6 Tips to Creating Your Own Michigan Scavenger Hunt on Wheels
| 3 min read
Everyone’s heard of scavenger hunts and some people know about geocaching, but have you ever heard of a road rally? Think of it as group-style scavenger hunt where each team uses a car to get from place to place. The goal: To decipher clues, find unique parts of a city or region, perform tasks specific to a certain place and be the first to cross the finish line. The activity is fun for friends and is a great way to explore the state.
While you could pay to have someone create a road rally for you, why not come up with one yourself? Michigan is home to so many random attractions and things to do, making it the perfect way to spend your weekend exploring!
Here are six tips to create your own Michigan road rally:
- Think outside of the box: The key to a great road rally is to come up with interesting, unique tasks! A few fun ideas to get you started are to bowl a strike at a bowling alley, buy a pint of the weirdest ice cream flavor you can find at a local dairy or record yourself singing a children’s rhyme.
- Make clues challenging, but not impossible: You don’t want to come right out and tell people what to do—instead, make them solve a little clue to figure out the task. Just don’t make the clues too tough to figure out. Think about puns, geographic coordinates and obvious visuals. For example, you might say “Hang a louie onto blue + yellow street” and it would mean: “Turn left on Green Street.”
- Think locally: You’ll need to come up with a set area where people can find everything listed on the rally. Make teams visit places that are unique to the town or region, like the Commerce Drive-In movie marquee, Allen Park giant tire and Grand Rapids Blue Bridge. Include places that only natives would know about or classic Michigan favorites, like Coney Island restaurants, apple orchards and farms, lakes, Michigan U-turns and more.
- Form selective groups: Teams that are too large make the rally complicated, but teams that are too small make clues harder to figure out. Our suggestion is to create one team per car (so around four or five people).
- Follow the rules: As fun as a road rally is, make sure everyone understands that safety is a priority. Teams must drive the speed limit and follow traffic rules. And it should go without saying, but make sure teams understand they can’t share answers!
- Establish judges: You don’t want people wasting their time following a clue to the wrong site. Set up “judges” and have the teams call them to confirm they figured out the clue correctly before they head off. At the end of the rally, create a meeting spot for everyone. There, the judges can determine the winning team.
Want to see more great ways to have fun in the Mitten state? Keep reading:
Photo credit: Harvard Law Record
