It only seems like the other day that we had our most recent“sporting” event for work. Tonight was the fourth in the series of what is no doubt the most ill-named series ever, although after tonight’s experience I think I could put up an argument for legitimately suggesting a new sport for the Olympics – the Treasure Hunt. Ordinarily there is perhaps a little bit of urgency when you set out on a treasure hunt but going into tonight’s event I had no idea just how urgent it could get.

Our task was fairly simple – visit the following eight sites in London and take photos of the team at each site:

– The London Eye
– St Stephen’s Tower (Big Ben)
– The Eros
– The Duke of York
– The Royal Opera House
– The Edmond J. Safra Fountains
– Alison Lapper
– ITV Studios

Lead by Martin and Shahida, two people who were clearly on a mission, we were pretty good at getting around to all of the above in the most efficient manner possible. In fact, efficient wasn’t probably the word – manic is closer to the real thing. I’m fairly sure at some stage I was practically running to keep up with the pace those two set – hence the argument that the new Olympic sport should be the Treasure Hunt. 🙂 Not that I begrudge the pace too much as it was a good work out in the end (over 10,000 steps from the 2 hours out on the Hunt alone.)

As a side note I noticed something really funny when I was browsing through the photos today: Whilst most people in the team managed to be looking into the camera or at least in the general direction of it, there was one person in particular who either had the funniest expression on their face or found something much more interesting elsewhere. Click the photo above to check out who it is. Regular readers will definitely recognise him! Actually I’m not surprised that we weren’t all always looking into the photo as Shahida definitely did not muck around when taking the snaps. In fact she put her life on the line a number of times running across the road to make sure she got all the pics we needed.

Along the way you could also earn bonus points for completing tasks such as:
– Most intriguing picture with someone famous/senior figure of authority [Alan Rickman]
– Most unusual item acquired for free
– Most novel form of transportation used on the night [Rubbish lorry – gross!]
– Most unusual busker who lets you perform with them [The whole team juggling in Covent Garden]
– Biggest group photo with a bunch of randoms
– Most people from team picture in a telephone box [Not us clearly!]
– Most people from team picture in the middle of a working fountain [How could we not – we had the biggest team]
– Tallest view overlooking London [Photo from top of Millbank Tower]
– Taking photos of any embassy plaques, blue heritage plaques etc.

Oh, and no arrests please, loss of 99 points for that!

We managed to score for most people from team in the middle of a working fountain but I’m afraid for the rest we were either outfoxed or our cheeky attempt to win the category (for the telephone box we all put our hands inside the box but apparently this was not a legitimate method – we even had two attempts at it!) was disallowed. Items in brackets above are what I can remember as the winner for the category.

Sad attempt at “someone famous”	Our failed phone booth attempt (three others inside the black booth too)	Even this photo from the 18th floor wasn’t high enough	Shahida – the photographer

Though it was definitely entertaining to be out in Central London chasing all these sites and taking cooky photos (I’m sure the tourists thought we had lost it) all our effort in the end was for naught as even though we came second overall with our points, we received a penalty for taking the longest time to get back to the pub and dropped to 6th overall. How disappointing! Oh well, on to rounders. Hopefully we will fare better this time!