McGuffin Ho! Putting the Game in Burlingame

In general when I thought of Burlingame, the first phrase to come to mind was "tepid hive of yuppiedom." But as the bars around the train station closed up for the night, a new face of Burlingame revealed itself: howling drunk and mean.

We'd picked up our next puzzle. We were sitting in the van, scribbling away. The van was decorated with pretty Mystic Fish magnets. When I say "magnets", I mean that they were constructed of EMF magnetic which allowed them to cling to the sides of our rental van. However, they were also drunk magnets. Drunks came over to the van to look us over. One guy, a credit to the species, circled the van, spitting on it. Maybe if we'd known what was going through his head, we would have been properly insulted. Instead, we kept puzzling.

This was a book full of minesweeper puzzles. These puzzles were not on square grids, but on penrose tilings. There was a wave of joy through the van when we found out what we faced. Then there was a wave of dread when we found out how many minesweeper puzzles we had to solve.

We got to it.

It grew late. Fatigue set in. Minesweeper requires the ability to count; as the night advanced, my ability to count drifted in and out of existence. I looked up at the front of the van. Wesley had fallen asleep while solving. Later on, I looked up and he was awake again, solving away. I snickered to myself--had he even noticed that he had fallen asleep? And then I thought: why did I think that I hadn't fallen asleep without noticing it? It would have been nice to have such an excuse for my puny puzzling progress.

We received a phone call from Game Control--there was a big problem with the next clue. So if we figured out the solution to this puzzle, we shouldn't just hop into the van to go to the named location. Instead we should call in.

A little before dawn, we had the puzzles solved. Probably. We were pretty bleary, not trusting our answers. The puzzles were on onionskin paper, so we tried overlaying them to see if they'd spell out a message. Sort of. Maybe. We called up Game Control to tell them the message that we saw. It wasn't right, but was close enough to convince them that we'd solved the minesweeper puzzles.

We'd taken so long to solve this that they skipped us over the next location, sending us to the Father Serra statue out on highway 280.

Next: Colorful Language

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