The Amazing Race

Yesterday Scott, the boys and I headed to Springfield to participate in a Geocaching Amazing Race event around the city. It was a 10 hour race! If you don't know what Geocaching is click here. It was pretty much just like The Amazing Race you see on CBS :) complete with Road Blocks, detours and mandatory rest periods. We had sooo much fun! It was a great day, gorgeous weather (until the afternoon rain), no fighting and no really stressful times! The funny thing is, Scott is the expert Geocacher and he is the one who made mistakes!

We started off with our first clue and we were sent to a Rest Stop right off the bat. Also in our big envelope was a little one that said "Your Key to Success" on it. Assuming we needed to do that first to do the race we went to the coordinates on the card. We ended up at The Library Center . A couple of other teams were there and appeared to know what they were doing and we were clueless, we only had the coordinates, no clue about what to do. So we decided to go on to our first destination Wilson's Creek National Battlefield. We had to watch a movie and answer some questions for the challenge. There were also several bonus questions to answer and we got most of them. We enjoyed that stop, so much history there! Our next clue was completely backwards but it led us to The Library Center for real! We had to find a fake reference book with our clue. There is a huge line of authors' names on the floor that we had to find in a word search on the back of the clue. So I started that because I am the puzzle whiz :) it was taking a long time, I think we were there an hour before Scott heard another team say that they would go on to their next destination and work on the puzzle later. HUH??? Scott had missed the OTHER piece of paper in our clue that led us to our next destination! We had wasted over an hour!!! The word search was all bonus but still! So we figured out our next clue and headed to the Springfield Nature Center. We all talked on the way there that we would be much more careful and attentive this time! We rocked that one! We had to answer some questions on a page about several exhibits. I held onto the clue and we would each be assigned a question to answer. We only had trouble with a couple of questions but we got them! Jake even found a bonus cache at our check in point an scored us 3 bonus points :) Our next clue led us to a park to participate in a round of Disc Golf. Only one person could participate. However, they were blindfolded (with a Tiger Woods mask) so other team members could lead them. Jake was the thrower, Scott was the voice to throw to and Cooper and I led Jake to the disc. It was so fun! He did really well, got it 4 throws!

Then we headed to The Discovery Center for our first Road Block. The player had to build a 7 foot tower out of blocks. One person could assist after the tower got tall enough that the builder needed a chair. This challenge was mine! I got it about 5 feet tall and it crashed! UGH! Then I got it and Scott helped steady it at the very end and I got it within 15 minutes! Pretty good I thought! My boys were cheering me on too :) Jake wandered out front and found another bonus cache! Way to go GEOJAKE8!



Our next clue sent us to the Missouri Department of Conservation. We had to see Mark Kee for our clue ;) Mark Kee was obviously a marquis in the window of the door :) It gave us the coordinates to get our clue which was behind the building in black and white balloons. We had to pop the balloon for our coordinates. It then sent us to Reliable Scion. There we had a Detour. We could either Build It or Count It. With two people with autism on our team we definitely chose Count It lol. We had to count the number of parking spaces in the first three rows of the lot between two signs. Scott decided to split the autism and he worked with Jake and Cooper worked with me. We were in charge of counting the first row and Scott and Jake worked on the other two. The first time we counted Cooper and I got 67 spaces and Scott and Jake got 88. NOPE! So we tried again, there were two spaces that Scott wasn't sure if they were spaces or not. Still wrong! So the third time we counted I counted the rows 2 and 3. Count on row 1 never changed ;) So third time was the charm and we got it! Sooo once again the expert numbers dude screwed up! LOL! Our next clue sent us to Dickerson Park Zoo. Once again we were hit with a Road Block. This one was listed as Kid Friendly so we gave it to Cooper ;) he had to feed a giraffe :) perfect for him, nice and easy!

Jake Planking

Our next clue had a Zooduku puzzle to figure out for our next set of coordinates. We solved that and it sent us to Springfield/Branson National Airport. All we had to do there was find a sign that had our next coordinates on it. We then went to Rutledge Wilson Farms. What a fun place! I'd never been there before and we will definitely go back! We had a Detour here too. We had to Pump It or Milk It. We chose Milk It. We had to find Irene the Dairy Queen cow to milk. We found her pretty quickly and milked her really fast! We were given our next clue that had coordinates on it in the middle of the cornfield. Scott left his GPS in the car! Seriously??? So Jake went back for it as Scott headed on out to the field. Cooper and I worked on some bonus questions and he even took some pictures of the animals. I'm definitely taking Addy there soon, I think she'll love it! We all headed out to meet Scott in the middle of the cornfield, crazy in there! He had to find our team number's coin in a jar of about 100 coins and take it back for our next clue. We were running and it was crazy!

Cooper's awesome picture of the piglets ;)

We got our next clue which then sent us to Wing Stop. Another team had always been just a step in front of us the whole race and were finally leaving a stop before them but they still beat us there! This was another Road Block. Fortunately Scott is an expert wing eater and this was a no brainer, he was taking this challenge. He had to eat 3 Atomic wings for our next clue. He started after the person in front of us and I'm pretty sure he had them all eaten in about 15 seconds!

We were off for our next destination, Bass Pro Shops. Our clue led us to find the GPSs which was pretty easy. There was a sign there with our coordinates for our next destination on the sign. We took a little bit of time to find some bonus questions while we were there. If you don't have a Bass Pro, there's really no other store like it! Our coordinates sent us to Lake Springfield for our next challenge. Once we got there it was the last road block so we knew that it was all Jake. He was so excited! He got to kayak across the lake to get our next clue. Scott was able to go too to make sure Jake was safe :) Right when they got back it started raining :( Scott said our last clue was our pit stop finish!

We had to finish the race within 10.5 hours and we still had over 2 hours before we had to check in so we decided to go for the bonus destination the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame. It was raining pretty good so I didn't get pix of us there but the boys really enjoyed this stop too. There are busts of famous Missouri athletes with information about them on a plaque that we had to answer questions about. I think we did it pretty quickly too :) Then we finally headed to the Pit Stop. We were all beginning to drag! They had bbq ready for us, Cooper was thrilled! All in all we had an amazing day and had soo much fun! We didn't win since we had overlooked some simple bonus points and simple caches at all of the stations too!

We also had a gorgeous double rainbow once we got to the Pit Stop too :)

Jake did win an electric box to hide a cache in and Scott won 4 day passes to Doling Park so that's going to be fun! What a day we had! Sooo much fun and we are so thankful that we had an amazing friend offer to keep Addy for us, there is no way we could have done it with her! But since this post was lacking an Addy update, here ya go!