Patti Hambley has been thinking about going to Budd Dairy Food Hall for a meal.

And now she’ll have some extra money to spend when she does.

Hambley, 60, of Columbus, is the Early Bird winner in the 17th edition of Joe’s Mildly Entertaining Easter Egg Hunt. 

Shortly after the final riddle was posted on dispatch.com around midnight on Monday, she identified the food hall in a renovated dairy as the location of the final egg and emailed me a set of eight correct answers. They arrived at 12:02 a.m. 

Her fast work won her $75.

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Hambley, 60, an IT support specialist at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, had to beat three formidable competitors to finish first. Emails from past champs Elizabeth Huggins, Margaret Hoffman and the team of Claire Curran Eastman and husband Chris Eastman arrived just after hers.

But Hambley is pretty formidable, too — she narrowly missed winning last year.

“I love puzzles and riddles,” she said. 

She struggled most with Riddle 4, which referred to Lower.com Field, the stadium of the Columbus Crew. The reference to “kicks” had her searching for kick-boxing gyms.

Also winning $75 is William (Jack) Frost, 80, of Worthington. His name was drawn at random from the names of all the entrants submitting eight correct answers.

Frost, a retired chemist, won on his first try at the Egg Hunt.

“What I’ve always done before this year was kind of read it randomly. This is the first year that I ever took it seriously.”

Several contestants were stumped by Riddle 6, which referred to the preserved bucket of a giant strip-mining excavator called Big Muskie. But Frost, a longtime central Ohio resident, said he knew it so quickly that he feared it was a trick question.

This year’s hunt attracted 183 entries, with 126 of them (68%) getting perfect scores. That was up from about 45% in 2021 and 2020. I thought the several out-of-town locations would make this year’s hunt more difficult, but hunters always surprise me.

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The Lower.com riddle tripped up the most contestants. More than 20 had it wrong. Guesses ranged from the Merry-Go-Round Museum in Sandusky to a park at Easton.

Also fooling a lot of contestants was Riddle 5 (“I. Newton’s theory provided the name”), which referred to the Gravity apartment complex.

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I was sure the hardest one would be Riddle 7 (“a place of pane”), but only five entries failed to correctly answer Ariel-Foundation Park on the site of a former glass factory in Mount Vernon.

So the Egg Hunt is over — almost. As usual I will convene an Egg Hunt Court of Appeals if anyone wants to challenge my answers. Happy Easter.

Joe Blundo is a Dispatch columnist.