Bloomington, IN: Mad Egg Dash

Last Friday night we went to the Mad Egg Dash hosted by the City of Bloomington! It's a grown-up Easter egg hunt (21+ only) in the dark in Bryan Park. There are over 3,000 eggs.

In years past it has been called the Egg Scramble (check out this super old article from IDS), and has been going on for 16 years. This year it was $10/person to enter.

There was a rectangle set up in Bryan Park were all the eggs were laid out.

Since check-in time was from 7:30-8:30 and the hunt didn't start till 9pm, there were activities for us to do. There was this obstacle course (see how fast you can run through hoops, dodge cones, throw noodles into rings, fire a water balloon at a target, crawl under rope, jump over fire, tag a tree -- somebody did that in 23 seconds; my time was 37), music and dancing with a DJ, and people watching.

Eventually we all got herded over the bridge and surrounded the eggs. Since it's dark they suggest you bring a flashlight. You don't need one (for one, everyone else has one; for two, it's light enough to still see the eggs; for three, they use glow in the dark eggs). But it was cool to see all the flashlights come on at once when they said you could turn them on. (We brought flashlights but did not use them.)

The hunt is over in seconds. We ran out into the field and grabbed as many eggs as we could, throwing them into our bags. We made out pretty well, as you can see from this scarily-lit photo of the inside of Eric's bag:

Inside the eggs were all kinds of goodies. Some were empty, but others had tokens for Bloomington Bagel Company, there was a gift card to Brothers and one to a salon, and we also got a free pizza coupon from Papa John's. Some also had raffle tickets inside, which you could put into drawings for all sorts of other gift cards and gift baskets (which we did not win, unfortunately). I had a really good time!

I found out about the egg hunt by sheer luck looking at Twitter one day (which I don't look at very often anymore), which took me to the City of Bloomington's registration page. Registration opens a few weeks before the hunt and closes whenever they reach max capacity (350-360 people) or a couple days before the event, whichever happens first.