The Fellowship has disbanded. Steve and Jenessa drove the van toward the mists of Silver Spring while Emily drove Laurel and me home.

Final standings and a pic of our awesome "gold" third place trophy below (picture from team Lazlo's blog). Thanks to all who helped out on our adventure!

1. Bloodshot 30:46:00 (hours:min:sec)
2. Stillwater 32:27:00
3. The Fellowship of the Van 35:50:00
4. Enemies of the Common Good 36:45:00
5. A2 37:55:00
6. Team Lazlo 38:23:00
7. Lost in Place 39:11:00
8. The Millers

Yesterday was our only real tourist day on this trip and luckily we were in New Orleans! We started out with the other Ravenchasers eating beignets at Cafe Du Monde. Then we wandered a little, spending a while in The Quarter Stitch. After lunch some of us continued to wander while others headed back to the hotel for a nap. We went on a great ghost tour of the French Quarter at 6. The tour has as much history as ghost stories which was much more interesting to me then people jumping out of doorways at us. We finished the evening with a tremendous dinner at K-Paul's. Emily chose it and we are so glad that she did. We should be off in about a half hour for the first of two long driving days. 10 hours to Knoxville tonight and then 8 back home on Monday.


Still can't believe we got third!!! (Granted it was partially because one of the teams dropped out at the last minute, but still third!) We have the tacky, gold-spray-painted sailing ship to prove it! This trip has been awesome! How will we spend 18 hours in the car without any clues to solve? How will we go back to our regular lives without having each other no more than 8 inches away?

HOLY ?@!& THIRD PLACE!!!!!

At the final bar (not on Bourbon Street, thank god) and are celebrating appropriately. OMGYAY.

It's gonna be hazy, hot and humid today. It was 90 degrees at 11 PM last night, so it can only go up.

Yesterday we were in Atlanta, and it was great fun. We rocked the first part of the race, and eventually got hung up on finding the durn 'nearby radioactive vessels.' Turns out there was a sheaf of clues in a newspaper box with a radioactive symbol on it. We spent a good hour and a half searching a plaza just across the street from the proper box, reread the clue and ran a block up to search newspaper boxes there, and never thought of going back to the other boxes. We ultimately called in and took an hour hit.

Spent some quality time chilling (quite literally, their air conditioner was turned down to 'arctic') in the Westin lobby while members of our team went up to the Sundial to look for the navy G. When we realized we couldn't crack clue #6 without the internet, we sent Steve for our laptops and mooched off the Westin free wireless. When we broke that, we checked out clue 12 - our 'car' clue, or the one that told us where to meet up in Savannah - and immediately called in to stop our time and take the 2 hour hit. We didn't get the answer, though, because we wanted to try to solve the thing while on the road.

After 3PM we were fancy free in Atlanta, and made a stop at the Varsity, the biggest drive-in in the country, I believe. All I can say is, they make a damn fine burger and shake. Once you are able to convey your order to the guy at the car window, anyway.

Back on the road in some rush hour traffic - my personal theory is that the highways around Atlanta were built in the shape of a demon sigil, thus sending out an aura of evil to envelop all drivers and make them insane - and blessedly brief torrential downpour. We all were very, very grateful not to be out running around in the rain.

Several hours out of Atlanta we were passed by a white van, which we deduced was the Bloodshot team traveling incognito. Even though they are subtle like spies, we figured out their sekrit code. (Photo to follow, to see if you too, dear reader, are up to the task!)

Anyway, we decided that rather than continue to solve the damn clue OR to call in and get the answer already, we would depend on the kindness of not-really-strangers. Jenessa, who was in the front passenger seat at the time, scribbled 'Where R we going?' with my phone number at the bottom. We caught back up to Bloodshot and she held the notepad in the window while Steve snapped a great photo of the driver, Chris (I think?), laughing at us while in the background someone was calling to tell us the answer.

This is how we discovered that the clue was a red herring and the *real* clue was the picture on the three little pieces of paper we'd collected over the course of the day. We were supposed to deduce that the stars around the edge of the paper were in the position of the numbers on a clock, and a random swirly line hit certain numbers in a certain order, thus making a number that, when you combined it with two swirly bits on the end of the line (which were, of course, zeros) you got a phone number.

We did not deduce that.

After much shaking of our puny fists, we spent an enjoyable time cackling about holding up a sign in our window. Because after nearly a week on the road, you get a little punchy.

Not twenty minutes later, Bloodshot called back to tell us team Enemies of the Common Good had blown a tire and pulled off the road. Our two teams pulled in to a service station off exit 143, reorganized our stuff so we could redistribute their five members plus two days worth of clothing between our 2 vehicles, then back on our way within 20 minutes. Awesome!

Now must go pack the car and run...

...or something.

	DC WWII memorial
	War mamorial
	Quality time in the van ETA by Emily: Yeah. I believe I mentioned something earlier about my inability not to make dumb faces in photos on this trip? Have some proof.
	finding the brick One brick we need to find...among thousands!!! It was quite an adventure and stroke of genius that led to our success.

Today was one of our best days as a team. We flew through the first 8 or 9 clues only getting stuck trying to "examine nearby radioactive vessels". After over an hour on my hands and knees looking under every bench, overhang, and potted plant at the Sun Trust Bank Headquarters (the sun's atomic right?), we walk up the street and look for newspaper boxes with an atomic sticker. We don't find it and call in only to discover that we were right (about the newspaper box), but we were looking at the wrong group of boxes. Grrr. Otherwise things went pretty smoothly. We correctly decided that we couldn't solve the final clue (no one did) and gave up in order to enjoy a delicious (and stress free) dinner of burgers and onion rings at Varsity. The locations were great today. One of the clues led us to the revolving restaurant and observation deck at the top of the Westin. We spent a good chunk of the morning at the very nifty Olympic Park.

Currently we are doing laundry at midnight while Emily hangs out in a towel since the shower is occupied and *all* her clothes are dirty. I think we could basically all be naked and it wouldn't change the group dynamic at all. Steve is instructing Laurel on how to use a "flossing fork," I'm not sure why regular floss presents such a challenge?

90 degrees and really humid here tonight and it's midnight. We'll be bringing lots of water tomorrow. Can't wait to see Savannah!

ETA by Emily: Mom, in case you're reading, no, not every single article of clothing I have is dirty. I *did* manage to pack enough clothes for once in my life! (Esp. socks and underwear. I could hit another six states at least.) There was just a slight timing issue re: washers and showers that led to the Towel Incident. You can rest easy. :D

Day two of wireless internet at the hotel. The internet has not lost any of its charm, but the immediacy has retreated somewhat. Currently we are enraptured with the free laundry and Steve's flossing forks. Right now, three people are trying to pry it out of Laurel's mouth, where it's stuck. Pictures are being taken, oh yes.

Today was eventful, as I'm sure the rest of the Fellowship will tell you. There was emergency frappucinos (yes, we really are Those People), chili cheese dogs with extra onions, really tall elevators that I steadfastly refused to patronize, messages passed between vans via spiral notebook paper on I-16, a brief joining of the Fellowship of the Bloodshot Common Good due to the World's Original RV experiencing slight technical tire difficulties, a professional bonding moment between members of the Fellowship and Lost in Place, Scottish beer, spinach artichoke dip, and allegedly the Enemies are currently rockin' an open mic at tonight's pub. Alas, the allure of fluff 'n fold was too much for the Fellowship, and we are back in our suite.

Enjoy the evening!

See you there!

Done for the day in Atlanta. Hitting the Varsity on our way out of town. Yay onion rings!

Though there is a team actually broadcasting wireless internet from their car, we have not managed to get our hands on a solid, free internet connection for the last couple of days till now. Anyway, most of my buds covered a lot of the good stories, but I thought I'd mention my love for the Charlotte city/race.

Why Charlotte rocked:
For starters, it wasn't timed. This actually turned out to be kind of relaxing. We took the time to take a lot of pictures and explore the things around us. And it was an awesome city to explore. Beyond just being safe and clean and nice, it was funky and had a lot of personality. The game itself had a lot of personality as well. It is always exciting to be in a downtown area with lots of people around and reach into a "secret" place that you've found with the clues and extract a scroll that no one else knew about. Describing how we came across a couple of clues will help summarize our awesome experience in Charlotte.

It started with parking the car, getting the maps and clues, etc. We interpreted the clues to find the location of a building "with red fins". Some clues indicate buildings through poetic or symbolic means. This building actually has long skinny fins that travel up the side of the building all the way around. After getting our bearings and finding a plaque on the south side of the building, the code cracking starts.

Though we had discovered this through exploration, the code we cracked there resulted in touching one of the fins of the building, which causes a sound to fill the air. Lisa, the author of the race, told us more about the building (see p.s. below). Basically, the plaque we were looking at didn't just involve a ravenchase clue. The architect of the building made it interactive on several levels. Each of the fins produces a different sound when you touch it (monkeys, crickets, car horn, anything). If you crack the architects code on the plaque, you discover the secret of the building. By touching the fins in the correct order (without interruption), the building sings to you. This is supremely cool. Unfortunately, it was in transition of getting new sounds, so it wouldn't work. We'll have to go back and give it a try one of these days.

So after the cool building we went to the cool park. Our clue was supposed to lead us to a "battlefield". We saw this awesome park and decided to take a short-cut through the park cause it was supposed to be just on the other side of the park. It was a cartoon-like park with two GIANT sculptures of a GIANT stack of books (we have a picture of Emily hugging it). As you walk by the leaves on the side of the sidewalk, random "nature" sounds trigger. Heartfelt messages are written on giant sheets of gold-colored metal that are wrapped around the lightposts. Fun messages of wisdom are written on the ground using clever pictures. Everything in the park seems to be produced by a talented bunch of artists. Including the chessboard tables. Yep, that was our battlefield. Jenessa even guessed that it was a chessboard before knowing that the park had a chessboard (yea Jen!). Under one of the chessboard tables was our clue. This clue had us running around the park looking at all of the various cartoon-like road signs. The clue indicated that the final sign (resulting in spelling out "Edgar Allan Poe") had a scroll nearby. Sure enough, under a nearby bush was a zippy with tiny scrolls in it. The scroll lead us to yet another fun place, but I haven't the time to post it all.

We took many pictures during this hunt, and they will have many stories associated with them. So be on the look out for when we get the time to do this. It'll be good.

Tonight, we ended in Atlanta, and I got to see my good friend Byron briefly (who I had not seen for quite some time).

It has been an absolute blast so far, and I can't wait for whatever is coming up next in Atlanta tomorrow. Woohoo!

Steve

p.s.

About the building:
The building in Charlotte is called “Touch My Building” and was designed by Christopher Janney. Here is a link to the project on his website. You all seemed very interested in it and so I wanted to pass the info along. Gotta love geeks. I’m proud to be one.

(skip intro/ Urban Musical Instruments/ projects (over on the left) / Touch My Building)


The Musical Building + Steve, Emily, and Amelia being amused.


Jenessa after defeating the chessboard clue

Things have been going great! I love this race. Today we hit a rough patch in the middle of the day, mostly I think because there wasn't time for lunch (we didn't end up eating until 5pm) and it was hot!

Memorable Moments for Me So Far:
-starting out on home turf in DC, I already knew the DC War Memorial, too bad we couldn't find the scrolls even though Laurel and Steve poked in the right hole with the stick
-being the "scrollmaster" in Richmond, finding all four of the scrolls quickly including the tricky one under the prickly bush by the statue
-running across the suspension bridge to Belle Island in Richmond
-running up and down the wrong end of the river looking for the treasurechest, then watching helplessly as Jenessa slipped on the rocks while getting it :(
-the awesomeness of the Charlotte bonus race: singing building, literary park, signs outside the library etc.
-Lisa buying us dinner because we had a long day on the road (mmm, mushroom and arugula pizza)
-Laurel giving the finger to the "Billy Graham Training Center" sign
-rafting with Emily. We fell in the water, but even after the shaky, adrenaline-fueled panic (and okay, some screaming like a little girl "get me out of the water"), we went back in and made it cleanly over the "difficult" part
-discovering that our Nashville "map" was primarily pictures of public statues (love, love, love the visual ID clues)
-singing "O Susanna" and "She's Comin' Round the Mountain" to "starving artists" (actors) on the streets of Nashville to earn our clues
-peering at signatures on the wall of Tootsies to find the answer, too bad no one had to pee or we would have got the one in the bathroom
-running around the park learning about Tennessee, then retreating to the airconditioned van when the 90 degree weather got to be too much
-discovering only then that Bloodshot had pegged the van's antenna with their signature eyeball
-finding the clue under the column and IDing it correctly as Doric
-Steve and the mint chocolate chip shake and hat incident in the van
-putting the random syllables on the CDs in order to sound out the location of tonight's Irish Pub in Atlanta
-chatting with all of the other teams: hunting by the river with A2, in the bar with Lazlo and Bloodshot, teaming up with Kim and Jeff for a bit, etc.
-four out of five of us typing intently on separate laptops in the hotel after 2 days(!) without internet access

So, after rafting the Nantahala to win a one hour bonus for the team, we ventured through the gorge (all a little green in the face), and made it out on the other side for a surprise pit stop in K-town for dinner and then finally arrived in Nashville. We stayed in a country-music-themed hotel before starting the race in Nashville this morning. Most of the race was centered around downtown and the Bicentennial Park. While downtown, we sought out a number of famous statues, sang for musicians on the street until we found the ones who would give us our next clues, visited the Charlie Daniels museum, and explored the thousands of signatures on the wall at the honky tonk Tootsies--all in the name of Ravenchase. Although the particular signature we were looking from at Tootsies eluded us, we at least got to enjoy someone singing country music covers on the other side of the bar in the midst of our frustration. After moving on to the Bicentennial Park, we gleaned a few bits of Tennessee history while solving the remaining clues.

On the way to Atlanta (and after acquiring desparately needed food so we could think straight again after the long, hot day), we popped the cd's into the player that we had aquired earlier from the street musicians, only to find that each track consisted of about half a word. We slowly pieced the sounds together (think 'fir dee fuh ive' getting assembled into '45') according to the code we had found earlier. It was like a very time-sensitive game of Mad Gab.

We're now on our way to the final destination of the day, a pub in Atlanta, exhausted, exhilarated, and very ready for a few beers. Cheers!

This is our first hotel with internet so far, and all four laptops are out, and Jenessa's on her blackberry. Addicts, what? Brace yourself for a deluge of entries.

Okay, so this is kinda weird. Dude! Four, maybe even five days since I’ve checked lj! (So, technically, I’ve peeked over Amelia’s shoulder while she made a post, and I’ve been quasi-regularly texting updates, but it’s not the same as hooking the Wee Little Mac up to the intarwebs and connecting with the outside world.)

I’ve got a jillion posts - give or take - floating around my brain, because if nothing else, Ravenchase is ripe fodder for endless storytelling. Instead of trying to do anything chronological at this point (four! days! in! halfway through! OMG!), you will instead be subjected to a bullet point list of random moments that stand out in my mind. I don’t know what my illustrious fellow Fellowshippers have already posted, so pardon me if you get the same tale twice or more:

- Steve hoisting Jenessa over his head so she can climb on top of the bar in Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge on Broadway in Nashville to stare at an ancient picture of (possibly) Aaron Neville while two guys wailed out Friends In Low Places

- (Currently Laurel and Jenessa are quite literally crying with laughter. Apparently there was an incident with a mint chocolate chip shake, Steve’s hat, face licking, and Steve’s eternal optimism. I myself missed it, as I am currently basking in the glory of noise cancelling headphones.)

- Random sampling from the Guilty Pleasures playlist: We Belong - Pat Benetar, Here I Go - Whitesnake, More Than Words - Extreme, Danger Zone - Kenny Loggins.

- Playing with the coolest. building. ever. in Charlotte. Seriously. I will eventually find a link to it (ETA: link found, courtesy of Lisa!, but it’s a parking garage built on the grounds of the old Seventh Street Station. The architect who designed gave the building red plastic fins spaced at regular intervals, and when you press the giant LCD(?) panel beneath a fin, it makes a noise. Currently they all only make phone ringing noises, but usually they make a wide assortment - monkeys, old men laughing, chimes, the whole gamut. The architect designed a code (picture of which to be posted later, naturally) that, when a series of panels are pressed in an appropriate sequence, the whole building lights up and plays a little song. Trick is, any random person on the other side of the building, if they happen to hit a panel while you’re decoding, screws up your code, and you have to start all over again. SO. COOL.

- Speaking of Charlotte, I’m kinda impressed. Or maybe we were just sent to the really, really awesome places in Charlotte. They have an entire garden doohickey thing devoted to books, puzzles, and games. We have many, many embarrassing pictures of me throughout the garden.

- Speaking of that, I’m not entirely sure we have a single picture of me not making some sort of bizarre face. Or with both feet on the ground.

- To wit, Laurel took rapidfire shots of us all while whitewater rafting (whitewater duckying?), and I look intensely pained throughout much of it. Amelia, in the front of my ducky, looks alternately terrified and gleeful.

- Did I not mention the whitewater rafting before? Yeaaaaaah. I’m kind of deeply enraptured. Charlotte to Nashville is a long, long drive, and jaunting off down to the Nantahala for a brief squirt down a river was the perfect break, in my mind. (Most because it doesn’t involve heights. Yay.) Each team sent one two-man ducky down river, and whooever made it through the final falls with both people still in the ducky got an hour’s bonus. We sent Steve and Jenessa down for points, and Amelia and I went down just. because.

This was my first time steering, and I have to say, I think I did quite well about 90% of the time after I got the hang of it. Alas, that 10% happened to fall right when we went through the patch of river that was marked with a street sign - BUMP. Yes. Yes, there is. I managed to wedge us right in between the rock and the backrush of water over the rock (I’m sure there’s a technical term for it, but mostly I just know it was very cold, very wet, and very white.), and there was just enough time to think, “Oh, we’re sideways, we need to push off and turn - hey, so this is what it looks like under the boat.” Amelia and I drifted another couple hundred yards down the river before we managed to get ourselves and our ducky out of the water. And by “we,” I totally mean “members of Enemies of the Common Good (I think? My memory’s a little fuzzy of those very long, very cold seconds) towed me to shore, a nice lady helped me out, Chris caught our ducky, and Steve and Jenessa helped yank it back onshore.” The water was forty-eight degrees, and they ain’t kidding - your brain really does just down when it’s that cold.

Because we are Just That Awesome, Amelia and I got back in the boat, made grrr faces, and totally made it down the “big falls” at the very end. Completely unintentionally In a deliberate and extensively-planed fashion, we managed to hit a very nice line and sailed right over the biggest drop, even managing to avoid getting whacked in the head by paddles wielded by rafting grannies. In the end, the only casualties were our senses of dignity (though not pride) and my right big toenail. Ouch. (No, I did not stand up; I was well-warned. ;)

- Dude. We just drove past a motor home driving through a lake. I think. Huh.

- After two days of crawling through various holes in trees around the DC War Memorial (as well as several homeless people’s residences - no, I did not accost them), tromping around stone gazebos in Richmond, and visiting Belle Island and its assorted Civil War ruins for the third time in two weeks (and at least once was for an actual clue, hey!), we decided we preferred the ciphering/puzzling clues a little more than the digging-through-woods-and-streams clues. This led to endless riffs of, “Mom, nature’s touching me again!” and “Show me on the doll where nature touched you.”

- It turns out there are two kinds of people in this world: GPS People and Not GPS People. I am the latter; the rest of the Fellowship seems to be the former. However, if anyone ever figures out how I can keep Google Maps in my pocket at all times, I will love them forever and ever.

- Oh, yeah. It’s called the iPhone. Hi, Steve Jobs. Hi.

- Poor Steve. Voluntarily locking himself in a van for ten days with three very opinionated, very different women. He may be learning things he never wanted to know. Still, he remains intensely good natured throughout all of our neuroses, and yesterday all five of us laughed till we hurt, hashing out the differences and similarities between men and women.

- Okay, so, post-whitewater-rafting, I made a judgement call on the navigating thing. The directions back to the highway were a little fuzzy, so I looked at our map, spotted what looked like a viable route, and sent us onwards. Yeah, that route? Route 129, which cuts across the Smokies before eventually turning into Alcoa Highway near Maryville. Google seven tales of the dragon and motorcyle and drive. Apparently it’s a famously notorious (notoriously famous?) super-duper-windy-switchbacky road. Now, going into this all, we knew that Jenessa and Laurel get carsick. No problem. One of them’s always in the front seat, and the other is either driving or in one of the first row of captain’s chairs. For this road, Jenessa drove, and Laurel had shotgun. No problem, right? Yeah. By the end of the Dragon’s Tail, they were the only two doing okay. Amelia and Steve got viciously carsick, and I was in a midst of a blood sugar crash so hard that, combined with the twisty road, left me so deeply nauseous I couldn’t contemplate eating (to, you know, fix the situation) at all. Score one for the Not GPS girl. Still, we all lived to tell the tale.

- Have I mentioned how awesome my noise cancelling headphones are? Seriously. My new v. favorite piece of technology.

- Speaking of technology, the Fellowship remains deeply in awe (and techno-envy) of Team Lazlo. They’re a trio out of Denver who are by far the most wired of all the teams, even moreso than the Kilts with their niftycool walkie talkies with headsets and their kickin’ dateshifting de-cipher program. They are live-updating their blog with their GPS position and have set up some sort of epic mobile wireless infrastructure in the back of their stylin’ gold Taurus. We keep swearing we’re going to follow them closely enough to mooch off their wireless signal so we can post from the road. For the moment, we remain confined to typing in the car, posting at hotels. Or McDonalds.

- For my own reference, please allow me to list the teams here: the Fellowship (naturally), Stillwater (aka the Kilts, aka Extra Brilliant), Bloodshot (aka the love child of Blood & Bones and the Longshots - but only one Longshot, aka the Herd of People in Scrubs), Lost in Place (a lovely couple out of Charlotte), Enemies of the Common Good (aka the Guys in the Hats, aka the Guys in the RV), Team Lazlo (aka Hi I Love Your Technology Hi), A² (aka the Thundercats Truck), the Miller family (with whom I’ve had very little chance to interact but who I am confident are just as awesome as the rest of the teams).

- We are at a gas station somewhere in northern Georgia right now. There is a fat black kitty with white tuxedo markings and no tail making friends with everyone, including the woman in camouflage stretch pants and a (not matching) camouflage t shirt. I didn’t know they made camo print stretch capris. Huh. Only in northern Georgia, baby.

- As of yesterday, approximately three hours separated first and eighth places, and less than twenty minutes separated three, four, and five. This, after three days of racing. It speaks to me of a tightly-designed race that is well-matched to its participants’ abilities. Learning when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em when to call in for clue answers, balancing penalties and estimated ability/time to solve - it’s all a delicate balance, and I like to think that the Fellowship is getting better and better at it as the days go by.

- Y’all totally missed it: two of today’s clues involved us approaching “starving artists” on the street in Nashville and singing to them. Yeah, baby. We serenaded two guys (who we were actually supposed to accost, thankyouverymuch) with Oh, Susannah and She’ll Be Comin’ ‘Round The Mountain. There may have even been a few hoe-down-y arm gestures along with it.

- I’m really kind of ridiculously excited about Savannah and onwards. I’m sure Atlanta will be awesome, but it’s a relatively familiar city. Savannah is, well, just awesome and mostly unfamiliar, and I have fond nostalgia (can you have unfond nostalgia?) for, okay, not Panama City itself but for Santa Rosa Beach and Grayton Beach and Seaside and all the others, and, well. New Orleans. YAY.

- The Random Piece of Knitting, FYI, is currently 10 inches by 8 inches. It is one single stitch over and over endlessly (which I actually quite enjoy, because I can do it in the dark and when brain dead and when exhausted), and yet I have still managed to mess up, quite epically, in at least three pieces. Hmmm. I think I just found the area over which I will be stitching a giant raven!

- Shockingly, the van is not entirely a pit. Sure, we’ve got five people, their luggage, their laptops, two coolers, enough snack food to satisfy an entire horde of third graders (no more M&Ms; the peanut lasted two days, the peanut butter only one), and stacks and stacks of clues/code books/notepads/ciphering paraphernalia, which certainly takes up its fair share (a lot) of space, but it’s not particularly dirty. I think. I’m not sure we’ve excavated underneath the bottom layer of detritus of pens and paper. It’s kind of like we’re fossil layers.

- Dude, how am I ever going to go back to regular life? You mean I can’t just jaunt about the country, playing with parking garages and plundering the Charlie Daniels Museum and whitewater rafting and driving around Belle Island yet again and discussing Wiberty Or Death and drinking at cool pubs with cool people every night and generally gloriously geeking out for ten to fifteen hours a day? Clearly I need to run away and join the circus treasure hunt. Yarrrrrr.

Alas, we just have text.posting available. Still looking for that Taurus-based mobile wireless infrastructure, though. FLA tags, anyone?

On the way to Atlanta with the car clue solved. Yay! Nashville nifty as always but v v hot. Long day. Halfway!

Morning in Nashville:
In a few hours we'll start the race here. I, of course, am awake hours before the rest of my team. I'd say 'wide awake,' but that is a dirty lie. I am in desperate need of a cup of coffee, and will be making a starbucks run shortly. Coffee = elixir of life.

After white water rafting yesterday (of which we have some 60 awesome pictures of all the teams going over the falls) Emily charted a supah-sekrit back route to Nashville via Knoxville. Jenessa and I took one look at the narrow, winding roads and called driver and front passenger on account of car sickness. (We're the only ones in the car w/ a history of sensitive stomachs.) With a lovely view out the front windshield we were just fine. Everyone in the back seats got sick. Fortunately there was no - how to say this delicately? - puking, but there were certainly some rough patches. Jenessa said that looking in the rear view mirror was *highly* entertaining because all she could see was people craning to stare desperately out the front windshield in a bid to feel better.

We paused in Knoxville to have dinner with Emily's dad and brother, Steve's dad, and Jenessa's mom and sister. We also made a quick run through Target for necessities (like diet coke. The prospect of running the rest of the race in insufficient caffeine was horrifying...). We saw some spectacular lightning on the way into town and pulled in around 10:00 PM local time.

As recently as the drive to Nashville last night we were still saying, 'OMG, yay, I'm so glad we're doing this!' Words can't express how much fun this is.

Whitewater rafting, baby! Jen and Steve FTW; Amelia, Emily, and Laurel for fun. Yay!

Morning in Charlotte:

As the token morning person here, I mustered the resolve to roll out of bed at 6:30 and shower. (Always willing to take one for the team, don'tcha know.) Am currently in the restaurant savoring my coffee and free wireless while the rest of the team is waking up.

Today's activities apparently are not race-related but rather are intended to break up the long drive from here to Nashville. We're meeting at 9AM outside of town to get directions and then we're back on the road to our mystery destination. Our only information is 'bring a sense of adventure' and be prepared for water. Interesting...

The race itself is a ton of fun. I've called my sister, Karen, so often for google-fu that we're joking she's the 6th member of the team. (Emily also joked that Karen was the Faramir to my Boromir, but I'd really like to come home alive from this little adventure, so I'm not sure I'm down with that comparison.) B - the chess clue we called you about 2 days ago turned out to be unsolvable. None of the teams got it, and once we got the answer and tried to back solve we still couldn't do it.

I think the writers/organizers are doing an amazing job so far. Especially when you consider that they only had a few days notice that they were going to write/run the race. The original guy was away on business and apparently was working on a deal that couldn't be dropped. He called last week to say, 'hey, ball's in your court!'

Everything about this is a blast - our team, the other teams, the clues. This is such a fun way to learn about new cities.