The Fest '08!

Oh boy, I thought that post a while ago was going to be long. Get ready for a record-breaker. It’s about 5 pages long in Word, plus pictures (thanks Lisa!). Then again, Saturday was really long in general.

Quick clarification too: The silent retreat was silent except for one hour each on the middle day. At different times that day, we each went out and spent an hour with our mentor talking about how things were going so far. Since Greg is my mentor, that is why I was talking with him on my silent retreat.

Hello everyone! I'm back safe and sound from The Fest '08! Feel free to offer a prayer at any time while you are reading this, along the lines of: "Lord, please return Dave's sanity." Arm yourself with that little gem, and read on!

5am wake up call! Greg and John were beating on my door, and I was shouting, "It's 5am! What do you want?!" So I got up and opened the door, and Greg said, "You've got 7 minutes to get your stuff together and get down to the parking lot! The race is on!" So yeah - I threw on some clothes, and got out there! We were divided into our Peru and Japan teams, and the race officially started! A few people from each team were shown a bunch of things in the back of one of the minivans in the parking lot for 30 seconds, and then we had a few minutes to write out as many things as we could remember. My Peru team got 19 things right, but the Japan team got 20 things right so they got a 10 minute head start on us.

The next thing we had to do was search all over the MARK Centre property for 6 bandanas of the same colour for each member of our team to wear. It was around 5:15am by that time, it was still dark, we were still tired, and there were other guests in the building. So we had to be very, very quiet (luckily enough there was even a rabbit by the one door, but we weren’t hunting it). The bandanas were hidden very well! It took us 45 minutes to find all 6. We ended up with light blue bandanas, and the Japan team ended up with red ones. We had to keep them with us for the whole race, or else we couldn't finish.

Once we found the bandanas, we were allowed to come into the great room and we were given 4 brainteasers. We were thinking, "Come on, it's 6 am. We want breakfast!" But no, we had to do brainteasers. There were 2 math ones that I finished without much trouble, but I was very glad to have my teammates working on the word ones! We finished them all in about half an hour. We had to count all the squares on a roll of toilet paper, and then we had to rip every square in half. We found out later that the whole toilet paper section was invented on the spot because our drivers weren't here yet, and they needed to keep us busy. Oh well, that took another half an hour and by the time we finished it was 7am, and our driver, Ann (sorry if I spell that wrong), was here!

We could direct our drivers and tell them exactly where to turn, but they couldn’t do anything original to help us. The first clue led us to a City Blends coffee shop where we had to order a Chai tea. I knew where the coffee shop was since Greg’s fiancée Laura works there. Our next clue was a picture inside the little paper band that gets put around the cup. We asked a few of the customers about the picture and they informed us that it is a clock at the Abbotsford airport. So off we went to the airport!

This is the clock. It's pretty crazy looking.

We charged into the airport wearing our bandanas, and there was an airport security officer standing in front of the clock staring at us. We charged over to him and asked if he knew about another clue, but he was pretty freaked out by our entrance and had no idea what we were talking about. We decided to be a little less zealous when entering public places for the remainder of the race! We found the clues hidden behind some brochures and figured out the next clue. It led us to John and Christy’s house on the other side of Abbotsford!

When we arrived at their apartment, the first thing we noticed is that things kind of smelled like fish. John greeted us with an atrocious Russian/Thai accent trying to speak English. *Sigh* “Come in, come in! We make good food for you!” He shouts and leads us to the table. As a team, we had to finish off a large casserole dish of plain rice, a can of sardines, and a 2-litre bottle of coca cola. Apparently this exercise is based on a real breakfast served to a past TREK team. Local people want to please us and offer what they think is awesome western food, but it was pretty brutal for an early breakfast! And you have to eat it all – we don’t want to offend anyone, do we? We ended up talking about the “rice-rocks” in our stomachs for the rest of the day.

Breakfast of Champions! Almost as good as the mythical Power Wheaties.

We got out of there as soon as we could, and drove on! We left Sarah’s bandana in the parking lot though, so we had to waste a few minutes tracking it down. Thankfully it was right out in the open and easily found! We got back on track pretty quickly and made our way out into the rural area just south of highway 1. We pulled into the farmhouse indicated by our next clue to see Luke standing on their tennis court next to 2 piles of hay. We ran up and he informed us that he literally hid a single small pin in the stack, and it was our job to find it! The next 20 minutes or so was spent slowly shaking handfuls of hay to try and spot a falling pin. Did I mention that it had been raining all morning, and that the ground was wet so it wouldn’t even have made a noise when it hit the ground? Anyway, we just kept searching as the pile got smaller and smaller. Finally, most of us started searching the already scattered hay, as the pile was pretty tiny. Then Roxy made our day! All of a sudden, with the very last handful in her fist, she shouts, “I found it! I found it!” We all starting jumping up and down, cheering Roxy for her amazing eyes!

The next clue was behind the house, in the hot tub. It was laminated and tied to a bag of rocks to sink it, but thankfully it was floating just high enough for us to grab it without getting too wet! It said that our next clue had been emailed to us. So we drove back to the MARK Centre to check someone’s email for the clue! This is what we got:

CLUE #8
PHOTO SCAVENGER HUNT.
YOU MUST FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS EXCATLY. EACH TEAM MEMBER MUST BE PRESENT IN EVERY PICTURE EXCEPT FOR #1. EXTRA PEOPLE IN THE PICTURES ARE APPRECIATED BUT SPEED IS THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR. TAKE ALL THE PICTURES ON THIS LIST AND RETURN TO YOUR DRIVER. YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO ENTER THE 7 OAKS MALL.
1. SOMEONE WEARING KIRKLAND BRAND JEANS
2. BY A CURB
3. “ITS RAINING MEN”
4. IN A BUS
5. IN A TREE
6. STUCK
7. STINKY
8. FISHING
9. BY A FIRE HYDRENT
10. HOLDING A TIM HORTONS COFFEE

We took a few pictures at the MARK Centre, and then we drove to Costco! Unfortunately it was only 9am at this point and Costco didn’t open until 9:30am. There was a Tim Hortons and a Zellers across the street though, so we went and took a few pictures there! I think our best ones were in the Zellers.

Do you think we could say, "It's raining men," if I used the royal "we?" I do like the sound of King Dave...

Yup, this hula hoop definitely set us a poser. How do you get one's group unstuck from such clutches? It also seems strange that I always have my arms in the air... maybe I was trying to attract lightning.

Once we did that, we had to head over to the 7 Oaks mall anyway, because our next clue was to be given to us once we found a car with a specific license plate in the parking lots. That took a long time, because the car was in the exact spot that was almost beside where we started, but in the opposite direction than we were looking. So, we ended up circling the entire mall looking at every license plate. In the rain. Yuck! We finally found Dave (he went to Thailand with TREK last year) and he informed us that Ann had left with the minivan, and that we’d be walking from here on. And then he handed us a picture from one of those firemen calendars. *Sigh* The girls weren’t too excited by it either. We asked for directions to the nearest fire station, and headed off on foot!

We walked over to the fire station and had the choice of doing a fireman’s workout, or playing some bocce ball. We played bocce ball! We divided up into 3 pairs, and we played until one team got 5 points. Then we had to figure out our next clue, which was a 12-digit phone number written backwards. It told us to go to the Rotary Stadium for our next clue, so we walked over there in the rain.

This is where things started to get messy. Our next challenge was to pick up gummy worms with only our faces. The problem is that the first one was at the bottom of a big bowl of chocolate pudding! Then, without wiping our faces, we had to get a second one from the bottom of a bowl filled with Rice Krispies! I bravely went last, but this turned out to be a fatal mistake. The last worm was at the very, very bottom of the chocolate! I was in from far past my beard, all the way up into my hair! And then we only had little wipes to clean ourselves off. I headed off to our next destination covered in what looked like war paint.

I may look like a Mud-Man, but at least I got that pesky worm! I'm holding firmly to a saying I once heard: "You can't look dignified when you're having fun." They seem to be mutually exclusive.

The next place we visited was Greg and Luke’s apartment. While there, we all had a chance to get changed into chocolate-pudding-free and dry clothes and dry off next to their fireplace. We on the Peru team ended up having to wait there for about 45 minutes for the Japan team to arrive. Luke says that we’re going to have times like that in the field – where we’re just waiting. Not really knowing why, and feeling frustrated, but waiting nonetheless. Thankfully we got started again about 10 minutes after the Japan team arrived. The challenge here was one that I wasn’t quite expecting after our strange breakfast: each team had to eat 2 whole dried squid. They were saltier than the sardines, and they were so tough! You can’t chew them at all! Eventually, we kind of figured out and then were confirmed by Luke that the trick to eating squid is to shred it into very thin strips horizontally, so that they are easy to get down. Some members of the Japan team love squid, and they got it down pretty fast so that they got out on the road about 15 minutes before us. We finally finished our squid and were reunited with Ann for the afternoon at about 1pm!

We made our way next door to Columbia Bible College, to look up a specific Dewey decimal reference in the library. There, hidden in the book, was our next clue: a little piece of paper with strange letters. We had no idea what language they were from, but I thought the book might have been a language book to help us translate. So we went back in to look because we hadn’t even noticed the title, but it turned out to be something along the lines of Love, Dating, and Sex. Definitely not what we were looking for. We went back out to the car because we were pretty confused and lost. Thankfully though, our Ann got a call on the phone to see how we were doing, and she told the interns that we were stuck. We were permitted to know that the note was written in Punjabi, but we still had to translate it. We visited a store nearby with Punjabi letters in the window, and the employees translated a set of directions to get to a Sikh temple a little ways away.

On the way to the Sikh temple, Ann informed us of a few ground rules. We would be spending at least half an hour inside, we had to take our shoes off in the shoe rooms as soon as we got inside, we had to keep our heads covered with our bandanas at all times, and we had to wash our hands before entering for our meal. With the meal, we had to take whatever was offered, and eat everything on our plates, although we could refuse seconds. I took a little bit of everything, except for these sweet cubes – apparently they tasted like peanut butter so Simone warned me not to take one (thanks very much!). The girls all sat on the women’s side of the temple to eat, and I sat on the men’s side. So it was kind of lonely, and none of the old Sikh men wanted to talk with me. But we ate, and the time went pretty fast. We left a little after 2:30pm.

Once we got back in the minivan, we headed over to Sonja and Amy’s house for an “icebreaker” game. Pretty much all it involved was freeing our next clue from the middle of a big block of ice. We couldn’t read through it because the clue was wrapped in an old t-shirt too. But once we were able to smash and melt enough of the ice to free the clue, we headed off to Castle Funpark! It’s an arcade / batting cages / miniature golf / go carts kind of place on the side of the highway outside Abbotsford. We had to get tokens with the money provided and earn enough tickets to buy Ann a cup of candy! It didn’t take long, and then we were headed just around the corner to a house in a section of homes under construction. We were instructed to serenade a mysterious and beautiful lady on her balcony with an original song we had to write on the drive over. Little did we know that it was actually Dave’s house, and we had to sing the song to him while he stood on his balcony and construction workers stared at us from down the street. Thankfully it was quick and relatively painless for all parties involved! He gave us our next clue, which was to go to the King George Skytrain Station in Surrey.

Thankfully, Breanne is from Surrey and has been on the Skytrain before. Just in case you’re like me and had never heard of it before, the Skytrain is basically a train system going into Vancouver, like GO trains going into Toronto, except that they are several stories above the street on a track supported by big cement pillars. She led us through there with no problems at all! I found the whole system very interesting and cool. We went all the way into Vancouver to Commercial Drive, where we walked a few blocks up the street to an ice cream shop called Dolce Amore. Luke gave us our very last clue at 5:20. We boarded the Skytrain once again and took it right down to the Vancouver waterfront, where we boarded the Seabus (a ferry) to take us over to Lonsdale Quay.

We ended the race with gusto, running up from the Seabus, up a tall staircase to a big neon letter Q and the finish line! We reached the finish at 6pm, just one Seabus trip behind the Japan team. I was amazed that after racing for 13 hours, we finished with only one ferry trip between us!

Here we are after the finish! It's dark again - how did that happen?

It was hard to do because we didn’t know how long it would go on. We were hoping to be done at noon when we arrived at Greg and Luke’s place, but it ended up being only half way! Everything was just a little uncomfortable, and was strange at first, but we learned to push forward! It was the first time we were really tested as a team, and I was greatly encouraged that we responded so well! We worked well together, and everyone contributed amazingly at every challenge. I think we’re going to have an awesome time in Peru!

Both teams drove back to the home where we looked for the needle in the haystack. We ate pizza and talked about the good and bad things we discovered throughout the day. It was great to affirm each member of our team individually. We each contribute in different ways, and we wouldn't be the team if even one of us was missing.

The aftermath is going mostly well. A few people are sick and sore, and we all have clothes that still smell like squid. Thanks for reading this whole thing! I hope you had a few laughs along the way. I’ll get back to you again next week, although I’m sure it won’t be nearly this long! Talk to you later!