August 30, 2007
Bringing nothing but a camera, our allotted money for the day, and our game faces, we started bright and early at 7:30am.
After venturing to down town Pretoria, (the capital of South Africa were we had been staying ) we received our instructions and “clues,” synchronized the timers on our cameras, and expectantly waited for the word. Go! All four teams scrambled to complete the first task while keeping an eye on our opponents.
Not everyone raced this go round. Team Zion (formally known as DOZ, AKA Casey and the Sunshine Band) had four racers: My self, Brooke, Beth, and Casey.
Fellow teammates, Brook and Beth sporting their best game faces:
The day proceeded to take us from Pretoria all over Johannesburg. One of our first tasks was to find the Pretoria Union building. Casey stopped and asked a guard a question as we were a bit turned around. We told him what we were doing and he asked us if we were with the TV show “The Amazing Race” – apparently they had just been there the day before. How fun is that? We were racing in the same place that the Amazing Race was – how funny would that have been if we had raced the day before with the Amazing Racers?!
After this we received our next clue and jumped into a coombi (an African buss) to the Jo-burg metro station. We ventured into the zoo as we were to take a picture with the “big five” after we discovered them in the zoo. Our team took a little creative liberty and took a picture in a different way!
Some creative liberty. Hey the animals are in the background. The directions did not say they needed to be alive. And we were at the zoo! Yah it works!
Some other stops along the way included this really amazing restaurant where we had to order this African platter of food and get our faces painted with African flair (the food was really good by the way). Up to this point my team was in the lead and doing quite well, then we had to go to the apartheid museum. We asked a bunch of different people where it was and they all pointed us in the same direction, the wrong one. They all pointed us to this military museum on the opposite end of town. This took us from being in the lead to over thirty minuets behind! We ended the day at this observatory that you could look out all over Jo-burg.
Polished off the platter of food at also got our faces painted:
We came in third, but we had a lot of fun and I think the four of us worked really well together. If it were not for being directed the wrong way we would have won! Next time, next time! Now we know to be sure people know what museum I am talking about before following their directions.
The team with the best time ended up being Awaken, but the team with the best time and most tasks completed correctly was Concrete, and they officially won the race. Team Concrete received 100 dollars, 50 of which they have to give to another team that must spend it on a ministry.
