This evening was the "Choose Your Own Adventure" event of the DIY Fest. Heather, Heather, and Girish joined me on the expedition to a secret location.

We met up with the organisers at the Paddlewheel restaurant, and they told us the venue (the health sciences centre), offered advice for which bus to take (the #19), and handed out the some booklets that would lead us around.

After running around trying to find a # 19 bus stop, we boarded a bus with some other explorers headed for the hospital. It was kind of funny because when the bus stopped at the hospital, half the people on the bus left with booklets in hand. We arrived on foot at the Brody building, which is where the intermediate difficulty level booklets all started. The booklets cautioned that we should be discrete, so I picked up a copy of the Manitoban and slipped the booklet inside.

The adventure worked like this, you were told to go to a certain part of a building and find a number (such as the number of fans on the ceiling, or a room number on a door), you then used this number to find your next destination in the booklet. Simple eh?

Following the booklet lead us through the bowels of the University of Manitoba Bannatyne campus. Areas of interest we passed by were a large display case of old, scary dentistry equipment, and later on, the animal testing labs. The U of M area was deserted except for fellow explorers, and we pressed on to the hospital for the next part of the exploration.

After a bit of searching around, we found an entrance to the hospital from the U of M area and pressed onwards down to the tunnel networks. We slowly worked our way to the parking garage for the next clue, which involved consulting the numbers on some lockers. We then 'won' the adventure by being instructed to head to the general hospital cafeteria.

At the cafeteria we waited and ate while other explorers streamed in. The majority of people doing the intermediate level completed the adventure and 'won'. After about ten minutes many people who were doing the advanced level came in and nearly all of them had 'lost';.

The large group of explorers really stuck out in the cafeteria, not that we didn't stick out everywhere else. Some people chose the worst possible attire such as oilskin fedoras, or the one person who was sporting an infiltration t-shirt (and they probably were wondering why they were caught by security).

The concept and booklets were a great idea, a guided urban exploration session. It was a really fun evening.