This has been a tradition at our house for the last 12+ years. I was roped into doing the Easter Egg Hunt for my kids.
Easter Sunday, my wife tells me she’s going to be gone with the kids to church for a period of time, I’m to make an Easter egg hunt for the kids before they get home.
I did. Then played dumb when they came in asking about the eggs they could see. I think that was the year of the jelly bean rabbet poop.
Things became more elaborate over time. Once I remember clearly was the Easter where there was still snow on the ground. I used a sliding pitch to place eggs in places with no footprints. That cemented the belief that it was the Easter Bunny and not dad hiding the eggs.
By the time they were teens, the hunt had become something more. The first big hunt was about 100 eggs in the forest behind the house. This is not a “search to find eggs”, this is a challenge to find the next egg.
Each egg is carefully placed to be visible from the last egg found. Lose the track, you’ve lost the remaining eggs. In general, the eggs were placed in easy to see locations, IFF you were standing where the last egg was found.
Last year, there was a swarm of 9 teenagers on the hunt. My son bought a handful of cheap orange cones, to be able to mark found eggs so they could go back.
This hunt was different, there were written clues with either compass direction, distance, or both. This meant that they might not be able to see the next egg from the current egg.
Of course, they beat that. They used swarm tactics. The 9 of them just moved out in all directions, searching for the next egg.
3 hours to plant the eggs, 1.5 hours for them to complete the search.
Tonight I’m sore. I walked about 3 miles placing eggs. Then another mile or two while helping them get back on track. It took them over four hours to finish the hunt. And that was with a rescue from dad.
It appears that they lost the track, they attempted a swarm, picked up a part of the tail of the track, cleared those eggs, recovered the forward track.
What this meant was that when they got near the end, there were no eggs in sight to follow because they had already picked up those eggs.
From the egg count, they missed around 8 of the 100+ that were placed. There were a total of 201 eggs in the hunt.
10 went to a littles hunt for the 4yo across the street. The next 100 to 150 were hidden in the forest.
To give some idea, we located three eggs from last year when placing eggs this year.
The kids had another failure, I had placed 10 eggs on the ground, carefully laid out in an arrow pointing in the direction they needed to go. They got to the “cluster of eggs” and just picked them up.
The arrow was there because the next egg was not visible from the location of the arrow. Plus, that direction had a heavy thicket full of fallen trees. They should have had somebody maintain that point and sent others around the obstacle until they were in the right location.
I had fun, I’m sore, my legs hurt. I’m already planning next year.
Oh, I received permission to place booby-traps next year. This will be fun.
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