All Aboard For Gourd

They made me drop the radio.

Left behind all alone in the dirt.

I could hear its sweet cries as we ran away into the dark night.

A piece of my heart was gone.

This is the story of how I became the Joker.

I'm getting ahead of myself here but it really was a travesty.

Day 3 of our Big Walk was pretty successful. We discovered that items you lose in the wild end up repopulating where you first found them the next time you enter the island, so we started off by collecting back our two walkies so we could finish out some puzzles.

We began with only four walkers this time; Joey, Nora, Rachel and myself. Jared and John were supposed to join in later so I left a note on the whiteboard back at our base for them to radio us if they logged on. I'm cute like that.

The first puzzle we wanted to tackle involved stations with telescopes and buttons that were spread across the map.

Rachel and Nora stayed at the first station while Joey and I headed out to the next. Our thinking was we needed to just get to the second button and radio back for completion. To our surprise we discovered there were more platforms. We only had two walkies at this point so it wasn't necessarily ideal. We radioed back to let them know what was up. Joey headed off to the next platform with the walkie and I stayed back to chill on this cool rock with the second button.

I was alone for at least twenty minutes it felt like. Maybe more. I spent time scrambling around on the rocks and looking through my telescope to see if Joey was getting closer to his platform. He had a long trek to make with no flashlight. To help with that Rachel and Nora were launching flares in the sky to light up the area. They looked like shooting stars flying by in the night:

Earlier while I was alone the sun started to go down and I managed to meander behind this big rock and sit on a little ledge looking out into the ocean. It was just me chilling watching the sun go down. Downtime in Big Walk is actually really nice. They put a lot of care into creating the environment and finding cool little areas is as fun as discovering a new puzzle. Make sure to give it a beat and take it all in every now and then.

Through the telescope I finally saw Joey's bulbous glowing eyes poking out of the darkness as he made his way up the mountain to the next platform. But nothing was happening and he wasn't giving me any signals. I could just see him speaking in the walkie.

A few minutes later I was startled by a voice as I was in the middle of a Peeping Tom sesh on Joey's ass. It was Rachel! She came with both good news and bad news. Bad news was that there was another platform with a button far away. Good news was that John showed up at the first platform to meet them, so Nora was on her way to what was hopefully the final button.

Once Nora made it we began to try pushing the buttons together and signaling the others by waving our arms up and down and all around. It took a few tries but eventually we all hit them in the correct timeframe. Success! Praise Gourd.

From here we all aimed to meet up at one of the cones so we headed towards Joey since Nora was deep into the forest somewhere.

The trek there got a little hairy. One because John was all alone with no walkie. Two because Rachel and I lost the yellow flare gun on the way lol ☹️ (this was a reoccurring theme of the evening). We were able to signal along the way though before that and check in with the radio at the blue cone. We were trying to get to green if I remember correctly. We saw John do the same right after we lost the flare gun because he started setting off the blue cone's flare right behind us.

Eventually we found Joey messing around up at the chair lift and we all regrouped to make a plan of attack. Nora mentioned she had run into a radio transmitter when she was heading to her telescope which was siiiiick news. It was the purple station. This one sounded kind of spooky when we were running through the forest at night:

The funny thing about Big Walk is that if you don't all log on at the same time there's a chance you might not see each other for a long while. The same can be said for when you get separated. I didn't see or talk to John for like the first 30 or 45 minutes until this point. It's really exciting when you finally run into each other though. I missed my boy!

After we grouped back up we tried to collect a few more flare guns by dropping down these holes into dark structures built into the rocks that Joey had spotted. We dropped down the red one. I landed first and shot a flare back up the hole. It was kind of baller. On the way out though... I fell and lost it. Less baller.

Then we stumbled upon another hole with a flare gun at the bottom and we also happened to lose that one. It ended up being a whole thing that was both hilarious and sad haha.

From here we blasted through a tonnnn of puzzles. One of them was this elevated structure that required some parkour maneuvering by lifting each other over a set of obstacles:

At one point Rachel got wayyyy too close to the edge and we all thought she was a goner for a second. She pulled through though. Thank Gourd.

Another puzzle involved a telescope and some puzzle tiles and figuring out the correct symbols to use and in what order. Here's Nora popping off:

We were cooking through puzzles with ease this time.

~We had officially entered a flow state~

After we finished this one we had enough gourds to complete the blue cone. Tower? IDK. I like calling them cones. It was after this puzzle that I was FORCED TO DROP THE RADIO. I won't name names but now it's at least in bold writing on the internet for the world to know.

As we headed up the mountain to the blue cone we ran into another radio transmitter!!! This was the yellow one. The music here sounded maddddd funky. We didn't get to bask in it long though. We continued forth and unlocked the next key which meant it was time to go for a train ride.

We piled on and took off. The train is equipped with seats, an intercom, horn, bell, and a brake. You can just chill on this thing as it makes its way around the island. It moves pretty slow but that just gives you more time to talk with the homies. I think myself and John both fell off the train at some point. For John we had to pull an emergency maneuver by breaking on a slope just outside of a tunnel so he could climb back on. Only seasoned conductors can pull this off.

We decided to take a whole trip around the island on the train. Along the way we saw sooooo many more puzzles ready for us to take on. Joey was practically foaming at the mouth looking at 'em all. It was kind of mind blowing how many we could see from the train though–just imagine how many we can't see! All together it was a relaxing ride and a perfect way to finish the night off.

Gourd Will Guide Us Through The Dark.