Snapping Dragons!

Today I got the car we borrowed from Hilary and parked it strategically near our classroom building. Then I met Aaron at the dining hall, where we ate a small breakfast before the race began. At 8:45 we met the rest of the teams in the classroom and got our instructions and clues for the day.

            The first clue was a flower…and lucky for us I knew what it was! It was a snapdragon…however; I kept calling it a snapping dragon. So needless to say that threw us off and we ended up going to Cutlerville, which was way out of the way! We lost probably thirty minutes driving around until we finally decided to remove the unnecessary –ing from the end of Snap. Our next clue was an envelope with paper plates inside. Immediately I counted the plates. There were eleven plates so we figured that was the name of the restaurant “Eleven Plates”. It turns out we were right and made our way to the restaurant (that looked like a house and was in a residential neighborhood). From there we were a little confused on how to solve the next clue, so we called up Amber and used a lifeline. This lifeline meant fifteen minutes would be added on to our final race time.

            After the clue we found the next task with no issues. Paragon Lanes is a Bowling Alley on Division St. At the bowling alley we came across a roadblock. I had to roll a Strike, while Aaron had to roll two spares. I had no problem rolling a strike but poor Aaron kept rolling strikes instead of spares (its really was too bad that he couldn’t have just played a game because I think he might have made a new personal record). After the bowling alley was our toughest clue yet. We were given a sheet of paper with some musical notes on it and we had to figure out where to go…With luck like ours you can imagine how long we sat in a parking lot trying to figure this out. So once again we called up Curt and Amber and had to take another fifteen minute penalty but, they hummed the McDonalds chime for us, and we were back on the road.

            At McDonalds we had to count the number of chairs in the restaurant, we counted 63 and that was close enough. The clue that we got from McDonalds was a map that showed business icons instead of explicit directions. So following this weird map we were lead down some snowy slippery icy roads into a neighborhood. Here we found Curt’s house and then his wife gave us a frozen ice cream cone with a rock on top.  Before we even made it back to the car I had declared it must be Cold Stone creamery. To our great joy that was right and we went on our way.

            At Cold Stone we had to count the windows with eastern exposure. They totaled somewhere around 22-24 and with that we opened our next clue. On this clue there were two options name a band or figure out what air force plane was on the page. We figured out it was the B52’s so we used the yellow pages and located at car wash place that had the same name and went there to uncover our final clue. Thankfully we made it to the car wash safely and started coloring in the last clue. To our surprise the red and green markers we brought along made a logo, Qdoba! So we made our way to Qdoba and once we went inside we saw Curt and Amber. We were team number 3! However with the two fifteen penalties we are not quite sure where we finally placed.

            There were stressful parts of today but I think that the most stressful part was worrying about travel. The roads were in terrible condition and I was driving a borrowed car. Overall I think we performed well Aaron gave our performance an A (for average) and I think we did a little better than average today because it was the first day and we really didn’t know what to expect.

-Scott