As most of you know I’m always on the hunt for fun things to do in Toronto (and other cities I travel to) and this is how I stumbled upon Urban Quest. It seemed like the perfect gift for my brother’s girlfriend who was celebrating a milestone birthday. She might be moving away from the country (sniff sniff) and I figured she had too much stuff to cart around as it is. So instead of another shawl or quirky gismo, a scavenger hunt exploring the city was scheduled.
I love surprises (but good luck trying to surprise me!) and kept the gift a secret till the HOUR of! All she had to do was pick a date and an encrypted animal. Urban Quest allows you to choose which quest you’d like (each quest explores a different part of the city and has a different skill level involved) and then gives you the option for a meal at a secret venue (again you have the option to choose cuisine and price points). We chose the Cat one as it was supposed to be the most challenging. My non downtown peeps…don’t you worry, there’s some in the burbs too. Best of all, they have quests in many cities in North America, which makes it a perfect way to explore a city if you’re up for a few hours of brain teasers and walking.
The customer service was top notch and responded to my queries promptly and they adviced us that it would take two hours on average but since we had a baby it would be best if we gave ourselves another hour as our dinner reservations were made for 6 p.m. Advice we did not heed. We got a pretty late start (an hour late!) and also decided to do a mini pubcrawl. Given that it was a Sunday after a major night of partying things were slow and a pint was needed to get the gears in action. I thought the starting point for us was Spadina and Adelalaide so we got ourselves to the Town Crier for some delicious suds and started going through the first section of the hunt. Ah! They had recommended that we park at this intersection.. it wasn’t the starting point! DOH! Oh well atleast we had some beer to go through the city trivia to solve our location… I won’t lie, after solving the first four letters of the sixteen, we knew we were headed to an area near our home! SHOULD have read through the items before we left home! I was trying to keep everything a surprise… it’s like I was trying to surprise myself too!
So now we were an hour late and also thirty mins into the quest and still at the pub! Once we dragged ourselves to the real starting point, things sped up and we solved through the clues easily. Some were doosers and while we would have been able to solve some without being in the neighbourhood, some of them definitely required us to be there. Who knew there were so many hidden things in spots we walked by quite often? It was definitely fun, but would have been funner if it were warmer and we had more time to do a few more pub stops. The mobile screen wasn’t the best way to read through the clues and trivia either. Definitely print out the quest before leaving home… we found ourselves scribbling the letters on the back of the pub receipt (alternate was a diaper!).
At the very end we were to key in the final word on the Urban Quest website to find out where our reservations were. We did hit a few issues at this point, I kept keying in the answer on my Android phone and it wasn’t accepted so after about ten minutes of trying, we tried it on the iPhone at it worked! PHEW! Unfortunately for us, we were an hour late and once we 
found out that we had actually been to the restaurant before we decided to keep with the tradition of exploring new things and found ourselves at another sushi joint. Sorry Urban Quest!! Didn’t mean to stand you up. I know it’s rude not to cancel on a date. If it’s any conselation, the restaurant we ended up at was rubbish! We would have been WAY better off with the Urban Quest suggestion.
I was very sceptical that the quest would be lame and super easy, but it wasn’t at all. All in all it was fun walking around the city and I would love to do another one this summer when it’s nicer outside. I also plan to give ourselves four hours so we can do a few more pub stops, just makes it more fun. Clearly it wasn’t the baby that delayed us, it was the boozing. And ofcourse we’ll stick to the restaurant reco!
Happy Questing Peeps! Invite me along!
