Sometimes we arrive in a town, and our favorite educational fare—museums and guided tours—are not available. Despite the general thawing of activities post lockdown, we still meet with apologetic announcements hanging like ghosts around the solemn words, Temporarily Closed. Take heart, travelers. You can still poke around a city safely without open doorways. Nothing like a challenge to get creative juices flowing! Read on for a few of our favorite ways to engage with a city’s history through play.
Kids and adults alike (even the grumpy ones who will pretend otherwise) love a good scavenger hunt. I’ll begin with the simplest of quests: the search for placard points. Keep your eyes peeled for all geometrical figures bearing factual tidbits—any fair city worth its keys has loads of them! (Some are better than others—a plaque on a house under the old wall surrounding Salisbury boasts that “Queen Elizabeth’s cousin once listened to music here.” Not every fact has historical value, folks.) Once the placard is discovered and read, award points to the finder, giving bonuses for anything particularly inspiring, ridiculous, gory, or heroic.
If a town is famous for a particular historical figure—say, Robin Hood in Nottingham, William Shakespeare in Stratford Upon Avon, or William Wallace in Stirling—here’s another idea to keep your eyes scanning. Search for any object bearing that famous person’s mark, be it a statue in the square or an ice cream truck on the main street, and call out the first name. “William!” (2 points), the rest of your party then locates the reference and point to it with a dramatic gesture—the bigger, the better. They draw their bow, strike an actor’s pose, or raise an invisible claymore and shout, “Wallace!” (1 point). Silly, I know, but that’s the point—it’s fun!
Some cities make a game easy for you. They are onto this idea of the hunt and have created thematic paths to follow. In Plymouth, we stumbled upon a trail of crayon rubbings detailing the historical development of Sutton Harbor. In Inverness, Scotland, our first placard point was a downloadable treasure map of myths and legends throughout the city. If you like poetry, you can follow the Wordsworth trail in the Lake District of Northern England or the Burns trail in Ayrshire (more on that one coming soon).
There are also companies selling online city-based scavenger hunts. In these games, teams of history hunters race against one another in and out of narrow alleyways, across railroad tracks, under bridges, and up steps to find answers to obscure questions and follow clues to the next landmark. We played with “Let’s Roam” in Billings, Montana, as well as “Treasure Hunt York” in England and “Huntfun” in Cardiff, Wales.
The kids reminded me that using a camera is a fun way to play, too. In Khiva, Uzbekistan—a veritable labyrinth of ancient sandstone buildings utterly free of motor vehicles—the game was a race to take photos of placards without being seen by other people in our group (minus 2 points). In Port Arthur, Tasmania, it was challenging to describe life in one of the world’s most isolated prisons; we endeavored to take photos to represent those descriptors. (It’s possible we were banned from social media because of a particularly well-posed photo of Seth and Leo pretending to be a guard and laboring prisoner—so be careful with how you play, folks!)
However, my favorite of all the hunts was the one that Jack, Leo, and I created together in an hour of car time on the way to Shrewsbury, England. We simply looked up ‘attractions’ in Shrewsbury—Charles Darwin’s birthplace, by the way—and made a walkable list of our favorites. Then, we penciled clues in the form of rhymed riddles. These we raced to hide all around the city while Seth and Chris had a hot chocolate and cappuccino date. (Dual purpose—it is vital to split up now and again to give individual attention to our kids; plus, Seth had a hurt foot and needed some enforced chair time.) It was so much fun watching our loved ones solve their clues and learn about the places we’d found for them to discover.
I want to take a moment to mention a standout experience in York. While we were puzzling out a clue, Peter, a kind craftsman with wild white hair and twinkling blue eyes, saw us struggling and asked if he could help. Noting our curiosity for the stories of his city, he then invited us to a private tour of the historic church he’d been restoring during lockdown. He welcomed us into his world when all other doors were shut. Games aside, a personal connection with someone willing to share their story is the best way to etch a place upon my memory. These days, it’s a veritable treasure on our map.
Perhaps the spirit of these scavenger hunts is the key? We aim to learn the history of the places we visit (as well as sampling their cappuccinos and hot chocolates). We keep our eyes up and our pace easy. Rather than barreling forward, we are open to opportunity. And I hope we are smiling because we try to remember that life is always more fun with a game.
Questions and Comments
Please comment below…
- What are your favorite ways to explore the world?
- Can you create rhyming clues while driving?
- What can you tell us about your home town?
I was part of a team building exercise in Breckenridge CO once that used GPS coordinates to get you close to historic items, placards and places throughout the city. When you got near the waypoint you got a clue and you had to interpret it and then find the exact thing. It was loads of fun and we all had a really great time.