Day 4, Part 4: Gone With the Wind!

Having triumphantly finished with the Indianapolis leg, we set off towards our final stop, The Windy City!

The driving puzzle this time was a bunch of audio clips of lines from famous movies, and our task was to identify the movies and then fill them into the following grid:

Driving Puzzle to Chicago.  The bottom looks Greek to me.

Once we'd identified the majority of the movies, the letters of each color could be anagrammed to get a message that was something like "KEY IS FAMOUS CHICAGO BLUESBROTHERS LINE".  Around the same time, Jonathan seemed to find a good lead on the Vigenere key from the other direction, suggesting it was a 15-letter key ending with "TITHITIT".  Putting these two pieces of information together, we determined the actual key was just "HIT IT", and this decoded the text at the bottom of the page.  Well, almost all of it.  That bolded line didn't decode.

The non-bolded text, after applying the Vigenere, decoded to:

YOUR HEAD MUST BE IN THE CLOUDS AT THIS LOVELY PLACE

THOUGH SOON A SQUARE YOU MUST FIND WHERE COLUMNS SIT AND WAIT

THERE YOU SEEK SOMETHING CHEWY NOW INDEED

FOR HE MADE IT CHEWY TO HELP YOU TO SUCCEED

BY HIS MARK ON THE PLACE LIKE A FALCON YOU WELL KNOW

THAT WHICH WAITS IN QUOTES SHALL LEAD YOU FURTHER DOWN THE ROAD

We figured whatever this led to would help us decode the rest of the message.  As we had a lot of driving yet before we'd reach Chicago, we tried to see how far we could get.  We quickly realized that the place we were looking for was Wrigley Square (the "chewy" references) in Millenium Park (the "falcon" reference), and that we were looking for a plaque or reference to Wrigley himself.  With this in mind, we found this image online:

This sign was chewy indeed.

The large quote at the bottom was in quotes, so we figured that if this was in fact the plaque we wanted, it would be something from there.  But nothing worked to decode that last bold section.  Without any more leads, we eventually got to Chicago and just went to Wrigley Square in Millennium Park, only to find that this exact plaque was really the most likely candidate.  It wasn't until we were looking at the plaque in person that we spotted that the word "PERISTYLE" can also be found in quotes.  Surely that was it!  But no, it didn't work to decode the remaining crypto text either.  So now we were stuck.  We wandered over and checked out the Cloud Gate (aka the "Bean"), which was awesome, but didn't help us solve the puzzle.

Jonathan finally finds a mirror of the appropriate size.

After 20 or 30 minutes stuck at this point, we cried uncle and went for another hint.  Josh told us "don't forget to hit it!".  Of course!  We were supposed to have already applied "HIT IT" to that text, and *then* apply PERISTYLE.  This worked like magic, and gave us a phone number to call.

When we called the phone number, we heard a live rendition of "If I Only Had a Brain" from The Wizard of Oz.  After a little research, we found that there was an Oz Park in Chicago that had statues of all the Wizard of Oz characters!  Cool!  And surely, we'd be looking for Scarecrow, who sings that song.  It was after 11 PM at this point, and were off to our second location in Chicago.

We were at Oz Park at night after it was technically closed, so we destroyed the evidence and instead show you this stock photo of what it looks like during the daytime.

At the Scarecrow statue in Oz Park, we found a scroll with a hand-drawn brain on it.  We examined it very closely to reveal that in the folds of the brain were some hidden letters that spelled out Kingston Mines, one of Chicago's oldest and most famous blues clubs.  (Shortly after, we realize that we were supposed to "fry" the brains, which would have melted away everything but the letters.)

So we head to Kingston Mines, a place I had visited many years before with my friend Sanmit, who lived in Chicago at the time.  I never would have guessed at the time that it would end up the finish line for an epic journey across the country some years later.  The finish line, I say?  Yes, that's right, when we arrive at Kingston Mines just before midnight, Josh tells us that the race is over and he hands us the Iron Raven!   He says we won by 2 hours and 6 minutes, and the other teams have already gone back to their hotels for the night.

Ladies and Gentleman, your GAR 3 Champions, complete with photobomber.

Confused that we wouldn't have another day of racing (later we found out Josh had a family emergency arise that he had to take care of back home, so certainly nothing to be upset about on our side), but happy that we'd defended our title, we hung out at Kingston Mines for a while to share stories with Josh and Sean, then we headed out to celebrate the best way we could think of: with some real Chicago pizza!  All the more famous places were closed at the time we were out, so we tried out Pequod's Pizza, which was open until 2 AM.

Nothing tastes better than victory except for possibly authentic Chicago pizza.

It was a great end to a great race... or was this really the end?  Stay tuned...