Look!

We spent our Thursday in 75 degree weather wandering around the San Diego Zoo. For the most part it was pretty relaxed, we just had a sheet we needed to fill out as we went around. We got points for however many of the tasks we completed, such as "take a picture of _____" or "what is the only other mammal besides the platypus that lays eggs?"  Turns out we did pretty well....good enough for first place!!! There is not a lot that can be said about the zoo, it is better seen in pictures. Those will be up soon enough, as Scott does that stuff and I don't.

After the zoo we went to the Point Loma hostel, which turns out is pretty nice. We had a great time meeting people, grilling burgers, and just hanging out last night. Oh, and we saw a beautiful sunset on the Pacific Ocean! We plan to leave here in about a half hour and head to LA, but on the way we will stop at the tide pools and probably see some really cool things.

These are our Point Loma sunset pics!

Scott and I are having a great time on this trip and learning lots about ourselves. One of our favorite things we have learned is that even though during the race we have different ideas and seem to always end up upset at each other, it really is not a big deal...we are realizing our friendship is bigger than that, and can stand disagreements. One thing I have learned about myself is that I love routine. Not to say I am not having fun....in fact, I am loving every minute of this trip and I'd do it again in a heart beat. It is just that I am out of my comfort zone, never knowing what is coming next....something that I am not familiar with. I love routine and knowing what is happening, so this is a good experience for me and I am loving it.

Pictures to come soon, have a great day!

-Aaron

Downtown San Diego

So this will probably be one of the shorter blog entries, but today was a bit more cryptic and a little bit shorter than the others. Aaron and I woke this morning in the King sized bed that we share and realized that it was still dark outside. However, with traffic like it is in California on the Freeway we needed to leave at 7 to travel the 13 miles to the school where we would be meeting the rest of the teams by 8. So we met up with the other teams and had a little get to know you session with some high school kids and then we were racing down the freeway toward downtown San Diego.
Once there we gathered our wits about us and prepared for a real mental challenge. the company was named something crow...or raven...but you can find that on the Calvin  blog since i can't remember it now. It was a cross between the amazing race and national treasure. The clues were fun and interesting. we needed to us a uv light to see some of the secret clues hidden on the sheets of paper with the clues on them. So overall we had a great day and everything went well. 
In the afternoon Travis, Ryan, Grant, Kyle, Aaron and me all went to a restaurant called Dick's Last Resort. It's the kind of place where the wait staff is mean to you and they give you a hard time. so that was a ton of fun and we all laughed extremely hard! For the most part apart from all the traffic on the freeway i think San Diego would be a really great city to live in and i think the weather is just absolutely wonderful! While MI and MA were getting snow we were sitting pretty in the sunshine at a comfortable 72 degrees!

-Scott

Holy Cow!

All the guys woke up this morning in the basement of the Voss' house. It was a wonderful time watching the game and eating pizza and just hanging out with everybody. It was too bad the ducks couldn't pull out the W.

We left early this morning and stopped about an hour later at a huge dairy farm. In fact, the family owns over 9000 cattle, 3600 of which were at the site we were at. The smell was horrendous, naturally, but we got used to it as we toured the facilities and learned more about cattle than we thought there was to know. After that it was time to compete. We drove about a half mile to a spot with maybe a dozen pens of cattle. We were then assigned to pens and told we had to count the number of cattle inside, which was nearly impossible because the cattle were easily spooked and were constantly moving around. We finished third at our pen, good for three "cows", which were used for keeping score. The team with the most cows would be the winner. We then drove back toward the place we started, where we approached a large pile of cotton seed. I would say it was something like 20 feet long, 8 feet wide, and maybe 3 or 4 feet high. There were 52 cows hidden in there, and it was up to us to find them. These cows are maybe, emphasize maybe, an inch tall. We found three of them, for a total of six cows, which was probably near the middle of the pack...honestly I am not all that sure.

From there we continued our drive to San Diego. We got in around 5 pacific time, ate dinner, and met with our host families at Calvin Christian High School. Tomorrow begins our racing in San Diego, which will be on foot. Sore muscles and fatigue may come in to play, but we'll be alright. Wish us luck!

PS....vote for us at

http://calvincollegeamazingrace.blogspot.com/2011/01/vote-here-for-your-favorite-team.html 

 Thanks!

VROOM, VROOM!!!

Our day in Phoenix was by far the most tiring day of the race. We started off in Chandler where we were given 20 bucks and told to get certain places only using public transportation. We got our all day passes and headed toward Chase Field, home of the Arizona Diamondbacks. We took the light rail, ran to the stadium, took our picture, and headed back to the light rail to go north toward Camelback Road. We were the only people to choose this route, and it made us a little nervous. We got to Camelback Road, got off, and switched the 50 bus which went across the city to the mountain. We got off and missed the bus headed to the mountain by about 30 seconds....very unfortunate. I sat at the bus stop while Scott went into a store to talk to the owner, who said it was about a mile and a half walk to the mountain. This was faster than waiting for the next bus, so we started to hike. We got the mountain and began the long hike to the top....so exhausting. When we got to the top we made a decision to hike down the other side, which would bring us closer to Scottsdale, where we needed to be for our next destination. We met a man on our walk down who informed us that it would be about a 5 block walk to where we needed to be, and walking would be a lot faster than waiting for a bus. This sounded good to us and we started walking....and walking....and then walked some more. It ended up being about a 3 or 4 mile walk, but no busses passed us on the walk, helping us feel more confident about the decision. We found the store we needed to be at with a little searching and took the picture required. We also had instructions to buy a Scorpion HotLixx...a sucker with a dead scorpion inside. From there we needed to get back to the airport, which was not good for us. We got on the bus right before the driver's break, and we sat in the bus for about ten minutes at the station. Today we did not have very good luck hitting busses, and it showed with us getting 8th. The final challenge was to find the group at the airport and eat the scorpion sucker. No problem, I did not even taste it. From there, my favorite part of the trip began.

We got in the vans and headed to the outskirts of Phoenix, to Bondurant School of High Performance Driving. After taking sharp turns at 80 mph (a professional driver, of course) inside of 15 passenger vans (no joke!!!!), we were taken to our cars....brand spanking new super-charged corvettes. We had races in the corvettes, driving through an obstacle course. Scott and I took 5th (I was fast, Scott was slow :P)

Earlier tonight we received the current overall standings. We are in 4th overall, one point behind 3rd place and two points behind two teams that are tied for first. We'll continue to do our best and try to stay in that top 3.

Tomorrow we drive to San Diego, which will be a long drive but we are looking very forward to our new adventures. Thanks for reading!!

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT!!!

Please head over to www.calvincollegeamazingrace.blogspot.com and find the post where you can vote for your favorite team. A vote for us gets us one point, which as you can see from the standings is very important to us at this point! Please help us! And tell everybody else to vote for us!!

-Aaron

WINNERS!

Hey guys, we won the race today!! Because of this, it is our privilege to write for the official Calvin College blog so if you want to read all about of cliff diving adventure (which of course you do), head over to www.calvincollegeamazingrace.blogspot.com

-Aaron

Hoover What?...Dam!

Alright so, today we woke up to our absolutely freezing room. "Tod Motor Motel" which is a hostel located down the strip from all the fun stuff (aka nowhere near the Belagio or Caesar's Palace). The pink and lime green decor dates the motel to about the 60's... and the interior of our room was no better. Three bunk beds that rocked and shook like a ship on the high seas. The mattresses were shot(about 5 years ago) and the sheets were plastic very similar to shower curtains. Needless to say the only plus side to this hostel was that it cost only $15 a night. But I guess you could say we got what we payed for, and thankfully Curt had just as bad a night as us so we will be staying in the stratosphere hotel and casino for our return trip to Vegas.
Once we gathered all of our stuff and packed it into our two 15 passenger vans we took off south toward AZ. But on our way to AZ we made a stop at the Hoover Dam. Our first stop along the way was the new concrete suspension bridge that has a six foot wide walkway for pedestrians and the cars pass right by on the other side of a concrete wall. The view from the bridge was amazing! Then we got into the vans and drove over the Dam so we could see the other side. Once there we parked the vans and had a quiz. It was difficult because we didn't really do any research about the Hoover Dam so needless to say we learned quite a few useless facts about the construction of the dam.
Then it was back to the vans! four or five hours later we arrived in Phoenix and ate dinner at Macayo's a Mexican restaurant that Amber really likes. Then we went to the Wigboldy's and met our host family for the next three nights. The Botma's are a really nice family. They have three boys the oldest is 27 and the youngest is 21 they all went to school in So.Cal. Well it's 9:30 (mountain time) here which is like 11:30 at home (which isn't late....but i am exhausted). So ttyl

-Scott

Welcome to Las Vegas!

Well, it wasn't the way we expected to get here, but we made it. Our original flight was with Continental, scheduled to leave at 1:48. Slightly after that time we got on the tiniest plane ever, only like 40 seats, headed for Cleveland. However, the plane was broken (something about not being able to de-ice. Oh, and the thermostat was affected and the plane was 100+ degrees inside! We were all dying) so we went back inside, where we switched airlines and found a flight with Delta to Las Vegas through Minneapolis. We finally left Grand Rapids at 7:45 last night, and got to Vegas around 11 pm Pacific time. We got some sleep at the Tod Hostel, where we were lucky enough to share a room with two other racers, Adam and Marshall. Last night we were very thankful for Adam, he won a game of rock-paper-scissors that got us our room of four while the other group of 4 boys had to share a room with 2 strangers. We didn't sleep particularly well, but a bed is a bed, and for 15 bucks a night I won't complain. In about a half hour we are heading to Phoenix, and it should be a beautiful drive. We are expecting some sort of racing today but we are not sure what it will be, so you can find that out in our next blog post, whenever we can get to it. We'll try and update our blog every day, but that might not happen...we'll do what we can.

-Aaron