I miss escape rooms.
As you may expect, having a baby doesn’t lend itself to locking yourself in a room for an hour and focusing diligently on complicated clues and fiddly padlocks. My escape room boots have been hung up for the time being, and I’m really missing the buzz.
What it does encourage you to do, however, is get out and about with your little one. So when Treasure Trails contacted me, I was keen to jump on the opportunity to review one of their outdoor puzzle hunts. It combined fresh air and exciting sights for my little one with some gentle exercise and much needed mental stimulation for me.
I invited a couple of mums from my antenatal group and the six of us (three adults, three babies) set off on the adventure around Leamington!
I received this Treasure Trail free of charge, but all opinions are my own. Here’s my full disclaimer.
Treasure Trails
My first challenge was to decide on which Treasure Trail to try! I knew I wanted something local. Luckily they have trails all over the UK, so that wasn’t a difficult ask. In fact, in Warwickshire alone they have 10 different trails to try.
I was torn between the Leamington Spa and the Warwick trails initially, as both are a very short drive for me. The detective theming of the Warwick trail appealed slightly more, but then I spotted the accessibility feature on the website, stating that this trail wasn’t suitable accessible for wheelchairs or pushchairs – an absolute necessity for our group.
I checked the Leamington route, and luckily that was accessible, so that made the decision for me! We would be on a mission to save the spies of the “British Intelligence Agency” or BIA, whose secret training location in Leamington has potentially been compromised!
A few days later, I received my printed pack in the post (an instant digital download is also available), so it was time to head out on our adventure.
Starting the mission
We met up at the Royal Priors shopping centre to kick things off. Along with the starting location, the pack contained helpful advice on where to park, where toilets were along the route and where to stop for a picnic!
We’d tried to organise this for earlier in the summer, but it was September before we managed to find a time for it. However, the weather was on our side, and it felt like there wasn’t a better way to make use of the last few late summer days.
Once we’d ensured the babies were settled in their prams and grabbed a drink for the walk, we started hunting for our first clue outside the shopping centre. It didn’t take us long to figure it out, and then it was back to the pack, to record the answer and read our next instructions.
Our second clue was just a couple of minutes walk away. Quickly Lily established herself as having the local knowledge needed to help speed us through our task, by recognising the icon that we needed to look out for without even seeing the shop front!
In search of answers
The trail was your standard treasure hunt, where you are looking out for solutions to the questions posed in signage around the town. It felt like a great amount of effort had been used to make the clues not only varied, but also timeless – it was unlikely any would be taken down or changed anytime soon. It definitely gave me more time to inspect the various idiosyncrasies around the town I’ve been living in for 4 years now.
Although the trail started right in the centre of Leamington, we didn’t stay on busy streets the whole time. We wandered down a pretty residential street, and then ended up in Jephson Gardens for several clues, before straying back towards the town centre.
The spy theming was woven into the wording of the clues, warning us to look out for enemy RATS agents, telling us they’d been spotted at our previous location and dropping bits of trivia through the pack. I can imagine doing this quest with kids old enough to engage with the theming would be a huge amount of fun, especially when given a description of what RATS are likely to be wearing.
Most of the clues were very straightforward, and just required a bit of observation, but some were a little more challenging to work out, particularly an alphabetical one towards the start of the trail.
Lunch break and hint time
About two-thirds of the way through the trail, we got stuck on a puzzle. While I brought up the hint webpage, we stopped to give the babies their lunch. It would probably have been easier to do this hunt before Juliet started solids, as it was my first time feeding her in the pram and crumbs got EVERYWHERE.
Meanwhile, the hint webpage was straightforward to navigate – just enter your pack code and the clue number. One small downside is that rather than a hint giving you a suggestion of where to look, it jumped straight to giving you the answer. It did tell you where to look to find it, although I did never spot that unicorn…
Last few clues and the finale
After lunch, we tried to step up the pace a little to ensure we finished the trail before the babies got too fussy in their prams! The trail was advertised as taking around 2 hours, which is almost exactly how long it took us in total. We’d taken a fairly leisurely pace, including our lunch break, so you could definitely finish it much faster if you were minded to.
We raced across the bridge and back again, then we headed up the Parade to track down our final clue. Many of the clues only had 100-200m between them, but one or two were a little further apart – not any great distance, but enough further to make you start wondering if you missed the clue! The final one in particular was a short walk from the previous, but it did take us almost back to our starting location, which was helpful for parking!
Having spotted the last answer, we added it to the grid on the back of the pack. Finally, we needed to cross-reference some highlighted letters with a grid. This resulted in a four digit solution code, which we entered onto a website to see if we’d cracked it…
And we had! A short video congratulated us on our success and confirmed that the spies of Leamington Spa were safe. I’d recommend going to a coffee shop before watching the video – it was a little hard to hear it over the street noise! But it was a nice touch to have a video congratulations, rather than a plain webpage.
Summary
Treasure Trails is a fun way to spend a pleasant afternoon wandering around with friends. The clues are generally on the easy end, but that leaves more time for catching up and enjoying the walk. I particularly liked that the route wasn’t just through the obvious hotspots of the town and instead took you to some unusual places.
I think that when Juliet is a few years older, Treasure Trails will be an amazing introduction to the world of solving clues and mysteries!
I received this Treasure Trail free of charge, but all opinions are my own. Here’s my full disclaimer.