2nd time's a charm

The clue about the hanging baskets didn't mean anything to me, as I've only lived in Minnesota for 2 years. A quick flickr search for a couple key terms turned up some pictures of the statue rongo rongo provided, as well as the name of the town and park where the statue lived. After a quick google map search, I was on my way.
I ducked out of work a little early on a sunny afternoon and rode my motorcycle along the Great River Road down the Wisconsin side to Red Wing.

I quickly located the park and the jester, but after a bit of digging around, I couldn't find the treasure. I enlisted the help of a stranger sitting at a near by picnic table, but the 2 of us were unsuccessful. The volunteer that maintains that garden showed up, but said he hadn't dug anything weird out of the flower bed. It's worth noting that I did not bring a shovel, as the picture clues provided did not look very deep.

I returned home empty handed and disappointed, but I was not yet resigned. After another hint from rongo rongo, I returned the next day with garden trowel in hand. This time I dug about 10" away from the rock, instead of just around it's base, and sure enough, TREASURE!

Silentseas' reckoning of finding the treasure!

I don't own a shovel. I do, however, have a friendly neighborhood hardware store that carries plastic gardening trowels meant for children. My options were bee, ladybug, or mantis. The mantis looked ready for action, so he came along.

Rongo's tip about the town being famous for its hanging baskets tipped me off to the location, and some sleuthing revealed the jester should be straight behind the old train station. I've been through the train station numerous times on my way to and from Chicago on the Amtrak. If the train ran with a better schedule, I would have taken it down there. Alas, it only goes by early in the morning and well into the evening.

I brought my non SF0 boyfriend with me to intrigue him to the delights of tasking. Achieved - he wants to bury everything now and have people find it. We found the jester and scurried off to the rock. We sat flat down in the dirt and started to dig. Some picnic-ers nearby eyeballed us, and a fleet of ladies with large visors kind of clicked their tongues, but everyone was too Minnesotan to say anything about us digging by a statue.

Fortunately, Ntan had been through earlier, and the ground was pretty easy to dig, though I had not anticipated how deep down it would be. Buried indeed, this was under more than a cursory layer of dirt. I shrieked when I hit the plastic bag, and we took out the treasure to admire it. From Rongo - a lovely card, and a chain of beads from Turkey to ward off evil. From Ntan, the most delightfully amazing assortment of doo-dads ever, including a arrowhead patch that says "SOPHOMORE" and pins and amazing widgets.

Ntan and I are under orders to share tea that he procured, and there will be more tasking and plotting involved.

rongo rongo and the first hiding

MN0ers are cool, so when I was in the state for a wedding, I had to do a bit of buried treasure on the side. I pinged all the MN0 folks whom I hadn't met, and hoped that the clues wouldn't be too obscure. MN0ers are a wily bunch, and Ntan and Silent Seas figured it out right away. What I was not counting on was the relative lack of shovels in Minnesota. I mean, when the viking guys buried something for me in MA, they dug a hole deep enough to hide a body with a shovel they borrowed from construction site. But between the ice cream scoop I bought at a local dollar store and the kiddie insect shovel that Silent Seas came up with, I guess all our digging needs were met.