Ducking Quest

The fun quest of the day was to see if we could find the crazy Mandarin Duck in Central Park, and get a picture. If you don't know about this yet, recently this duck showed up in New York City. It's not any type of species that's native to anywhere in America, so how did it wind up here? It hasn't quite reached epic viral attention yet, but it's somewhat of a celebrity, and just the type of silly thing we like to get excited about.

Here's the map of Central Park. I'd point out all the flaws in the quest but that might spoil the ending... It's a pretty big park, we are looking for one single duck, and by the time we got there, there was only an hour or so before sunset. Just don't want to get anypony's hopes up.

Click on the "Read more" below to see if we saw it?

Aww! Ice skating rink in the park. We got to the park a little late, so there was not much daylight left. No time to check this out.

Haha Trump Skating Rink. You still feel like skating? It's the best rink anywhere, everypony says so. Easily holds a million people. Fake news.

Cold weather, almost dark, a little overcast... sure, the perfect time to take some wedding photos! Reminded us a little of Princeton there were a few groups doing the photo thing.

Minty is the Queen! Or King? Wait, which space am I standing on here?

There's a gift shop here. The shopkeeper pointed us in the direction of where he thought the duck was. This whole thing felt very much like a video game. Asking the shop keeper for information haha.

He pointed in this direction. Cool tunnel. Central Park makes for good questing terrain.

It was kind of a long road but eventually it lead to a huge lake. At this point we were pretty sure we were not going to find this duck, but there's a little daylight left, what time do ducks go to sleep?

We spot a couple of ducks in the distance. Not nearly as colorful as the super duck should be.

Well, we found a group of ducks, and the magic duck is not among them. probably already asleep? 

These rocks seem a little dangerously slippery and... rocky. So let's everypony go climbing all over them!

More wedding people. The camera isn't quite capturing how dark it was getting. 

Well sorry to have teased the quest earlier, but we did not have enough time to find the Mandarin Duck. Here's a statue of a duck, so this is about the best we could do. We still had a lot of fun brisk-walking around and questing. It just gives us another excuse to go check another day?

Yeah it was totally dark in some areas. So let's stop and take a picture? That's probably safe, right? 

Walked past the zoo area. They were either dragging metal tables across the floor over there, or the seals were loudly screaming for some reason.

Right outside the park is the Apple Store which seems to have moved from it's iconic glass square location, and into the old FAO Schwarz spot? When did that happen?

Okay here's a cheating bonus picture taken a few days later on our TV from the local news, showing the duck we were looking for. So the pro news team gets the duck scoop. How has nopony given this thing a name yet?