To the race! (part 9)
After Uplift Events decided not to hold an Amazing Race last year but to move it to April this year it was a bit disheartening to also find out that this year's race would be the last one, at least unless they decided to try it again down the track. So yeah - Urban Max, City Chase, Rat Race and now the Amazing Race have all given up on Melbourne. I have no idea what I am going to do with my life, seriously.
Still, there was one left so
kirstenfleur and I signed up as "Mum's Day Out" again and entered in the social category. We met again at Southern Cross Station (I was somewhat bemused to discover that the information/help service doesn't open until 9am on weekends, WTF?), grabbed coffee, and started heading towards the start line. There was an amusing moment on the way in when we were messaging each other - both our train lines were undergoing works and had bus replacement services, which meant I got Dean to drop me at the point the bus replacement ended, and
kirstenfleur took a bus directly in instead, and I actually saw her bus as the train passed it. Heh.
We got to the start, registered, got our tags and map, and our... free t-shirt? OK, mild irritation point #1. In the lead up they had specifically said that they weren't providing t-shirts this year, and encouraged people to dress up or wear t-shirts from previous events. So we'd worn t-shirts from 2013. This shirt was from one of their sponsors and was fine, but seriously? Don't encourage people to wear previous event shirts if you actually have a shirt, or at least mention the people who went to the effort. We certainly weren't the only team who'd found t-shirts from previous years, and there was no mention of that at all during the event.
They started the pre-event ramble, with the worst mike I've ever heard at an event. It kept randomly dropping out so you'd miss words or sentences and then it would start working again. Mild irritation point #2 - check the damn equipment beforehand. Or give up on it entirely and shout, either would have worked. Probably as a result of this the MC was a bit distracted and inadvertently announced that "using public transport and your legs were not allowed on the event". We giggled, and there was a brief moment of "what do you want us to use, our arms?" before she realised and corrected herself. Even so it was yet again past the 10am start time when we finally got our clue sheets and started working things out. On the positive side they definitely had enough clue sheets!
As in the previous couple of years they'd let us know who the major sponsors were so we already had a rough idea of where/what we might be doing. We decided to head straight for the Amazing Race Challenge, which was at Albert Park Lake, and was very likely to involve sailing (major sponsor). Off we headed... and mistake #1, we should have gone up the hill to Bourke St and grabbed a tram there instead of down the hill to Collins St. We ended up catching a tram to Spencer St so we could catch the Bourke St tram - annoyingly the tram that wasn't in sight when we were on Collins St but which snuck up behind us would also have taken us to Albert Park. Oh well, the joys of public transport as per usual. While we were on the tram we checked Facebook for the online clue, and realised that we were passing the statue we needed to get to. At least we knew where it was! We kept going to Albert Park, jumping off a stop before the one I thought we were at (never follow other teams, sheesh), and headed to Coots Picnic Ground where we got our Decision card. The choice was between sailing (duh! major sponsor!) and playing table tennis at the Melbourne Sports and Aquatic Centre.
OK, so we chose sailing despite knowing for sure that this was (a) going to be a lot longer than table tennis and (b) it being further away. But you know... you do these events for the fun stuff, and we've both played table tennis before. So off we went to Aquatic Drive, found the right jetty, signed the waiver, got lifejackets and then waited in line for the boats that were already out on the lake to slowly make their way back again. Many people were paddling with their hands. In retrospect that was not a good sign. There was also no wind, which again is a bad sign in sailboats. Finally we got into a boat, got some very brief instruction about the steering, how to manage the sail and where to aim to go around the buoy on the lake and back. I can honestly say we were still pretty clueless. We started off OK though, managing to get about a third of the way out before the breeze died again and we sort of... drifted. And paddled. And drifted. When we were about halfway to the buoy the organisers realised that this was never going to work and moved the buoy back towards us, which was helpful as it put us about two thirds of the way there. We also got a bit of a tow to put us back in the right direction, just as the breeze picked up slightly again. We got around the buoy, started heading back and... the breeze stopped again.
If we had any experience in sailing we could probably have made the boat go again. But yeah, we were clueless. So we paddled, got a tow, and eventually got back to the jetty. We gracefully climbed out of the boat like beached whales, returned the lifejackets, collected our bags and got our next clue, which was a Roadblock equivalent but I forget what they called us. This directed us to go to the amphitheatre near the Carousel Cafe on Aughtie Drive. I looked on the map. This was directly across the lake from where we were near the boats, about 900m away once you went across Palm Lawn and around the lakeside track.
From the table tennis choice it was under 500m. Mild irritation #3 - you couldn't have put the Roadblock between the two options? Or at least not made the people who already had made the obviously slower choice not go nearly double the distance? Talk about additional penalties.
Anyway, we got to the amphitheatre where 10 numbered flags were set up with numbered pictures of athletes below them. We needed to identify the sport the athlete competed in, their country and their flag number. We got two pretty quickly - Ian Thorpe (Australia, swimming) is pretty recognisable, and so is Simone Biles (USA, gymnastics). We were standing in front of a picture of a woman with five medals around her neck, and I'd gotten in close enough to be able to read that they were from Vancouver. So a winter sport then. (At this point the official mentioned that we were supposed to be behind the yellow cones, about a metre back - he did not mention this earlier!) We teamed up with another team we'd talked to at the sailing, and who had two athletes we didn't have. Between us we got it down to the woman we'd been looking at, who had to be either biathlon or ice hockey, and another woman. Quickly working out which flags we had left it was a choice of Japan or Canada - given the woman was quite obviously not Japanese, we picked her as Canadian, which left the other woman was Japanese, and managed to get the sports the right way around. So we'd managed one challenge - in nearly two hours.
Off we headed again to the tram, and back to the city. On the way we stopped off at the sculpture at The Hive, which we'd passed on the way down, and which wanted us to count the ladybugs. We counted independently. Both got 12. The team who was there at the same time as us got 12. We wrote down 12 (our first Chase item) and kept going.
This is the point where we really did screw it up. Instead of heading to Flagstaff Hill, which had a challenge closing at 1pm, we kept going towards a sculpture clue which we knew was on the yarra River. By this point it was midday, and that was a dumb decision. *sigh*
Anyway, we eventually found the sculpture, which was right down towards Swanston St, and got our second Chase clue. From there we kept going to Federation Square to find the Avengers exhibit, which the website described as being "at Federation Square". Well... it sort of was, if you count behind the car park at the back past Russell St as being "AT Fed Square". What irritated me the most (minor irritation #4) was the really poor signage at Fed Sq to the exhibit - it was woeful, and at one stage actually pointed us in a totally stupid direction. Still, we found it eventually, took our photo with the giant glittery A sign and reassessed where we were. At this point we realised that we had screwed up as we didn't have enough time to get to Flagstaff Hill. We headed to another challenge on Swanston St instead, which was in the Nicholas building.
This challenge was up 3 flights of stairs, which would have been less creepy if (a) more of the shops were occupied, (b) any other teams had been there and (c) we weren't being followed by a bloke who was muttering random stuff under his breath for the first two flights. Yeah, that wasn't creepy at all. When we got to the top we had to - of course - wait. The challenge was to listen to a three piece band who would play bits of 10 songs, we had to identify the title and artist. We could use our phones to look up bands but not use apps like Shazam. No problems there, I don't have that on my phone! While we were waiting the sound of "Eye of the Tiger" came drifting down the hallway to us, so we giggled and looked up the band name.
The previous group finished, we headed in and sat down. Other racers filed in slowly behind us, and when the room was full (about 5 or so minutes later - I think we waited about 12-15 minutes all up) the band started. I immediately started writing down song names and artists, I think that is the most successful I have ever been at this kind of trivia. The only one we didn't know was one that I knew I knew the melody to but couldn't get the lyrics into my head. The organiser came over, looked at the one gap and said "that one's by OutKast". Looked it up quickly on the phone and it was "Hey Ya". The others were by Lady GaGa, Pink, Traditional (Waltzing Matilda), Goyte, Beyonce, Survivor, and five that I have forgotten. Heh.
Our first completed Challenge! Unfortunately there was definitely no way we could get to Flagstaff Hill now, but we thought we might just make it to the other required Challenges if we hustled. So we jumped on a tram.. and promptly missed the stop at Lonsdale St due to the new superstop locations. I aren't in the city often enough to know where they are and I keep forgetting that trams don't stop at corners any more, sigh. So we accepted that we would be penalised for a Challenge as given that it was 1pm already we probably weren't going to get to the Wing Chung challenge on Lonsdale St before the last session started at 1.05pm. Instead we kept going up to Franklin St and then towards the Multicultural Hub on the corner of Elizabeth and Bouverie Sts where there was a challenge which finished at 1.30pm. And... we waited. *SIGH* Finally we all filed in to do African Drumming, which was fun. We tapped out rhythms - and at least half the teams were doing it with one eye on the clock as the challenge went longer and longer. Finally after 20 minutes of drumming we were finished, and there was a mass sprint to the door to get ticked off and down the street to the next Challenge, which also finished at 1.30pm. This was at 63 A'Beckett St, and we (along with quite a few others) arrived there pretty much at 1.29pm, breathless and ready to do karaoke.
The karaoke was a Taylor Swift song, which I had never heard before. I turned my mike off entirely and mouthed along, mostly intrigued by just how completely dodgy the song and film clip was. It was also unhelpful in the that the backing track had no melody line, so even if I had heard it before it still would have been difficult. It finished, and we headed off again, this time to collect our last Chase stage at Collins St. We ran most of the way there, having given up on the tram system, and found the Storytelling Statue at Collins Place. Hooray! All the Chase stages and the Amazing Race stage finished!
Off to our last Challenge, which was a pole dancing studio on Flinders Lane. On the 6th floor of the building at Flinders Lane. We were supposed to take the stairs. We couldn't find the stairs. So we somewhat rudely pushed past the queue of students waiting to go to their classes on the 4th and 5th floors and got in the first lift (we did apologise, but yeah, the queue was out the door and seriously it was bloody ridiculous by that point that they only had two lifts for what was quite obviously a huge number of people. The students in the lift with us found it funny, which was probably not the case with the students who were still waiting. At least we sent it back down to them. Also, lunchtime.)
The pole dancing was fun, and involved both team members learning two moves and then doing them to music. From the photo they had shortened the routine considerably by the time we got there, as earlier teams were doing what looked like pushups. We just did a hold the pole and sway both legs through the air, and hook your knee around the pole and swing gracefully around to the ground, coupled with some steps.
kirstenfleur had a lot of trouble with the swinging gracefully to the ground part, which was entertaining to me at least. We finished, were ticked off, and headed back to the venue, arriving at 2.20pm.
Minor irritation #5: previous events have been 10am-4pm, 10am-3pm, and the mini races 10-1pm. This was 10-2.30pm, so kind of weirdly mid-way. I think a lot of teams would have finished more of the challenges with the extra half hour.
After we'd collected our lunch, we ran into the team we'd collaborated with at Albert Park. They'd made it to the Flagstaff Challenge, which turned out to be semaphore, dammit, but had missed the music challenge on Swanston St. As we ate and they announced the winners I looked around - there were a very small number of teams (144 in total, with only 27 racing teams) compared to previous years, which is probably the main reason they aren't running them again. *SIGH*
Interestingly the winning teams didn't finish long before the cut off time, which made me think that a lot of teams were going to be in a similar boat to us with missing challenges. The mike hadn't improved at all, but we managed to hear most of the announcements before heading off again.
The following Monday they released the results. And there was an outcry over the counting ladybug challenge, which an awful lot of teams had gotten wrong including us. Apparently the answer was 13. This was disputed by a number of teams. They put up a photo from Google Streetview with the ladybugs circled. I am still dubious, but apparently some teams got it right.
Minor irritation #6: if a large number of your teams are getting it wrong... you might want to reconsider. It's actually hard to tell who did and didn't get it wrong as we definitely wrote down the answer and are still listed as not having done it. The social team that would have come 2nd got it wrong and dropped to 5th... there were quite a few teams that I'm pretty sure got 12. And I'm still dubious that that was a ladybug - we had four independent people counting who didn't think it was!
Anyway. We came equal 56th, which was disappointing but still. I get irritated when they set the race up so you pretty much have to go in one direction, but I should have known that by now. I hope they do run more in the future because I do generally find them fun and I like the activities, but they are going to keep losing people if it's too hard to get to the challenges and back in the time. Of the 118 social teams only 18 had no penalties at all, which is pretty bloody high for these events (and quite a few are ladybugs).
We travelled 15.71km, and if we could run more we probably would have finished all the challenges!
Next time, if there is one.
Still, there was one left so
kirstenfleur and I signed up as "Mum's Day Out" again and entered in the social category. We met again at Southern Cross Station (I was somewhat bemused to discover that the information/help service doesn't open until 9am on weekends, WTF?), grabbed coffee, and started heading towards the start line. There was an amusing moment on the way in when we were messaging each other - both our train lines were undergoing works and had bus replacement services, which meant I got Dean to drop me at the point the bus replacement ended, and
kirstenfleur took a bus directly in instead, and I actually saw her bus as the train passed it. Heh.
We got to the start, registered, got our tags and map, and our... free t-shirt? OK, mild irritation point #1. In the lead up they had specifically said that they weren't providing t-shirts this year, and encouraged people to dress up or wear t-shirts from previous events. So we'd worn t-shirts from 2013. This shirt was from one of their sponsors and was fine, but seriously? Don't encourage people to wear previous event shirts if you actually have a shirt, or at least mention the people who went to the effort. We certainly weren't the only team who'd found t-shirts from previous years, and there was no mention of that at all during the event.
They started the pre-event ramble, with the worst mike I've ever heard at an event. It kept randomly dropping out so you'd miss words or sentences and then it would start working again. Mild irritation point #2 - check the damn equipment beforehand. Or give up on it entirely and shout, either would have worked. Probably as a result of this the MC was a bit distracted and inadvertently announced that "using public transport and your legs were not allowed on the event". We giggled, and there was a brief moment of "what do you want us to use, our arms?" before she realised and corrected herself. Even so it was yet again past the 10am start time when we finally got our clue sheets and started working things out. On the positive side they definitely had enough clue sheets!
As in the previous couple of years they'd let us know who the major sponsors were so we already had a rough idea of where/what we might be doing. We decided to head straight for the Amazing Race Challenge, which was at Albert Park Lake, and was very likely to involve sailing (major sponsor). Off we headed... and mistake #1, we should have gone up the hill to Bourke St and grabbed a tram there instead of down the hill to Collins St. We ended up catching a tram to Spencer St so we could catch the Bourke St tram - annoyingly the tram that wasn't in sight when we were on Collins St but which snuck up behind us would also have taken us to Albert Park. Oh well, the joys of public transport as per usual. While we were on the tram we checked Facebook for the online clue, and realised that we were passing the statue we needed to get to. At least we knew where it was! We kept going to Albert Park, jumping off a stop before the one I thought we were at (never follow other teams, sheesh), and headed to Coots Picnic Ground where we got our Decision card. The choice was between sailing (duh! major sponsor!) and playing table tennis at the Melbourne Sports and Aquatic Centre.
OK, so we chose sailing despite knowing for sure that this was (a) going to be a lot longer than table tennis and (b) it being further away. But you know... you do these events for the fun stuff, and we've both played table tennis before. So off we went to Aquatic Drive, found the right jetty, signed the waiver, got lifejackets and then waited in line for the boats that were already out on the lake to slowly make their way back again. Many people were paddling with their hands. In retrospect that was not a good sign. There was also no wind, which again is a bad sign in sailboats. Finally we got into a boat, got some very brief instruction about the steering, how to manage the sail and where to aim to go around the buoy on the lake and back. I can honestly say we were still pretty clueless. We started off OK though, managing to get about a third of the way out before the breeze died again and we sort of... drifted. And paddled. And drifted. When we were about halfway to the buoy the organisers realised that this was never going to work and moved the buoy back towards us, which was helpful as it put us about two thirds of the way there. We also got a bit of a tow to put us back in the right direction, just as the breeze picked up slightly again. We got around the buoy, started heading back and... the breeze stopped again.
If we had any experience in sailing we could probably have made the boat go again. But yeah, we were clueless. So we paddled, got a tow, and eventually got back to the jetty. We gracefully climbed out of the boat like beached whales, returned the lifejackets, collected our bags and got our next clue, which was a Roadblock equivalent but I forget what they called us. This directed us to go to the amphitheatre near the Carousel Cafe on Aughtie Drive. I looked on the map. This was directly across the lake from where we were near the boats, about 900m away once you went across Palm Lawn and around the lakeside track.
From the table tennis choice it was under 500m. Mild irritation #3 - you couldn't have put the Roadblock between the two options? Or at least not made the people who already had made the obviously slower choice not go nearly double the distance? Talk about additional penalties.
Anyway, we got to the amphitheatre where 10 numbered flags were set up with numbered pictures of athletes below them. We needed to identify the sport the athlete competed in, their country and their flag number. We got two pretty quickly - Ian Thorpe (Australia, swimming) is pretty recognisable, and so is Simone Biles (USA, gymnastics). We were standing in front of a picture of a woman with five medals around her neck, and I'd gotten in close enough to be able to read that they were from Vancouver. So a winter sport then. (At this point the official mentioned that we were supposed to be behind the yellow cones, about a metre back - he did not mention this earlier!) We teamed up with another team we'd talked to at the sailing, and who had two athletes we didn't have. Between us we got it down to the woman we'd been looking at, who had to be either biathlon or ice hockey, and another woman. Quickly working out which flags we had left it was a choice of Japan or Canada - given the woman was quite obviously not Japanese, we picked her as Canadian, which left the other woman was Japanese, and managed to get the sports the right way around. So we'd managed one challenge - in nearly two hours.
Off we headed again to the tram, and back to the city. On the way we stopped off at the sculpture at The Hive, which we'd passed on the way down, and which wanted us to count the ladybugs. We counted independently. Both got 12. The team who was there at the same time as us got 12. We wrote down 12 (our first Chase item) and kept going.
This is the point where we really did screw it up. Instead of heading to Flagstaff Hill, which had a challenge closing at 1pm, we kept going towards a sculpture clue which we knew was on the yarra River. By this point it was midday, and that was a dumb decision. *sigh*
Anyway, we eventually found the sculpture, which was right down towards Swanston St, and got our second Chase clue. From there we kept going to Federation Square to find the Avengers exhibit, which the website described as being "at Federation Square". Well... it sort of was, if you count behind the car park at the back past Russell St as being "AT Fed Square". What irritated me the most (minor irritation #4) was the really poor signage at Fed Sq to the exhibit - it was woeful, and at one stage actually pointed us in a totally stupid direction. Still, we found it eventually, took our photo with the giant glittery A sign and reassessed where we were. At this point we realised that we had screwed up as we didn't have enough time to get to Flagstaff Hill. We headed to another challenge on Swanston St instead, which was in the Nicholas building.
This challenge was up 3 flights of stairs, which would have been less creepy if (a) more of the shops were occupied, (b) any other teams had been there and (c) we weren't being followed by a bloke who was muttering random stuff under his breath for the first two flights. Yeah, that wasn't creepy at all. When we got to the top we had to - of course - wait. The challenge was to listen to a three piece band who would play bits of 10 songs, we had to identify the title and artist. We could use our phones to look up bands but not use apps like Shazam. No problems there, I don't have that on my phone! While we were waiting the sound of "Eye of the Tiger" came drifting down the hallway to us, so we giggled and looked up the band name.
The previous group finished, we headed in and sat down. Other racers filed in slowly behind us, and when the room was full (about 5 or so minutes later - I think we waited about 12-15 minutes all up) the band started. I immediately started writing down song names and artists, I think that is the most successful I have ever been at this kind of trivia. The only one we didn't know was one that I knew I knew the melody to but couldn't get the lyrics into my head. The organiser came over, looked at the one gap and said "that one's by OutKast". Looked it up quickly on the phone and it was "Hey Ya". The others were by Lady GaGa, Pink, Traditional (Waltzing Matilda), Goyte, Beyonce, Survivor, and five that I have forgotten. Heh.
Our first completed Challenge! Unfortunately there was definitely no way we could get to Flagstaff Hill now, but we thought we might just make it to the other required Challenges if we hustled. So we jumped on a tram.. and promptly missed the stop at Lonsdale St due to the new superstop locations. I aren't in the city often enough to know where they are and I keep forgetting that trams don't stop at corners any more, sigh. So we accepted that we would be penalised for a Challenge as given that it was 1pm already we probably weren't going to get to the Wing Chung challenge on Lonsdale St before the last session started at 1.05pm. Instead we kept going up to Franklin St and then towards the Multicultural Hub on the corner of Elizabeth and Bouverie Sts where there was a challenge which finished at 1.30pm. And... we waited. *SIGH* Finally we all filed in to do African Drumming, which was fun. We tapped out rhythms - and at least half the teams were doing it with one eye on the clock as the challenge went longer and longer. Finally after 20 minutes of drumming we were finished, and there was a mass sprint to the door to get ticked off and down the street to the next Challenge, which also finished at 1.30pm. This was at 63 A'Beckett St, and we (along with quite a few others) arrived there pretty much at 1.29pm, breathless and ready to do karaoke.
The karaoke was a Taylor Swift song, which I had never heard before. I turned my mike off entirely and mouthed along, mostly intrigued by just how completely dodgy the song and film clip was. It was also unhelpful in the that the backing track had no melody line, so even if I had heard it before it still would have been difficult. It finished, and we headed off again, this time to collect our last Chase stage at Collins St. We ran most of the way there, having given up on the tram system, and found the Storytelling Statue at Collins Place. Hooray! All the Chase stages and the Amazing Race stage finished!
Off to our last Challenge, which was a pole dancing studio on Flinders Lane. On the 6th floor of the building at Flinders Lane. We were supposed to take the stairs. We couldn't find the stairs. So we somewhat rudely pushed past the queue of students waiting to go to their classes on the 4th and 5th floors and got in the first lift (we did apologise, but yeah, the queue was out the door and seriously it was bloody ridiculous by that point that they only had two lifts for what was quite obviously a huge number of people. The students in the lift with us found it funny, which was probably not the case with the students who were still waiting. At least we sent it back down to them. Also, lunchtime.)
The pole dancing was fun, and involved both team members learning two moves and then doing them to music. From the photo they had shortened the routine considerably by the time we got there, as earlier teams were doing what looked like pushups. We just did a hold the pole and sway both legs through the air, and hook your knee around the pole and swing gracefully around to the ground, coupled with some steps.
kirstenfleur had a lot of trouble with the swinging gracefully to the ground part, which was entertaining to me at least. We finished, were ticked off, and headed back to the venue, arriving at 2.20pm.
Minor irritation #5: previous events have been 10am-4pm, 10am-3pm, and the mini races 10-1pm. This was 10-2.30pm, so kind of weirdly mid-way. I think a lot of teams would have finished more of the challenges with the extra half hour.
After we'd collected our lunch, we ran into the team we'd collaborated with at Albert Park. They'd made it to the Flagstaff Challenge, which turned out to be semaphore, dammit, but had missed the music challenge on Swanston St. As we ate and they announced the winners I looked around - there were a very small number of teams (144 in total, with only 27 racing teams) compared to previous years, which is probably the main reason they aren't running them again. *SIGH*
Interestingly the winning teams didn't finish long before the cut off time, which made me think that a lot of teams were going to be in a similar boat to us with missing challenges. The mike hadn't improved at all, but we managed to hear most of the announcements before heading off again.
The following Monday they released the results. And there was an outcry over the counting ladybug challenge, which an awful lot of teams had gotten wrong including us. Apparently the answer was 13. This was disputed by a number of teams. They put up a photo from Google Streetview with the ladybugs circled. I am still dubious, but apparently some teams got it right.
Minor irritation #6: if a large number of your teams are getting it wrong... you might want to reconsider. It's actually hard to tell who did and didn't get it wrong as we definitely wrote down the answer and are still listed as not having done it. The social team that would have come 2nd got it wrong and dropped to 5th... there were quite a few teams that I'm pretty sure got 12. And I'm still dubious that that was a ladybug - we had four independent people counting who didn't think it was!
Anyway. We came equal 56th, which was disappointing but still. I get irritated when they set the race up so you pretty much have to go in one direction, but I should have known that by now. I hope they do run more in the future because I do generally find them fun and I like the activities, but they are going to keep losing people if it's too hard to get to the challenges and back in the time. Of the 118 social teams only 18 had no penalties at all, which is pretty bloody high for these events (and quite a few are ladybugs).
We travelled 15.71km, and if we could run more we probably would have finished all the challenges!
Next time, if there is one.