If you look up “summer” in the dictionary, you might find the following definition: “A two to three month window, typically between June and August, in which academic hiatuses and clement weather lead to a spike in demand for travel*.” If one were to follow the asterisk at the end of the sentence to the footnotes, he/she would find the following addendum: “An increase in demand while holding supply fixed will typically increase the equilibrium price.”
What does it all mean? In short, that traveling during the summer months is really freaking expensive!
My trip to West Virginia was the last realistic driving trip for me to do; the only way around it would be to take extra vacation days for a long drive to the east coast or to Denver, but I’d prefer to use my paid time off a little more sparingly. So for the past few weeks, I’ve been digging locally for puzzles to keep me occupied while close to home.
Enter my cool new resale shop find- the “What Riddle Is That?” jigsaw puzzle. It jumped out at me due to my current enthusiasm for riddles after reading the books of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower featuring a riddle contest against a deranged monorail.
The premise of the puzzle is to find puzzle pieces with matching questions/answers for different riddles, and then after assembling all the correct riddle matches together, the solver gets a full image of an Egyptian sphinx. For a quick thrift shop find, I had a blast with this one. With the sheer volume of riddles, I recognized some, while others were completely new to me. When on my cruise in Alaska, I participated in a riddle contest, and I recognized a few of these riddles from that event, including the only one I got wrong that day.
He who makes it sells it. He who buys it never uses it. He who uses it doesn’t know he’s using it.
A coffin
The puzzle was a lot of fun to put together. After solving the riddles, it’s not very easy to finish the puzzle since all the pieces fit with each other and many of the matching pairs look near identical to one another. Still, I feel confident that I have the correct alignment across the board, though with the top row, it’d be near impossible to confirm.
If anyone is looking to try this puzzle, it may be a little difficult to find. The puzzle was produced in the nineties and never reprinted, and while there’s a single overpriced copy on Amazon.com, there’s no guaranteed way to find it. Still, for a thrift shop find, it was the perfect way to get some thought provoking puzzles in the comfort of my own home.
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