Village Scavenger Hunt

For the past six or eight years, our village events committee has hosted a scavenger hunt. This was the first year we were able to participate. Our friends came from Paris to join in the fun. 

The theme this year was "pirates", so the hidden envelopes we had to find had our team's pirate-themed stamp on them (a pirate hat for our team, a treasure chest for Benjamin's team). 

To Benjamin's immense surprise and joy, his best friend Léa showed up. He was extremely disappointed when she wasn't in school this year, since she is moving, so he was thrilled to see her here. Her mom agreed to take Benjamin with them, so he got to spend the entire day with Léa. ( Lea is next to Benjamin in the pink and white baseball cap.)

We had another surprise in the form of a parade of classic cars through our village. Puiseux was a stop on the circuit before they got to the car show in Villers-Cotterêts. So several groups of classic cars (and their drivers) came through, and we took pictures of most of them.

More came through as we were looking, unsuccessfully, for more clues by the bridge.

At one point, we took an entirely fruitless walk through the forest looking for a "cave" which turned out to be not on this path at all. We tried a different path as well, but didn't find it there, either.

And while Manu and Rose Mary climbed a hill looking for a house with blue shutters - or perhaps formerly blue shutters that were recently painted burgundy, how's that for tricky? - their girls and Noah posed for photos for me at the bottom of the hill.

Our village is so cute! (And one of those may be the house with formerly blue shutters. Or not. At any rate, we did not find a hidden surprise package there.)

At one point, our neighbor, who organized the scavenger hunt, took pity on us (again, actually; she took pity on us the first time when we were still in the center of the village) and told us to go up to the water tower to find some tokens we were looking for. Look how far that is! It's that tiny building at the end of the road in this picture! 

 We got all the way there, and found.... nothing. That was when Léa's mom called me, saying they were leaving, so I came back down to get Benjamin, and we waited around til the other players returned so we could count up everyone's score. We did not win... in fact, we might have been the very last ones, score-wise, but we had a great time.