For January’s puzzle, “Timely Journey”, we presented a crossword grid and… no instructions.

Some tiles on the side… C JS. Some dominoes… 20 16 - 04. If we “see” the JS puzzle from April 2016, we find a similar title (“Long. Journey”) as well as a puzzle similarly devoid of direct instructions. And both puzzles, it turns out, featured coordinates.

Located above the grid in the original photo, several solvers noted the rebus of thyme (in the jar), the Z pentomino, and the dice (all showing 1). Thyme + Z + “ones”: time zones.

And so: in the grid itself, we have 24 words. Each corresponds to the name of a time zone. One can travel ‘round the world, one time zone offset at a time, via the 24 clues, starting at MADEIRA (UTC offset of 0; latitude clued by 324506 in place of 32°45’06”). Next is ALGIERS (UTC offset of +1, longitude clued by 30319). And so on. The full list of locations is filled in above.

Finally, we shift the red and blue letters by the amounts indicated in the clues. (As suggested by the pushpins pointing at the “Shift” key in the photograph.) When shifted, the blue letters spell out “WHATREDLETTERSAREMISSING”. The red letters shift to “ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSUVWXY”. The missing letters – the answer to this month’s puzzle – are T and Z. They represent Time Zones, but also, as the 20th and 26th letters, they stand in for 2026 as well. (As suggested by the dice.)

A timely journey indeed! Big congrats to everyone who figured this one out.