Last night after the American Idol concert, Nicki and her friends Gary and Kelli were bored and looking for something to do. They called me for ideas, so I read them my entire list of “Things To Do When There’s Nothing To Do.” Well, they liked number twenty, “Scavenger Hunt,” so they challenged me to come up with a list while they were on their way over to my apartment.

Here’s the “List of Things to Get” that I came up with:

1. A moose
2. The Queen of England
3. An American flag
4. A postage stamp
5. A striped sock
6. Your mom
7. The autograph of a famous person
8. V.D.
9. Another moose
10. The Anaheim Angels
11. A smurf
12. Something old
13. Something new
14. Something borrowed
15. Something blue (besides a smurf)
16. A Christmas ornament
17. A Christmas tree
18. Gravy
19. Jesus
20. Gum

Since there were only four of us, we decided to go together to get the things on the list instead of splitting up into teams. In that respect, it wasn’t truly a Scavenger Hunt. That’ll have to happen some other time when I’m hanging out with more people. Also, we decided to make it a Pictorial Scavenger Hunt, meaning that instead of obtaining the actual objects, we’d just have to get photos of the objects. Thank goodness, because live moose are quite heavy and surprisingly expensive these days. You can imagine the horror of having to cart around two of them in Nicki’s Civic.

Anyway, our first stop was obviously a twenty-four hour Sav-On. Almost every item was either there at Sav-On or already in possession of one of the other three people (including “Your Mom,” because Nicki had a picture of her mom with her). So after spending an hour or so in Sav-On, and then visiting some other nearby locations in Newport Beach, all we had left was item number two, “The Queen of England.”

Now, I was hoping we could just find some Canadian currency somewhere, because that has pictures of the Queen on it. But we couldn’t think of anyplace where we could get Canadian currency at one o’clock in the morning. We called some friends, but they didn’t have any.

Next we tried going to Fashion Island, thinking that although the Barnes & Noble would be closed, we might still be able to find a book of British Royalty in the window or something. That didn’t happen. We couldn’t even get near the bookstore because large parts of the parking lot were blocked off. So we gave up on Fashion Island.

Nicki suggested downloading a picture of the Queen off the internet, but Kelli and I informed her that using the internet would definitely be considered cheating in a Pictorial Scavenger Hunt.

After that we drove to Laguna Beach to look at the closed art galleries, in the hope that one would have British crap in it. None did.

We also tried several different newspapers and tabloids at a Shell station, but there was apparently no news about the Royals this week.

Finally I got the idea of going to the Five Crowns Restaurant in Corona Del Mar. It’s the only British restaurant I’ve ever seen, and although it would obviously be closed at two o’clock in the morning, I was hoping it might have a picture of the Queen outside or in one of the windows.

This is when our evening became… creepy.

The Five Crowns looks like an old tudor mansion, sort of like the kind that they visit on “Haunted Hotels” on the Travel Channel. It has stone lions guarding the entrance, an old-fashioned British phone booth out in front, and ivy growing all over the building. Narrow paths lead from the front entrance around to the sides of the house. All of the windows contain lace curtains that you can just barely see through.

There was no one around on PCH at that time of night, and although the building was mostly dark, there were a couple of rooms that were still lit by chandeliers, although very dimly.

We saw two photographs near the entrance, but one was a picture of a guard and the other was a picture of an old manor house.

Gary decided to check out the phone booth. Inside was a phone book, and for some reason he thought that the Queen of England would be listed. There was some kind of dried, red liquid on the cover of the phone book, though, and we weren’t really sure what it was. It kind of resembled… blood. But we laughed it off and continued with our search.

While Gary was at the phone booth, Kelli and Nicki decided to walk all the way around the side of the building to a room with its lights on. This room was some kind of wine cellar, and they took one look in the window and decided to give up and move on. The Queen of England obviously wasn’t in there.

Then Kelli, Nicki, and I came upon the corner room.

The lights in the corner room were very dimly lit, and the lace curtains were almost completely shut, leaving only a crack to peer through. Kelli and Nicki climbed through the bushes to get as close to the window as possible, while I went around to the other side of the room to try and look through the other window.

Sure enough, on the walls of this room, there were old etchings and drawings of past members of the Royal Family.

As I leaned in to get a closer look (and to try and figure out how I would shoot a photograph of the far side of the room through the window and the lace curtains), Kelli screamed, “Nicki!.”

It sounded to me like a scream of “A figure just walked into the room and is heading toward the window.”

I ran back around to the side where Nicki and Kelli had been standing, and I quickly realized that the scream had actually occurred because Kelli had spotted a very large black widow spider, which was quickly descending toward Nicki’s head as she stood in the bushes by the window. Nicki screamed also and hopped back onto the path. Gary came out of the phone booth to find out what was going on. At that point they stood back and noticed the huge spider web which was covering the entire window, and which Nicki had almost destroyed with her hands and face as she had leaned in.

We took a moment to recover from the discovery of the giant spider and its web. Everything was quiet, and then we were shocked by a sudden, loud, hissing noise that came from right behind Gary. Kelli screamed and reached over to grab Nicki’s arm, but she accidentally grabbed Nicki’s boob instead, and Nicki also screamed. The hissing sound was just the sprinklers starting, but it had scared us pretty well.

Kelli and I decided we couldn’t get close enough to the spider web window to take a decent picture of the etchings, so instead we had to take one through the side window (the one which I had been investigating). Gary and Nicki stood watching the spider and made some more attempts to take pictures with their cameraphones through the front window, while Kelli and I walked back around to the side.

When we walked back to the side window, we noticed that a single dinner fork had been placed on the window sill. Its presence there was completely unexplained, and it put us even more on edge than before.

Both Kelli and I had digital cameras, so we tried to take pictures through the window of the Queen of England’s head, which was in the middle of a very large etching on the wall. We took them with and without flashes and at different angles, but it was very difficult to get the far wall illuminated without getting a glare from either the glass or the lace curtains (which were mostly in the way). Finally Kelli got a shot in which she could see “something,” and then her battery died. Then I tried one more time to line up a shot through the separation in the curtains, using the flash, and I finally took a picture in which I could faintly make out the Queen’s head.

“I got it!” I yelled out, and we ran back around to the front of the building, grabbed Gary (whose cameraphone had just died) and Nicki (who couldn’t get any of the photos to come out on her cameraphone), and booked it to the car. As we approached the car, we heard a whirring sound start inside the Five Crowns. We got into the car as quickly as we could, and as the sound grew louder, we sped away.

We went to Denny’s. I looked at my picture of the Queen, and sure enough, if I zoomed in enough, I could see her there on the wall, albeit very faintly. Kelli realized she suddenly had enough power left in her battery to look at the pictures we’d taken, and in the picture she’d taken just before her battery had mysteriously “died,” we could make out some kind of ghostly image on the wall… but it wasn’t the Queen. It was just… something.

Needless to say, I want to return to the Five Crowns sometime and maybe even have dinner there. And if possible, I’d like to sit in the corner room. The one that’s always dimly lit, even when the rest of the place is dark. The one with pictures of past members of the Royal Family on the walls. The one with the fork.