Portland, Maine Madness-speurtocht

We had a blast! Great way to do something active, learn more about our city, and have a lot of laughs. We enjoyed it so much that we decided to try one in a city we’re traveling to next month as well!

While we loved the concept of doing a scavenger hunt through Portland to see the sites, this experience under delivered. We knew there wouldn’t be anyone physically with us but had anticipated more interaction as we went from spot to spot. Instead, we were sent a pdf doc via canva (???) a few minutes before the game started, which contained all of the missions together. We were instructed to snap pics via WhatsApp as we completed a task. It was a pain to keep going back and forth between WhatsApp and canvas to navigate the game—why not make it like a real scavenger hunt and sent us one clue at a time? When we sent a pic, we received very generic responses like “good job” or an emoji, which made us wonder if it was just a bot replying to us. We were told the missions were in geographical order but they weren’t, so we were zig zagging back and forth throughout the town. We liked the exercise, but it seemed pretty disorganized. The missions themselves were mid. In one location, we were told to find the cat that resides there only to learn that this cat died 4 years ago-has this thing been updated?! Another location was closed when we arrived. We didn’t receive any background info about what we were looking for so we didn’t really learn anything about the city along the way. After 2 hours, the “game” sort of ended. The bot host congratulated us on earning 5 million points and then asked if we’d like to leave a tip. Wha?! After spending $100 for a family of four to read through a slide deck of half-assed missions, the only tip I would leave is — you can do better. We still managed to have a good time because it’s vacation and we made the very most of it. We celebrated earning our millions of points with a tasty lobster roll.

Started off at the location noted. The hunt took us from one side of the town to the other side repeatedly. The missions were too far spread apart. We are in good shape and found ourselves just walking the city with no real time to stop as you only have two hours. The shops that were part of the mission didn’t even know they were part of the hunt. One place realized that is why they have so many people coming in asking for free samples and leaving. Of course we bought some of their products after hearing this from the owner. The one thing we had concerns sbout was the areas that needed to be travelled thru had a high density of homeless and IV drug users fixing right on the steps to someone’s home. We stopped this hunt after I had to confront a man following my wife and I. Made us wonder if the organizer walks these areas and does a safety analysis. I was thankful for the education of the homeless and drug situation but it was not what we paid to experience. We were really looking forward to this event but were disappointed.