License to stamp.

Today was Puzzle Safari 007: License to Stamp. Can you feel the dorkiness? Yes, I think that you can.

There were some slight rule changes this year, but the principle was the same: answers to puzzles are locations around the Microsoft main campus, so at some point during each two and a half hour round, each team of four people needs to send one person off with the logbook to all the locations the team has found in order to retrieve stamps. Only one person from each team can run at a time -- there's only one logbook per team -- and on my team, I am the runner. This means I spend the first hour and forty-five minutes or so solving puzzles with everyone else and the last hour and fifteen minutes running around campus to try to collect stamps before the time runs out.

In past years I have had theories about the distance that I actually cover during the event. I'm out for two and a half hours total, which is a long time, but there is a lot of starting and stopping to hunt for stamps and answer phone calls from teammates with new solutions. This year for the first time ever I wore a GPS device while running so I have some idea how far I actually went. Check out the map here: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/kml/episode.kml?episodePkValues=3240710

The route is crazy! Not my fastest time ever because of all the starting and stopping, and I lost signal inside pretty much every building, but my watch did a pretty good job capturing the distance anyway; I estimate from the corrections on the map that I ran about 1-2 additional miles beyond the 10.5 that my watch captured.

The whole event was a lot of fun, and I'm not just saying that because Chris is one of the organizers.