Required reading for a DC Scavenger Hunt
I recently ran a scavenger hunt for my company retreat. It was a lot of fun, but because I only had a few hours to let the teams solve the clues, I wasn’t able to do the really hard ones that require a full set of encyclopedias. Here are the books that I would have used, had I been able to make this so hard it required serious research.
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One book that would be good on such a trip would be “The Names of Washington, D.C.”, by Dex Nilsson. Ever wonder why Foggy Bottom is called that? It’s because of the smoke from a brewery, a gas plant, and glass factories that were originally in the area. This and other useful bits of history are available in this book, which is not easy to obtain, and therefore, probably an excellent sourcebook for a scavenger hunt. “Names” is not available from Amazon, but you can get it from DC bookstores and from the publisher at P.O. Box 730, Twinbrook Station, Rockville, MD, 20848 for $14.95 plus $3 handling. Another book in my scavenger hunt library is this one from National Geographic, “On this spot: Pinpointing th Past in Washington DC”. A little easier to get, “On This Spot” covers many areas of DC, and is easily organized by neighborhood. Literally opening the book to any page will yield a notorious story about my favorite city. |
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