Tropicalbats 6000 Contest

Thanks for running the contest, Tropicalbats! It was good fun. =)

Thanks for the fun! Continued prayers for our neighbors in Bat Cave and other communities in Western NC.

Philidelphia

SPOILER ALERT - This is the solution to the puzzle. If you haven't figured it out, and don't want to know how to get to the answer, then skip this one.

First, there is a lot of random information in the story, on purpose. But the question is simple, where is the store? The first leap is to note that the two customers' names are Mr. Long and Mr. Latit. Those are just abbreviations for Longitude and Latitude, telling you how the location is hidden in the story.

Next, since Lat and Long can be reported several ways, and most commonly now as decimal degrees, the second paragraph uses the words "degrees", "minutes" and "seconds". This is how you know which format the coordinates are in.

After that it is just a matter of looking at the years of the coins each of the customers bought. Mr. Latit(ude) bought coins from 1935, 1927 and 1905. Mr. Long(itude) bought from 1982, 1917 and 1913.

Therefore the coordinates of the store are 35 degrees 27 minutes 05 seconds north latitude, and 82 degrees 17 minutes and 13 seconds west longitude. The north and west aren't stipulated, but it's the only way you end up in the US. You can plug this into any of a number of websites to get the actual location of these coordinates, which is Bat Cave, NC. It's the town, not the cave itself, which is up on the hill and not right in town. The cave is a protected site for hibernating bats, and hence the name of the town, although White Nose Syndrome has killed off much of the cave's bat population.

The response noting that the customers had a lot of "tude" was a very clever reference to the solve.

There were a lot of red herrings, but the big one was the name of the store keeper Albus Doubledie, to distract from the answer by introducing a Harry Potter reference.

Good to know folks enjoyed the puzzle! 1st prize went out in the mail today and 2nd will go out on Monday.

Thanks for the contest tropical bats. I was right about one thing and that there was a lot more that went into the answer than a mir guess. Congratulations to igwt

Very cool contest! The clues were there but hidden. I was too caught up in the Harry Potter reference! Congrats to the winners!

You're very welcome! Glad it (they) arrived safely.

Glad those finally arrived! Mail is always a bit slow around Christmas, but as long as things do get delivered then all is good. Happy you liked the extras I put in there as well. Maybe I won't wait another 1000 posts to do something again.