Birthday parties for three year olds normally involve jelly and ice cream, silly games and lots of running around screaming. When the three year old in question is Planet Inline, all you need to do is substitute the jelly and ice cream for skating and you pretty much have a perfect description of a Mystique Birthday adventure skate.

As the day was going to require a modicum of organization, anyone wanting to partake had to pre-book. From this, we had been split into six teams of four and assigned a team colour by e-mail.

At 8:30am on a bright sunny Sunday morning little clumps of skaters dressed in team colours began to assemble at the Domain. The six team colours were black, blue, green, pink, red and white. I was on the black team with fellow team mates Julie, Sash and Jo. Paul was also supposed to be on our team but a last minute substitution saw him transferred to the blue team.

By nine, everyone was sorted out, team loyalties had been forged and general goading had begun. Michael, the head of Mystique, stepped up and addressed the expectant crowd. Our mission, should we choose to accept it, would be to follow a series of clues. Each clue would lead us to our next destination. When we arrived, we would be given a puzzle or challenge before getting the next clue. On top of this, we were also given a list of items we had to acquire along the way. We were not allowed to spend any money or go to anyone’s house to get these items so it basically came down to beg, borrow or steal.

With the rules explained, we were ready to begin. The envelopes containing the list of items to collect and the first clue were given out and we were soon setting off to locate a café in West End and track down a roasted coffee bean.

Item gathering began almost immediately and with twenty two objects to locate during the day no time was lost in determining the best places to find the various trinkets. Some of the simpler items fell quickly, a drawing pin was plucked from a notice board as we passed and a used scratch-it was extracted from a rather non-plused newsagent. One of the items we felt would be a problem also came into our possession quickly. As we waited in the newsagents for Sash to acquire the scratch-it, Jo noticed a beaming Naomi Campbell staring up from the front page of a newspaper. Her visage was on the list and one quick digital snap later, a pencilled tick rendered her a problem no longer.

As Julie homed in on our target café, we spotted the blue and green teams ahead of us. We were still inside our twenty minute time limit and with our haul of items we didn’t feel too far behind. We got our coffee bean, signed the visitor’s book and grabbed the next clue. We now had another twenty minutes to find Bent Books and determine why they call themselves that. Julie knew the shop was on Boundary Street so we set off with the intention of arriving further up the order. On the way a coat hanger, a foreign coin, a flower and a leaflet for a restaurant called Cumquat fell into our possession.

We arrived at Bent Books in good time, although the blue team were already in the shop as we made our way in. A member of staff explained that Bent Books was a second hand book shop and the title was derived from the rather dog eared appearance of some of the volumes on offer. We exchanged this nugget of information for the next clue, but not before being told that there was a riddle to solve for an extra point. Unfortunately the conundrum stumped us and rather than waste a lot of time on it we elected to take the next clue and be on our way.

Challenge three directed us to find Scout Point and get a photo of our team from a passing tourist. For an extra point, we had to get a photo of a team member being kissed by a stranger. This all had to be completed by 10:45am. No problem, all we had to do now was work out where Scout Point was. The clue said it overlooked the river and the city. Julie guessed that it was the rotunda at Kangaroo Point but she wasn’t one hundred percent sure. We decided that the best course of action would be to head through South Bank. This would let us do a couple of things. One of the items we had to collect was some sand from the city beach. We could get this and at the same time go into the information centre and check if Scout Point was in fact where we thought it was. On the way to South Bank we would also pass the train station which would allow us to grab a government business card.

With our plan in place we made a dash for the train station. We got the business card but came up short on our request for a thong from lost property. Next we skated over to South Bank and filled up a cup with sand from the Beach in the City. We now threaded our way through a busy South Bank to get to the information centre. At this point, Sash’s new pedestrian terror weapon came into play. Allied to her already terrifying call of ‘PEDESTRIAN’, she had added the extra psychological intimidation of a finger bell. Combining the two with her cowl of death meant that even the most stubborn of pedestrians were quickly swept aside and often reduced to little more than gibbering wrecks. In no time at all we were inside the information centre where our suspicions on the location of Scout Point were almost definitely, possibly, maybe confirmed by a slightly less than sure tourist information officer.

Safe in the knowledge that we definitely might be going to the right place we headed over to Kangaroo Point. As we clambered up the steps to the top of what we assumed was Scout Point, we were reassured to find a couple of other teams busily getting their photos taken by tourists. We considered forming an orderly queue behind the red team to try and get our picture taken, but Julie decided it was better to just push into their photo, which we duly did. The bonus challenge now needed sorting out. Sash was volunteered to give Michael a kiss (after all he was a complete stranger to her), which she didn’t seem overly reluctant to do. A photo was taken and shown to the Mystique representative which got us our next clue.

Challenge four was to ‘Find the King 1910 – 1936’ and have our photo taken with him. The King in question was George V and his statue adorns King George Square. With no time to loose, we set off over the Story Bridge and headed into town. We were soon standing in front of George having our picture taken before being given a puzzle to solve, a jigsaw puzzle that is. Six sets of puzzle pieces were neatly laid out on the ground behind the statue and we had to pick one and complete it. The puzzle itself was fairly simple, apart from the fact that four of the pieces were missing. When we pointed this out, we were told the absent sections were somewhere in the other piles of pieces. A desperate search of the other piles ensued and after a few minutes we had located the missing sections and completed our task. As a reward we were allowed to keep one piece of the jigsaw (it was an item on the list) and given our next task.

Challenge five was to busk or earn $10.00, prove we had done it and then take it to Skate Biz. Cryptically at the bottom of the sheet it said that for a bonus point we had to eat something foul. Julie, Sash and Jo immediately switched on the charm and began asking strangers in the square for money. Young men were immediately captivated by their winning ways and handed over handfuls of cash unquestioningly. At one point it looked like we could come out of this endeavour with more money than we went in with. Ten dollars was acquired in no time and all that remained was to get some form of proof that we had earned it. This took the form of me pretending to sing to a passing woman while she handed me a coin. The scene was set and the picture taken. With the shot in the can we made our way, with all haste, to Skate Biz to pick up the final challenge.

We were the third team to arrive at Skate Biz and we were told that the foul thing that had to be eaten was a raw egg. There didn’t seem to be a massive amount of debate before I was nominated to take on the task. Never having eaten a raw egg before I was a little apprehensive to say the least. The egg was cracked into a cup and handed to me. There was only one way to approach this and it didn’t involve too much thinking. Cup to lips, head back, down in one. Yuck! If you want to know what a raw egg tastes like, well it tastes like chicken of course.

At this point our esteemed team leader Julie had to leave us. She had an appointment with the fairies (quite literality, she was going to be a fairy at a children’s party), however Anne, who could not make the early start because of work commitments, was going to join us. She was on her way and would catch us up as soon as she could. While Sash was buying a new bum bag she had ordered some time ago, Jo asked one of the guys in the shop if he had a spare thong we could borrow. With out even blinking he said ‘sure, there’s one in the back of my van’. He handed Jo the keys and she came back into the shop a few minutes later brandishing one slightly off white thong.

The sixth and final clue was in a sealed envelope which wasn’t to be opened until midday, some thirty minutes away. The envelope was handed to us along with $7 from the $10 we had collected. The thirty minute window gave us a chance to try and collect the few items that were now missing from our list. One of these was a Big W carrier bag so it made sense to head there first. As we skated over Julie called. She had forgotten to leave the drawing pin, coat hanger, scratch card and foreign coin we had collected earlier.

When we arrived at Big W we were obviously not the first team to request one of their bags. The two women stood by the door handed us one of the carriers and asked us what was happening. A couple of minutes chatting paid dividends as a request for another coat hanger was obligingly met. As we were leaving, Anne appeared and we went back outside to discuss strategy.

We still needed something in the team colours that we could all wear. After mulling over a few possibilities, Anne suggested black drinking straws which we all agreed was a good idea. We set off looking for a café or restaurant that could supply us. While you would have thought that black straws were a fairly common commodity at the majority of eating establishments, you would in fact be wrong. Straws it would seem are almost always every colour except black. We found no shortage of white straws, clear straws, blue straws and even stripy straws but no black ones. We were on the verge of giving up when Sash made one last dash into a rather up market looking coffee shop. Minutes later she emerged waving a handful of black straws and we quickly weaved them into our hats and helmets.

By now it was 12 o’clock and time to open the last challenge. Our task was to find a passport photo booth and get a picture of the whole team. We scratched our heads and wracked our brains. Where was the nearest passport photo booth? The station seemed like a good bet so we headed in that direction. We hadn’t gone far when Sash spotted a chemist shop that also did photo developing. Would they do passport photos we wondered? Sash disappeared inside and re-emerged a few seconds later sporting a huge grin and gesticulating wildly for us to follow her back inside. The lady in the chemist pulled down a white screen and we arranged ourselves in front of it. One quick digital snap later and before we knew it we were holding onto a small envelope containing four passport sized photos. Jo then asked if she might have a foreign coin lying about by any chance. Amazingly a quick hunt through the till turned up not one but two. How about a condom was the next rather bizarre request. Unfazed the young lady disappeared into the back of the shop and returned a few moments later brandishing the requested item. We thanked her profusely and headed off to the final rendezvous point, the river Canteen Stage at South Bank.

The only two things we now needed were another drawing pin and some ice. We had decided to get the ice in South Bank so that it wouldn’t be too melted and we would look for another drawing pin as we skated over there.

With no time to loose we headed over to the Canteen Stage. We picked up a cup of ice but had no luck with the drawing pin. We got to the meeting point and had our items checked off. Each item was worth a single point and we thought we had everything bar the drawing pin, however our picture of a golf ball was rejected on the grounds that it was not an actual golf ball and our front page of last weeks newspaper was rejected mainly on the grounds that it wasn’t from the previous week. Still we got a fairly respectable 19 out of 22.

All we could do now was sit and wait as the other teams had their items checked off and all the points were added up. After a few minutes we were told there was a tie between two teams and there would have to be a play off to determine an outright winner. The two teams on equal points were the red team and the black team. The final result was going to be decided with a relay race that involved carrying ice cubes between two cups with a straw. While this sounded like an exciting and challenging way of separating red from black, it turned out to be a little less well thought out than might have initially seemed the case. As Jo and Pepsi made the first dash to the ice cubes it quickly became apparent that no amount of suction through the thin straws was going to provide enough purchase on the ice cubes to lift them clear of the plastic cups. The idea was abandoned and new suggestions sought. After various ideas were muted and rejected (mainly on hygiene grounds), the final solution was declared to be an ice and spoon race (seeing as we had eaten all the eggs). So, we reformed our teams and the race was on. Initially it was the red team that pulled ahead but black came back strongly in the middle section and by the time the last ice cube was about to be fetched both teams were neck and neck. One last mad dash saw both spoons come down to the cups almost simultaneously, but in the panic one of the ice cubes missed the cup and flew uncontrollably through the air. Michael called out black as the winners and the Birthday adventure was over.

We received a rather handsome trophy and a selection of prizes kindly donated by Skate Biz. The red team also received a selection of runners up prizes and we all settled down to listen to the live band and enjoy some well deserved food and drink. Julie appeared shortly afterwards and joined in the fun.

All in all, the day’s celebrations were deemed a great success thanks to Mystiques excellent challenge, Skate Biz’s sponsorship and Planet’s organization. A third birthday sk8 party to remember!