La Birthday 2008

After a round of mini-golf, we promised to take La out to get food - but the van took a detour and she ended up outside Dan's house. She ran up the front steps and saw this on the front door:

Underneath the welcome mat, she found this:

To help her along, clues were hidden all over Dan's house:

At the end of the trail of clues, she found a "Secret Decoder Map", which she could overlay on the partially completed puzzle, to reveal the location of a secret treasure!

... But first she would have to figure out what the extra symbols on the overlay meant. Each party guest had a plastic key from a computer keyboard, with a symbol pasted on the back, which La had to earn by answering riddles they read from cards:

Finally, she completed the puzzle, and found a huge wrapped package behind Dan's hot tub. A fancy new stand mixer! Wohoo!

All in all, a challenging birthday hunt. I'd wanted it to be tougher than last year, because last year La breezed through everything in less than a couple of minutes.