GISHWHES

Beginning this weekend and lasting a week I am doing a little thing a few of you may have heard of called GISHWHES. GISHWHES stands for Greatest International Scavenger Hunt World Has Ever Seen and it is a week of madness. My plan is to blog my experiences about this week and give you an insight into the fun, and stress that is GISHWHES. But first I think you need an introduction to prepare you for its insanity.

What is GISHWHES?

It's about as easy to explain as it is to say the acronym. To put it simply GISHWHES is a week long international scavenger hunt. You either create or join a team of 15 and then wait for the item list to be uploaded. If you don't know enough people interested you can join as a partial team or on your own, and you'll be sorted into a team of 15 people from around the world. 

GISHWHES was started by the actor Misha Collins who is most known for his role of Castiel on the CW show Supernatural, and is currently in its fourth year. Every year it breaks at least one Guinness world record including 'largest media scavenger hunt'. Over the years it has gained some notoriety with the media and amongst celebrities. This year has seen Misha's co-star Osric Chau set up his own team and even William Shatner (of Captain Kirk fame) has pledged to compete.

So what are some of the items?

The items are usually image or video submissions and are assigned a points value corresponding to their difficulty. They range from the doable to the slightly illegal to the impossible. Let's take last years list from when I competed officially for the first time. One of the items was 'IMAGE: Make your country’s flag from food or food packaging. 49 POINTS' . Now this sounds pretty easy right? This was one of the items I completed and you can see it attached below. It took me about half an hour including clean up. 

There are others on the list just as easy such as 'IMAGE: Model this summer’s hottest fashion trend. Let’s see a swimsuit made entirely from tea bags. 68 POINTS'. It's a little time consuming, but not out of the range of possibility. If you're artistic there's a few items that require your painting or drawing skills too. There's also a few easy ones for charity or good causes such as; 'IMAGE: Let’s see you and a friend, seated side-by-side, donating blood or platelets. Wear something festive on your head to commemorate the occasion. 33 POINTS'

However, if you really want to score points in GISHWHES you need to be willing to leave your sanity behind and embrace the impossible. One of the big point items last year was; 'IMAGE: You, dressed as The Flash in the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) tunnel. If this is too difficult, you will get full credit for dressing as The Flash in any actual, operational particle accelerator. 216 POINTS', and people actually managed to complete it. Another high scorer which proved difficult was 'VIDEO: A military aircraft with Gishwhes decals. The video must depict take-off. You may not illegally or secretly graffiti the plane. 185 POINTS'. I think it says something of my leftover sanity from last year that I don't think these items are too outrageous.

GISHWHES items don't always go to plan though. Take last years; 'IMAGE: Get Alexander Misurkin, Pavel Vinogradov, Chris Cassidy, Fyodor Yurchikhin, Karen Nyberg or Luca Parmitano to take a photo of themselves holding up a sign that says, “Hey (INSERT ANY USERNAME FROM YOUR TEAM)! GISHWHES does space too!” or a similar slogan. As a side note, the preceding individuals are all currently on the International Space Station orbiting planet Earth. 334 POINT'. NASA had to publicly state that unfortunately they would not be able to help, and ask the competitors to please stop bugging the astronauts. 

There's also always a great big GISHWHES meet-up to try and complete an item together and break a world record. This year's is in Seattle on Sunday 3rd August and even if you're not competing I encourage you to go for the experience of being involved in something as fun, and abnosome (GISHER speak for awesome) as GISHWHES.

As you can see there's a lot of variation in the items, but one thing GISHWHES encourages is for you to break out of your shell and try things you would have never thought of. You will get some strange looks when you announce you're dressing up as a nun and going down a water slide or you race down the street in pumpkin shoes, but it will change your life. GISHWHES shows you the impossible is possible and normalcy is boring.

So what does the winning team get?

Every year the winning team gets flown out to a different location for a mini holiday. Previous winners have been to Rome, a haunted castle in Scotland and New England. This year's winning team will be flown to 'King's landing' (Game of Thrones) for a pirate and survival weekend with Misha Collins.

So this all sounds pretty cool, where can I find out more?

Check out the GISHWHES site, follow the GISHWHES twitter, follow Misha Collins and check out the video below showing last year's accomplishments.

Also head back here on the 10^th of August for my blog detailing this year's GISHWHES adventures, if I have the energy to type that is. I suggest you keep an eye on our Twitter in case I need your help too!