My Treasure Hunt Prank :D

I don’t get out enough and sometimes just need to find an excuse. The other day I was feeling mischievous and decided to play a game with person or persons unknown.

Some of you may know that I dabbled with crafting easter eggs last year. I made quite a few of them using the traditional technique of Pysanky and still have some leftovers. I was eager to give them away before we left the US except for one which I want to keep for myself. So I thought I’d hide it someplace and leave a clue around the neighborhood for any passerby to find. I went outside to find a nice hiding place and finally settled on this area:

And here was the Easter egg:

There was a bush on the right. I hid the egg inside, then composed a little poem on a sticky note and left it on the fence for all and sundry to find :D. This was the note:

Here was the hiding place in the shrub on the left:

In the evening a bunch of kids come out to play in this area so I hoped they’d see the note and go on a little hunting spree. So I stayed away and parked myself comfortably at a nearby bench to watch the fun. After a while a kid came long on a skateboard. She rolled right past the area at first without noticing anything out of the way. A few minutes later she came back and looked bored. Then the note caught her eye!

She came close, read it, then turned around and began searching. I thought my instructions were pretty clear. But unfortunately I had hidden the egg behind and a bit to the right of the note. She couldn’t find it. Either my expectations were too high or this was just a particularly unimaginative specimen. In any case, she took a couple of pictures of the note on her iPhone, made another perfunctory search of the area directly behind her and went on her merry way. My prank was a bust!

I waited for Anupa to return from work and asked her what she thought of it all. She said I should have placed it directly behind the note. Shaking my head in disbelief, I went and moved the note over to the right so there could be no damn mistake again. We went away and I thought I’d check next morning.

It was a weekday and that area is apparently where the kids gather to wait for the school bus every morning. So when I went out somewhere around noon the next day, I saw to my delight that both the note and the egg were gone! Cool :D

I thought I’d play a few more pranks like this but my natural laziness got the better of me and I haven’t repeated the performance yet. Still, it’s good to know that at least one of my leftover Easter eggs is in someone’s hands :)