Last Saturday I participated in The Great Urban Race. The GUR is a scavenger hunt throughout the city, complete with brainteasers, puzzles, trivia, and random physical tasks to complete. The entire race is supposed to take under five hours to complete and you work in teams of two or four. As a team, you have to dress in a theme or dress alike to race and you also have to stick to gether because most of the clues required a team picture as proof. My team decided to dress in theme and since we are fantastic, we chose Games as our theme.
We have Candy Land, Connect Four, Trivial Pursuit, and Twister!
When the race began at 12, we quickly got our clue sheet and headed to a grassy patch of land to plot our route. We took about 30 minutes to figure out the addresses of locations and determine which route to take. We started the race and I felt like we were making decent time. Some of the things we knocked out in the first hour were: we had to head to a Duane Reade and buy two items to donate to a charity that was waiting in front of the store, then we had to take a picture with two Yankees fans, we also had to take a picture with a food cart, we visited he American Folk Art Museum to count the windows on one of their sculptures, and we had to get a wrapper from a McDonalds. Then we headed across town and during the next few hours we visited a cupcake shop, a toy store, completed a task with a pedometer in Bryant Park. There was one clue that wasn't making sense to us and we spent a lot of time trying to figure out where a certain book store was because the book store we thought was the answer was not at the address given. After checking with a few other teams we figured out that WE were right and the GUR staff had made a mistake on the sheet and put Eighth Street instead of Eighth Avenue, which makes a huge difference in NYC.
We then hit another roadblock when we couldn't find a yoga studio. We eventually decided to skip the clue and just move on (you are allowed 1 skip). On the way to the next clue we happened to stumble upon the yoga studio, so that was a happy accident.
We then made our way to a magic shop where I ate a meal worm and broke my favorite flip flops (unrealated events, but both happened in the magic shop). Check out this awesome picture of me and my mealworm skills:
After a stop at the show store, we then got on the subway and headed to the book store which was the book store we had thought of from the beginning but thought we were wrong about. We completed the puzzles there and then headed for the finishline because we were able to skip the last clue due to not skipping any before hand.
We arrived at the finish line is 4 hours and 33 minutes. After crossing the finish line we got bananas, water, and a medal! Then we had to wait in the checkpoint line for the staff to check in our pictures and business cards. We ended up having one incorrect answer and they give you a 30 minute penalty for that. However, since they made the mistake on the book store question they gave everyone that clue whether you had figured it out or not and did not give us any extra credit for realizing their mistake and still getting to the correct location. Thus we technically finished at 5 hours and 3 minutes which means we don't even get told what place we were in because we went over the 5 hour mark.
We still finished, got our medals, and didn't die in the 90 degree heat. It was fun and I think I am ready for next year, now that I fully know what to expect!
