with constant activity.

So I participated in the hunt with a bunch of friends from the ultimate frisbee team, as well as one friend from home. We were six: 3 American girls, 1 French girl, and 2 French guys. It was an all-day affair, so we arrived at 9am bright-eyed and bushy tailed awaiting instructions. The organisers of the hunt started out with a theatrical skit setting the scene for the day.

It was all in French by the way.

Basically, a treasure was stolen from the devil, so he had released various 'minions' that were wreaking havoc all over the town. We had to complete various tasks to get back into the good graces of the devil, and to eliminate all of the terrorizing creatures.

There were a total of 8 stages, 4 in the morning and 4 in the afternoon. Our team was the green team, and we started out with the challenges in the town in the morning. These consisted of finding various people located around the town, completing logic games, and even recruiting passersby to form a human knot ! I also had to search for stamps within the town, and each stamp was a point, or two points on the face, so naturally I asked for all of the stamps to be placed on my face. Those were some interesting conversations, especially because there was a 10-minute time limit. We also did archery in the morning !

At the lunch break we had a picnic before the outdoor adventure tasks began...

The village is situated in the mountains, so it was beautiful, and perfect for unique challenges. One involved using a compass to locate a hidden message in the woods, another involved climbing a REAL rock wall on the side of the mountain !!!!!, and another required us to fight to the death in a small creek. Ok we didn't really fight to the death, we just had to grab the 'sock tail' from behind the other guy, by I like that other description better.

In the end it seemed like we were going to win it all, but when that didn't happen, we assumed they miscalculated the points and considered ourselves winners anyway.

After the day concluded, we went to one of the team-member's houses for a barbeque, and it was so fun. A perfect end to the day :)

Now for some pictures...