The Christmas treasure hunt.

I have just had the best weekend of fun, jolly times and merriment. Yes i have. I know that it's now Thursday so the weekend was a while ago but i have just gotten back home!

I went up to London to see my friends and take part in our first festive treasure hunt. And the general consensus is that we will now make it an annual affair!

We all met up at Covent Garden and headed to the nearest pub for some preparatory mulled wine. Whilst sat around supping the delightful hot booze the rules of the hunt were set out. This basically involved one member of the group wearing a santa hat and another elf ears at all times!

We were each given a copy of list of things we had to find and had two hours to get as many of the ten pages of things as we could. And off we went!

My team were pretty single minded, we wanted to win!

Unfortunately (or fortunately as it was pretty damn funny and a lot of fun) a lot of the things involved us making idiots of ourselves and taking photos. And help from various shopkeepers/ bar staff/ people on the street was essential.

The above photo of one of our team (me) reading the T'was The Night Before Christmas. This was one of the things we had to find. Done. You might even notice that we also have a book in shot called 'The Night Before The Night Before Christmas' as we thought this might get us extra points. It didn't.

This photo is my favorite and is thanks to the security staff at Tesco's who not only let us into their booth to take a photo of one of the group (Abby) on CCTV in elf ears but even redirected the security cameras for us and got her to pose in the right place for the best shot!

A photo of the whole group calling santa!

A poor gingerbread man having his head bitten off!

One of the group (Laura) asking a policeman the way to the north pole. He was a very jolly man and was happy for us to take photos with him.

A taxi driver who kindly agreed to be photographed wearing one of our Christmas hats! We gave him a mince pie to say thank you.

Not all of the questions were photo based, there was also a lot of Christmas trivia, such as: Which European city donates a Christmas tree to London every year (the answer is Oslo). Thank god for the power of the iphone!

Once our time was up we headed to the crypt at St Martins in Leicester Square for some well deserved cake.

And lovely little elf spend a lot of time studiously adding up the scores and it turned out........my team won! Hooray!

But most importantly (she says knowing how competitive i can be!) we had heaps of fun and got to hang out together. We then got even more festive with an afternoon spent at the Christmas market on South Bank. All in all the perfect day!

I'd just like to say a massive thank you to my amazing friend Antonia for organising the whole thing. A LOT of work went into it and we all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves!