A few weeks ago Megabus invited a group of 26 bloggers to take part in their first ever #MegaMysteryBus Tour. It turned into a raucous evening full of wonderful randomness!
The night started in the beautiful reception room of the Radisson Blu Portman Hotel in Marylebone, where we eagerly awaited the big reveal of what the night had in store for us. Details had been kept top secret.
After making sure that we’d enjoyed our fill of canapes and bubbly, Jennie from Search Laboratory let us in on the details.
A top of the line Megabus coach would be ours for the evening, transporting us in comfort across London to some of its best known landmarks, where we’d be taking part in a Sherlock Holmes themed puzzle adventure. On cue, two policeman characters appeared to explain more.
They split us into four teams, each of which was given an adventure bag containing a series of clue cards, evidence bags and a tablet upon which we’d need to record our answers. These were then to be handed back in for scoring at the end of the night.
Over the course of the evening we visited Westminster Abbey, Trafalgar Square and Covent Garden, at each location tracking down statues, monuments and plaques from picture clues to help us solve cryptic questions.
It was a fast paced and we probably looked quite potty to the rest of London town as we hurried past shouting seemingly random things to each other like “Can anyone see a statue with a chair?” and “Everyone, look for a quill!”
Added to this, there were bonus points for completing fun photo and video challenges and we were encouraged to be creative and think outside of the box. For the photo challenge ‘Fiddle’ we somehow managed to persuade a rather confused busker to not only pose in a picture with us, but also pick up his guitar and hold it like a violin!
At another location we had to take a picture ‘behind bars’ and this was our take on it.
Having received the scores at the end of the evening, I’m not sure the judges got what we were trying to do!
It was a cold night and I have to admit that as much as I was enjoying the challenges, it was a welcome relief to get back on the bus after each location to enjoy some brief respite in the cosiness of the coach, as well as taking advantage of the comfy seats as we did a lot of running over the course of the evening!
At Covent Garden half of our team spent our time there solving the much more pressing mystery of where the rest of our team had disappeared to… which may explain why back at the hotel we were announced as the bottom scoring team – oops! We did, however, get an honourable mention for some of the ‘evidence’ we had collected. We had been asked to bag up something to prove the presence of The Hound Of The Baskerville and so had bought a Poop Emoji Stuffed Toy that we found at a souvenir shop, a find we were all quite proud of!
The night ended in comedy when a life sized Sid (Megabus Man) turned up at the hotel to greet us and pose for pictures. Most people loved his cameo appearance and were soon queueing to take selfies but my team-mate Laura discovered that she had a phobia of giant inflatable Megabus men, much akin to how I’d imagine people react when faced with a giant clown. I told you it was a random night!
Thanks go to my team-mates for an evening of pure entertainment. If you’re looking for some new beauty/fashion/lifestyle blogs to follow check them out!
Laura | LoJoVsTheWorld
Katy | SchoolRunBeauty
Heather | 100waysto30
Jasmine & Kirsty | SoeursDeluxe
Of course I also need to say a big thank you to Megabus for providing us with everything we needed to travel around iconic London’s landmarks in comfort, and to Search Laboratory for organising such a fun evening. Whilst the #MegaMysteryBus tour was a one off event, you can still find Megabus providing regular transport services up and down the country all day, every day!
Photo credit: All photos in this post are courtesy of Matt Chappell and Search Laboratory, who followed us around taking our pictures so that we could concentrate on saving London from evil Moriarty!
