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The "world's largest scavenger hunt" wrapped up Sunday at the University of Chicago, and Jesse Friedman was feeling pretty good about how his team did.

In a 58-hour sprint, Friedman and three other students drove 1,531 miles through the Upper Midwest and Canada, performing some pretty strange tasks.

They bought beer bread at a brewery, persuaded folks to do a "Badger dance" in Madison, found a snowbank that hadn't melted yet, searched for clues in an abandoned cemetery, cavorted nude at a beach and stopped frequently to talk to long-winded locals.

"It was like a guided tour through the bizarre," Friedman said.

Indeed, the entire event was a bit strange.

The 19th annual Scavenger Hunt began at midnight Thursday, when judges released a list of 283 things each team had to find, do, buy or make. It was a list to challenge even the brainiest U. of C. student, with items such as "erect a rigid, free-standing n-tuple helix," or build "a completely edible movable-type printing press with a complete set of upper-case and lower-case letters."

About 75 items could be obtained only by taking a long road trip. Contestants had to figure out the route based on the items on the list. And for a few tasks, the team had to dress as four characters from Pinocchio. As instructed, they decorated their car as Monstro, the whale that ate Pinocchio's puppet maker.

The road trippers started out in Milwaukee, where they bought "an authentic batch of Miller Beer bread." Next stop was Madison, where they were instructed to "Go Mad and drive down State Street." But most items came from Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Item 13, for example, commanded them to calculate the size of Michigan Tech University's Wadsworth Hall.

The locals "were incredibly friendly," Friedman said. "They talked our ears off. They were very curious about what we were doing and willing to help out."

In Gay, Mich., for example, the team stopped, as instructed, at Gay Bar (which really is a straight bar), and asked the bartender to dance to the Village People's "YMCA."

"My joke was that the road to gay was straight," Friedman said.

Friedman's team accomplished all but a few of the tasks. But there was one hitch. On their way back from Canada, they were detained and grilled by customs agents who at first didn't buy their story about a scavenger hunt. (Fortunately, customs didn't find the grab bag of kids' fireworks the team purchased at an Indian reservation, worth a valuable 20 points.)

Meanwhile, other members of their dorm team searched around Hyde Park for the remaining items on the list. They also competed in a shopping cart race and partied at a huge gathering in which each team was assigned a different theme (Super Bowl party, Irish wake, tea party, Communist party, etc.).

Saturday was ScavOlympics, which included a watermelon launch, a White Castle Sliders eating contest and a calculator catapulting competition called "weapons of math destruction."

Nine dormitory-based teams, with a total of about 300 students, alumni and friends, competed. "Every team had their charm," said ScavHunt CEO Courtney Prokopas.

Winning teams divided up $1,500 in prize money.