AN INTERNATIONAL scavenger hunt saw a legal assistant from Dorchester head to Bletchley Park to work out a simple calculation as part of a series of crazy tasks.

The Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen (GISHWHES) sees thousands of competitors from all over the globe team-up and for one week complete as many items on a list as they can.

One of the competitors was Becky Buck, from Dorchester, and as part of the hunt she headed to The National Museum of Computing to perform the obscure but simple calculation on a pre-1970 computer.

The museum, based at Bletchley Park, has the world’s largest collection of working pre-1970 computers and was happy to help her and other competitors work out how long it would take to fly from New York to Reykjavik travelling at an average speed of 400mph. Becky, a legal assistant and mother of two, made the seven-and-a-half hour round trip to do the calculation.

She said: “I’m a member of the international Team Waywardsons competing to win GISHWHES. We’ve been set about 175 challenges – all of them rather weird – to attempt during the week and we get points for completing them, and extra points for completing them with pizzazz.

“The winning team gets a trip to Iceland with GISHWHES founder, American actor Misha Collins.”

As well as setting competitors barmy and fun challenges, GISHWHES also raises money for the charity Random Acts.

The charity promotes random acts of kindness and all entrants pay a fee which goes to charity and the teams receive points for showing kindness.

She said: “It takes me out of my comfort zone and I find myself doing all kinds of crazy things like running down a residential street in shoes and hat made of pineapple. I can involve my kids too. As one of my random acts of kindness, I will be visiting a care home with my kids, dressed as pirates, delivering flowers.”