great greenville race

back in july, kathrin saw a living social deal for a team entry into the "great greenville race". inspired by cbs' "amazing race", ggr is a scavenger hunt around downtown greenville (sc). you must successfully solve trivia questions, riddles, puzzles and special tasks to find your way to the finish line. we put together an all-girl team, the "awesome blossoms". i attempted to study before hand like marlene did for her toronto city chase, but ultimately was too lazy.

(sidenote: i was googling "awesome blossom" for t-shirt ideas and found the urban dictionary definition. these are not quite the definitions we had in mind)

this was before running around in the 99 degree humidity

jess and i made team t-shirts. the puff paint was more subtle than we wanted it to be though.

a few days before the race, the organizers sent out a riddle that you had to solve in order to find the race's starting location.

"it's not a hospital, but you'll find doctor's there.
it's not a store or hotel, but people check out daily.
it has more stories than any other building in downtown greenville.
where is it?"

josh solved it in 0.2 seconds so he was recruited as our phone-a-friend.

after debriefing, we received our first clue/set of trivia questions and figured out we needed to go to the art museum to solve them. a volunteer checked our answers and gave us our next clue (if you were wrong you could try to fix your answers a couple times before getting a penalty).

our next clue/task was "look for your book" - with 5-6 authors listed. we split up and flipped through books by the listed authors until one teammate found an envelope in one of the books. this was our next clue and our bonus questions! each bonus question was worth a set number of points, and each point on a correct answer took one minute off your finish time. if you answered all bonus questions correctly you could shave 30 minutes off your time.

a task at the beaded frog

we set off to find the trivia answers on our next clue and i multitasked on the bonus questions while we walked (though this was a race, we only ran 2-3 times for a short stretch). i texted some questions to josh and we found some answers along the way (technically all the answers were findable downtown). one bonus opportunity was to be one of the first 5 teams to stop by the barkery bistro (a dog-supply store) for a treat and 3 bonus point/3 minutes off your finish time, but when we checked in for that the store owner said that nothing had ever been dropped off. i had her sign our sheet in hopes that it would still count.

we continued solving the clues and working our way around the streets of downtown. thankfully there were no gross tasks like eating bugs, holding spiders, etc. eventually we had a long trek to the west end to shoeless joe jackson's house, where we deciphered clues which resulted in a phone number. calling the number gave us a recording with the location of the finish line. hot, thirsty and ready to be done, we walked (ran a little) over to the finish. there were a few teams there already, but the elusive bonus questions hadn't been tallied yet.

post-race: hot, thirsty, tired

once the scores were tallied and bonus points credited, we came in 2nd place! (the bonus questions knocked off about 16 minutes, i'm not sure how many we attempted to answer) not too shabby for four girls who don't live in town. we received our medals and were told to head over to the chocolate moose for our prize - a box of cupcakes!

...which we inhaled.