Obscure Pears Mystery Cache
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This is a mystery cache. You must solve the puzzle to determine the actual coordinates. There is a designated parking area about a quarter mile south-east of the final; please don't use the side of the road, however tempting.
During our time in Massachusetts, we really enjoyed caches by JWCOREY, aka Walker Royce. His puzzles and hides were among the best we have known in our caching career. Here we have stolen (with his permission) one of his puzzle types — the dreaded RASH — to make our own puzzle. We highly recommend checking out his book, Eureka! Discover and Enjoy the Hidden Power of the English Language, where this and many other unique puzzle types can be found.
The clues below consist of words that when verbally replaced with their appropriate counterparts, will produce answers that correspond to the puzzle’s theme. The theme is up to you to figure out.
RASH definitions:
Relatives are words in the same family or group, or associated in some reasonable sense. Knives and forks are related because they are utensils; tulips and daisies are relatives in the flower family; Washington and Lincoln are related because they were both Presidents; A and B are both letters of the alphabet; Pancho and Lefty are associated names.
Antonyms are opposites: hot and cold; coming and going; old and young; his and hers.
Synonyms are words with similar meanings: twist and turn; purple and mauve; thin and slender; fly, soar, and glide.
Homonyms include homophones and homographs. Homophones are words that are pronounced the same but have different meanings: to, too, and two; pray and prey; right and write. Homographs are words that are spelled the same and may or may not be pronounced the same, but have different meanings: rose (flower) and rose (past tense of rise); lead (go in front) and lead (chemical element).
The clues below are combinations of relatives and the various "nyms."
Some ground rules and notes to help you:
- If you can decipher any part of a solution, it becomes much easier to wind your way through the twisted combinations of “nyms” to get the whole answer. The possibilities decrease rapidly.
- Some of the homonyms are close but not exact. For example, “glide” might be as close as we could get to a homonym for “Clyde.” Such rough homonyms are in italics.
- Hyphens separate syllables. For example, "sphere-waterbird" could translate to ball (synonym for sphere) – loon (a type of water bird). So “sphere-waterbird” might translate to “balloon.“
- Multiple words with no spaces or hyphen between them constitute a single syllable or word in the solution. Thus "waterbird" translates to "loon" in the example above.
- Underlined words or letters are not translated; they are left intact in the answer. For example, Homeliness & the Archfiend might translate to Beauty & the Beast (Beauty is an antonym of Homeliness; the is retained in the solution, and Archfiend is another name for Beast in biblical commentary).
You can check your answers for this puzzle on GeoChecker.com.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Chmmyr: Jevgr gb hf. Ohg jr'yy bayl uryc lbh ba guerr bs gur pyhrf orsber gurer vf n SGS, fb pubbfr pnershyyl.
Uvqr: Fgnl ba gur genvyf hagvy lbh unir gb ohfujunpx. Urnq uvtu; guvax bs gur pnpur gvgyr.
Treasures
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