Road Trip (Solution)
by Dan Zaharopol and David Farhi
Each picture has a single character digitally removed. There are two sets of images; one set of images are of banners along Newbury Street in Boston, while the other set are of green highway signs along the US.
Newbury Street
The images can be ordered in a straight line along Newbury Street. In order from Mass Ave to the Boston Public Garden, they are:
C removed from Shot Cakes sign.
E removed from "dresses" in a banner at bebe.
I removed from "Moving Supplies" at the UPS Store.
N removed from "Best of Boston" at Best Smoothie.
' removed from "Home of the World's Softest Magical Unicorn" at Sterling Silver Jewelry.
E removed from "Experienced" at the soon-to-open Camille Albane salon.
S removed from "Wash & Fold" at Bush's Quality Cleaners.
T removed from "fcuk TM".
P removed from "Petit Bateau".
A removed from "Copley Society of Art".
S removed from "SEASON" on a sale sign at Hotel Chocolat.
U removed from "INSURANCE" at SEE eyewear.
N removed from "Dependable" at Dependable Cleaners.
A removed from "am" at the Church of the Covenant.
C removed from "baby cottons".
K removed from "Suffolk Construction".
When plotted, they look like this:
At this point, you can notice that this spells out CECI N'EST PAS UN HACK with the second C and the H missing, a famous hack banner on the Great Dome.
US Highways
Now we have highway signs with letters removed. With some work, it is possible to place all of these in the US. (It's possible to get them exactly, but you really only need approximate locations.) Here is a link to Google Street View for all of them, in the order they should be read:
Plotting these all out on a map, we get:
This is again a model of a famous hack, this time "M.i.T. monster eats Boston/Back Bay", a street sign planted by MIT students. This time EATS is omitted.
Putting the omissions together, we have CHEATS, which is the answer to the puzzle.