Just for fun... Volvo: The Hunt
spoilers here: |
During the Summer of 2006, I was on the hunt for a new Volvo.
We leased a Volvo S40 in 2000 a month before our oldest child was born. When the 4 year lease was up, they came and towed it away. I am still not happy about it. Although my eldest was only 4, he still talks about the car and says when we're done with our new car (a Honda civic hybrid) he wants our old Volvo back. In fact, it's been over two years, but he still remembers details about the car. A couple of weeks ago we rented a car. It had fake wood paneling on the dash like the S40 we had. He pointed out that it was "like the Volvo". I had almost forgotten. My youngest was only 2 1/2 when they took the car away, so most of her impressions about the car are through her brother's eyes but of course she says she wants a Volvo too.
Then there's the Pirates of the Caribbean : The Curse of the Black Pearl movie. We all love it. It's great for the whole family! Of course the Pirates of the Caribbean was always one of our favorite rides at Disneyland, so all of the tie in's were very fun. We can hardly wait to see it all dressed up for the new movie. Too bad our passes expired before the grand opening!
So what about the hunt? Well, Volvo seems to be a main sponsor of the new Pirate's movie, Dead Man's Chest. They are actually giving away a car (or is it an SUV). The entire package is worth about $100,000... quite a pirate's booty! When my youngest saw the Volvo commercial saying they were giving a car away and all we had to do was find it and dig it up, she was all over it. My kids begged me for days to go and get a map. Finally, on June 20, we went to San Diego Volvo and picked up a map.
By the way, other companies have teamed up with Volvo and Pirates to create cool contests as well. For example, Mc Donalds (request game peice here) M&M's, Kodak, FAO Swartz and Valpak. Read more at:
Pirates Brings M&M's, Volvo On Board
The dealer made us sign a sign-up list when we picked up the map. Each map has
a unique code. Just for the sake of privacy, I covered the code up with the
red square when I scanned it. You enter your unique code into a special
website and start solving a series of 15 puzzles. Many puzzles require a
clue to get in that you also have to figure out, so you actually need
to solve way more than 15 puzzles.
The rules (#15 in bold) say that you have to turn in your map when you get to the finals, so if you decide to play to win, you must have your own unique map. If by some bizarre chance I make it to the finals... hopefully it won't matter that I wrote all over the back of it when I was trying to solve the puzzles.
If you don't want to (or can't) go to a Volvo dealership, I read somewhere that you can receive a treasure map by sending a self-addressed, stamped envelope to: Volvo XC90 Pirates of the Caribbean Hunt Map Requests, P.O. Box 8042, Grand Rapids, MN 55745-8042. All mail requests must be postmarked by June 26, 2006 and received by July 3, 2006. On the other hand, I can't find where I read that and it is past July 3 so I guess by now it's a moot point. I read on one of the many blogs and newsgroups that started because of this game that someone lived in a place that was not near a volvo dealership so she called one that was several hours away, but still the closest (and in the same country) and they mailed one to her.
When I first started I blew right through the first 4 puzzles. Piece of cake, I thought. Then I ran into puzzle 5. Oh my gosh. What a killer. That's when I started to look for newsgroups. One thing I've learned is that there is no way I'm going to make it to the final and the second thing I've learned is that I'm not as good at solving puzzles as I thought. In elementary school we used to do puzzle solving all the time. Maybe this will get me to practice more. I've already found that the NBC Series, Treasure Hunters also has an internet puzzle solving game which so far is much easier.
Here are a list of blogs, newsgroups and websites that I've found so far:
So now I want to document the entire game and how each puzzle is solved. Like I said before, I was not able to solve all of these puzzles by myself, but so far I haven't found a site that had completely documented the game and I really wanted it for my own use (which is basically what this site is for anyway).
See the links above starting with "Getting Started"
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Last updated: May 4, 2007 by Lila Hayes