Treasure Hunting - A Day We Will Never Forget

It started with a totally out of the blue phone call from my friend Kris, in Seattle.  She told me about a website {www.brainchase.com} that had a riddle leading to a book in a library in the Boston area.  Inside the book was a key to a $1,000.   Kris and her daughter solved the riddle for their clue in WA and won the thousand dollars there so I was motivated by their success and thought it could be doable.  Especially because she gave me insider information:  the book containing the clue wasn't an actual library book but a book that had been planted on the shelf, thus making it easy to spot.  Plus, it looked like there wasn't much competition.

I read the riddle and quickly sent it to Boston Cami.  She just happened to be driving through Concord and ran into the library searching for the book.  I was sure she'd find it there.  She didn't but she only had a few minutes to look.  I sent the clue to family and friends who I thought might help and went to bed.  The prize had gone unclaimed which was unusual because the other riddles had been solved in a matter of hours.  When I woke up the next morning I had a text from Kris telling me to go to the Franklin Library in MA.  It was the first public library in the United States and would be a perfect place to hide a clue so naturally I did what any parent would do.  I told the boys they were skipping school so we could search for treasure and they were over the moon excited.  Marcus studied the clue and made a list of possible books to search for while Ethan was given the job of entertaining Landon and Parker so Marcus and I could search undisturbed.  After searching through four floors of books, {the Franklin library was huge} and annoying the grumpy librarians, we finally decided to head to the Concord library because I was convinced that was where the clue was.  We searched for over an hour.  My hands were black from looking through dusty books.  I kept sending Marcus to the librarians to ask for help finding books while I scoured shelf after shelf.  Finally I called it quits and took the boys to lunch at Costco.  We always go to Costco when we're in MA. 

This is what we were looking for (photo from Kris)

Historic Concord Library

Two hours after getting home the riddle was still unsolved and a hint was posted on the website telling us to forget all the words and focus on the music notes.  What??!!  That was a total game changer.  Kris and I spent the next night and day texting each other back and forth with possible guesses.  For three days I went to bed thinking about the clue and woke up thinking about the clue and while I was in the middle of running I finally got the brilliant idea to use Morse Code to solve it.  Marcus and I looked up everything we could on translating music to Morse Code with no luck.  I sent the boys off to school telling Marcus if I cracked it I'd pick him up and we'd race up to MA.  But it never happened.  I couldn't figure it out.  Late that night someone found the clue.  It was an Edgar Allen Poe book in Watertown, MA.  A very unhistoric place if you ask me.  But the real kicker was that I was right!  It was Morse Code!  I just couldn't figure out how to make it work.  The music was a series of C's, D's, and E's representing dash, dot, and space.  I made it too hard and was trying to match the rhythm of the music to the rhythm in Morse Code.  Grrrr!
But we had such a good time searching for real treasure!  We got to see the very first public library and I'm sure my boys will one day be telling their kids about the day they got to miss school to search for treasure.  Now, days later and every once in awhile you'll hear Marcus or me randomly sigh and mutter under our breath, "Morse code..."

PS.  the words in the riddle were all over the place.  "Miles from Heartbreak" refers to the Boston Marathon Heartbreak Hill in Newton, "42 by 71" refers to the latitude and longitude coordinates of Boston which ironically doesn't have a library in the Minuteman library network, "he hopes to live deliberately" refers to Thoreau living at Walden Pond, and the Concord Library is at the end of the Minute Man trail.  Without using Morse Code the clues basically sent us on a wild goose chase.