EARLY POST AGAIN THIS WEEK:

Travel day, so early post. Again please don’t fret if you don’t see your name on the leaderboard until this evening, since I’ll be on planes today.

LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:

By the time you read this I’ll be where that X is! Or on the way, at least. 183 solvers figured out that I’m en route to GRAND CAYMAN. 17-across made it clear we were looking for a CARIBBEAN ISLAND; the puzzle came at 58-across, USE ANAGRAM TWICE, clued as [What you must do to figure out which 17-across I’ll be on]. Then one other hint: the last across clue was asterisked: [Itinerary for many Acela passengers, briefly*] = DC-NY. So now what?

They key was to use ANAGRAM twice, like so: once as an indicator to anagram something, and the second time using the letters in ANAGRAM itself. So simply anagram ANAGRAM + DCNY and you’ve got my vacation destination, meta answer GRAND CAYMAN.

Tim Harrod asks:

Surely you didn’t plan a vacation around what would make a great meta!

Nah, it’s for a wedding. But that would be a serious level of meta-dedication.

Four solvers reported a curious backsolve to this meta. Tyler Hinman explains:

Maybe my funniest MGWCC solve ever after two days of cluelessness. Monday NYT spoilers below. So I’m solving that puzzle. 18A: “Caribbean resort island”. I have GRAND?A????. Ah, GRAND CAYMAN, of course. …wait a second. …holy crap, that’s it! And the denouement: That was the wrong answer. It was GRAND BAHAMA. I had planned to look for islands that contained all of DCNY, so there’s a good chance I would have succeeded anyway. But still.

This week’s winner, whose name was chosen randomly from the 183 correct entries received, is ant of Gilbert, Ariz. In addition to a MGWCC pen, pencil and notepad set, ant will also receive a 20-week subscription to Peter Gordon‘s new Fireball Newsweekly Crosswords.

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

This week’s contest answer is a kind of fabric. Submit your answer in the form on the left sidebar by Tuesday at noon ET. Note: the submissions form disappears from the site promptly at noon on Tuesday.

To print the puzzle out, click on the image below and hit “print” on your browser. To solve using Across Lite either solve on the applet below or download the free software here, then join the Google Group (2,040 members now!) here.

Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.