These are not the volunteers in the back yard. This is Darcy at the front plaza. I didn't take any photos in the back yard.
| Location Lawrence Hall of Science and environs | Start Code: NOBEL |
These are not the volunteers in the back yard. This is Darcy at the front plaza. I didn't take any photos in the back yard.
We were directed to the back yard, where a LowKeyite gave us a couple of mini-puzzles to work on. He suggested that the team split up into two parts to work on it--and seemed kind of non-plussed that there were only three of us on the team. This was another time when it was tough to be a small team.
Dwight and Brian were mostly done with one puzzle--involving finding information in the Hall of Science, and then information about prizes won by Ernest Lawrence. I was barely started on a puzzle using museum fixtures to generate binary, semaphore, and Braille. And then the museum closed. We didn't have any way to gather the remaining information we needed. The Game Control people gave us the answers to those puzzles, and gave us another two mini-puzzles to work on.
This was looking to be slow going, too. Brian and Dwight were working on a rap song, but it was taking a while. I was supposed to be labeling a view of the bay as seen from this hill, but I was having trouble. Things were looking bleak.
The hints for this puzzle had poked fun at my back-solving ways. They said that this "Lawrence Hall" was not named after Ernest Lawrence, but after a certain Lawrence who was infamous for making guesses about where to go before he had sufficient information. So, in hindsight, it was satisfying that we got to skip the rest of this puzzle. But at the time, it was just confusing. It happened in this way:
The answers to the two first mini-puzzles were LOVER and WAITER. Someone noticed that each of these was the name of an element from the Fifth Element plus one latter: LOVE+R, WATER+I. Brian thought maybe if we entered more element+letter words into the PDA, we might thus "solve" the remaining mini-puzzles. He entered FIERY. Nope. He entered FIRED--hey, an element+1 word that was also fit the "The Apprentice" theme. The PDA liked that, and said "congratulations". So we started to think about words that we could make from EARTH or AIR plus one letter.
![[>];](../../../images/next.gif){kind=small}