The annual Fiesta Treasure Hunt! Ahhhh, yes. What great memories......good times.
For years a dear friend, my children and I were avid treasure hunters. From the time the first clue was published in the Irrigator, until the treasure was found, we would go out nearly every night and scour the town.
We even went as far as to wait in front of the Irrigator office, late at night, hoping to be the first to get our hands on the newspaper. It was so freshly printed, the ink would rub off onto our fingers.
We would sit in the car, read the clue and then the lively discussions would ensue. Each of us had theories about what the clue meant. We would dissect the clue, trying to decipher if it was literal or if the clue held double meanings.......
What fun. A great time for family. An opportunity to have the kids learn investigative skills and critical thinking. The chance to learn more about the history of Patterson. They never thought about it that way, and actually, neither did I. We were just having fun.
While out searching, we would meet other folks doing the same. Sometimes, we would discuss our theories. Sometimes, we would guard our notions of what the clues meant. After all, we wouldn't want to give our brilliance away!
Little did I know at that time, that one day I would be working at the Patterson Irrigator, and ultimately responsible for the clues. That dear friend who hunted with me and my kids, for those many years, is now the author of the clues. We are co-conspirators again. Having almost as much fun as when we were hunting........but getting a lot more sleep!
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5 comments:
good times, hard to believe its been about 15 or 16 years.
Ill find it again this year!
remember when we hopped in the car and took off leaving Kev in the alley while we watched him from across the street?
My favorite one is the year it was hidden underneath a wooden pallet used to support sandbags at the city's corporation yard on south 4th street.
My family and I were avid treasure hunters (they still are) and the clues that year led us to search the corp yard. It was right under our noses, especially because we live right across the street from the city corp yard, but we didn't find it.
Well, another avid treasure hunting family, the Stehlis, were also drawn to the corp yard and was also searching the same piles of sandbags and pallets that we searched earlier. Being good friends of the Stehli family, and not wanting to waste any of their precious treasure hunting time, my dad went ahead and told them that we looked there and the treasure was nowhere to be found.
They probably would have found it if it weren't for us... sorry guys, I think a week or two went by when a city worker moved the pallet away complicating the treasure's whereabouts even further.
I'm not quite sure how this one ended up, maybe you can shed some light Carol, but I know for sure, neither the Funez's or the Stehli's found it that year.
That may have been Ron Swift's last year at the helm of the Irrigator. He hid the treasure and wrote the clues back then. My girlfriend and I were hunters back then too.
As it turned out that year, the treasure wasn't found because of having been hauled away by city crew.
So the following year, the prize doubled.
Whoops! Can you imagine the look on Ron's face when he first realized what had happened?
Priceless.
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