At exactly noon the team were all given their clues. There were 12 clues, all in the same envelope. It was up to us as a team to decipher the clues, figure out locations, and choose which ones to do. You are allowed to skip one, although on the website it states that some clues are mandatory while others or not. This will come into play later.
After we figured out the locations, we sprinted 2 miles to the first cluster of challenges. We got our pictures taken by a friendly group of us "jumping' into a fountain. It was so hot I was half tempted to jump in for real. Next we went into an upscale wine shop, where in the back we tried to get three corks a piece into buckets. On our way to the next clue, we had our picture taken with a hobo who was carrying two grocery bags (to complete the picture tic-tac-toe).
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| Me and my crazy hair. |
Our second challenge took place at a necklace shop, with the requirement being to sort out one wooden bead from one thousand clay beads. Once we found the wooden bead, we were to string it with six clay beads to form a necklace.
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| The final product. |
Next we busted down to a Greek Restaurant. Funny thing about that, both of us were sweaty and I looked pretty wild by this time. We took the side entrance and walked in on a bunch of people who were nicely dressed and enjoying there dinner. Needless to say, we felt significantly awkward. Luckily a waiter rescued us by pointing out the challenge table in the corner. The challenge was to take a picture of one partner feeding the other a piece of Baklava, a Greek dessert pastry. With my large eating habits, it only made sense for me to do the eating. This baklava was the best I've ever had (also the only I've ever had). It was very sweet with lots of honey and other good stuff.
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| Om nom nom. |
With the completion of this challenge, we were finished with the first cluster of clues and ran to the next. Two miles later we found ourselves at a boutique/flower shop. There our challenge was for one us to ask the other out to prom using a randomly selected accent and emotion. I got a happy sports broadcaster, and while I gave it my best shot, I didn't nail it. Fortunately we still got credit.
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| Me, all sweaty and crazy haired again. |
Next up was the football stadium, home of the professional team which are 10ac's bitter rivals (or so we like to think). While Aunt B. searched unsuccessfully for office supplies in the gift shop (it comes up later), I went and threw some horseshoes to complete the challenge.
Rejoined with Aunt B. we raced a few blocks over to the pro-basketball stadium, where we shot some mini-hoops. Then another block later and we found ourselves on the third floor of a pub/restaurant place which served as a billiards club, where we had to shoot some pool to complete the challenge.
From there we stopped by a local UPS store to buy basic school supplies (which are surprisingly hard to find in this downtown metropolis) for the charity challenge. Then we ran (if you haven't figured it out already, we did a lot of running in the extreme heat) to the offices of a NASCAR branch, where we had to fill in the blanks of a common regional anthem. Luckily we had iPhones to look up the lyrics, since the song was unknown to the both of us.
We then headed to the canal, where we paddled a few meters, around a fountain, and back in a kayak (the cold water was very refreshing to the near 100 degree weather).
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| Our approximate route. |
We finished up the picture challenge with
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| 1) take a picture with a street sign with double letters |
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| 2) take a picture with a car with a different state licence plate |
Finally, we ran 2 miles to give our school supplies to St. Jude's Children Hospital representatives. While we could have skipped this clue, I felt that since it was for charity we should still do it. This did end up costing us an hour's worth of time, but it's all good. So after that we used our last legs to get back to the finish line, with a finishing time of 2 hrs, 56 min. As I said before, without going to the charity challenge we would have shaved off near an hour of time, which would have most definitely put us in the top 3. But regardless we still finished in the top 24, qualifying ourselves for nationals (yes, they have a nationals for this) in New Orleans this November. Besides getting a cool medal for qualifying, we also were the first family team to finish (one member has to be below 18 years of age, me) so we got a cool Car Racing prize pack with some shirts and shtuff. At the closing ceremonies there was also a speaker from St. Jude's Children's Hospital who told a heart-warming story about her personal struggles with a brain-related illness.
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| Us with our prize (the city name is blotted out because my dad fears a hacker attack or something) |
