For quite some time, Carla and I have wanted to be on the show The Amazing Race. When we saw a link to a similar type of adventure, we quickly signed up. That was how we got started with City Chase. We chose the Chicago location mostly because it was geographically between the two of us (Iowa & Ohio). In all of our preparations, the one thing we didn’t expect was the extreme difficulty of the race.

We both got to Chicago on Thursday evening and got up Friday morning to practice. We had a team meeting over breakfast at IHOP, which involved mostly eating and no meeting. Then we proceeded to practice the rail and bus systems. The rail system was easy navigating. We had oodles of experience with rails in Europe so that was no challenge. The hard part was the bus system. For the majority of the afternoon on Friday, we roamed around Chicago, being part tourist and part hunter. Tourist because we kept pulling out our map every block and a half. Hunter because we got an early clue to Saturday’s race which involved collecting a very specific collection of business cards. In our business card hunting, we ended up in a fire station, getting a grand tour of the kitchen and lounge. The firemen were very nice, but didn’t have any business cards.

We went out to Navy Pier and also to Millennium Park, where Kevin had proposed back in February. It was very reminiscent for me. 🙂 The big riot at Navy Pier was the pirates, the dancing pirates. It was the funniest thing and also very entertaining!

After all of our adventures, we decided we were hungry for some Chicago-style pizza. When Kevin and I were in Chicago, we ate at Giordano’s and, though we had to wait over two and a half hours, the pizza, at least, was good! Carla and I decided to hit it up. As we stood on the street corner reading our map, a gentleman pulled up on his bike and asked if we needed help. We said that we thought we knew where we were going, but weren’t sure. He said, “Well, I’m the guy who made that map so I can help!” When he found out we were looking for pizza, he suggested a different place where he thought made the best pizza in town, Pizzeria Uno, or it’s sister restaurant, Pizzeria Due. Uno had a 2 hour wait so we went up the street to Due, where there was only a 30 minute wait to be seated (the pizza would still take an hour and a half…). After sitting for what seemed like ages, we finally got our pizza. It was burnt. It was the worst pizza I have ever had. What a waste.

That got both of us in terrible moods and it was 10:30 by this time so we were tired and cranky too. By the time we finished, took the bus to the blue line, took the blue line rail to the airport, and took the shuttle from the airport to our hotel, it was about 1 AM and we were both ready to hit the sack. So much for resting up for our big race…

Saturday morning came too early and we missed the 7 o’clock shuttle by about 3 minutes so we got a slightly late start, but it ended up being fine because we arrived at the Daley Center downtown in plenty of time for the start. After being severely annoyed by the l-o-n-g welcome and rules stuff (where we couldn’t understand anything the guy was saying because he had the mic too close to his mouth), we got started. We had no idea where we were going to get our clue sheet, but we just followed the crowds of people (there were over 1,200).

Everyone else seemed to have high ambitions of actual racing in this competition, which put us severely behind to begin with. More importantly, however, was our lack of knowledge of the downtown Chicago streets, businesses, and transportation. When we got our clues, we were so overwhelmed with the difficulty in deciphering them that our own Olympic flame was immediately squelched or, probably more accurately, drenched to not even a leftover smoke trail. If you think that I’m being dramatic, please know that I am not at all! We tried to keep our spirits up and found a challenge that we could decipher.

We figured out (thanks to Kevin) that it was at Wrigley Field somewhere and, since there was a Cubs game that day, it really wasn’t all that difficult to follow the crowds onto the correct rail line to get there. The biggest challenge came, however, once we arrived at Wrigley and couldn’t figure out where to go from there. We thought it was at a bar named “Moes” from the clue, but no one seemed to know where that place might be. Finally, we caught another team and asked them. They hadn’t figured out the “Moes” part, but knew where it was once we told them. They were of the very competitive nature though and went dashing away, far ahead of us. By this point, we were both hot and grounchy. Go figure. It didn’t help once we realized what our challenge was. We had to take a camera phone to the stadium and get several videos of various nature with different people doing different things. At one point, we got so mad that we actually were mean to the City Chase volunteers back at the bar. It was just way too frustrating for us.

We finally finished, but by the time we got back to downtown for another challenge, we had spent nearly 3 hours just for one of the challenges! Meanwhile, Carla got really sick from overheating and so we had to pause the race for a second stop at McDonalds. (Our first stop was at the beginning of the race to orient ourselves with the map and the clues…and for some double cheeseburgers.) We spent quite a bit of time there until Carla felt well enough to continue on and then spent the remainder of the day bumbling around trying to find at least one more challenge to complete.

One of them hinted at either repelling from a building or zip lining. This was something that I really wanted to do so we figured that, since we obviously weren’t going to come even close to finishing the race by 4 o’clock (the ending time), we would just try to find this high heights adventure and get what little amount of fun out of the day that we could. It turned out that it was at the very end of Navy Pier so, if you know any of Chicago geography at all, you will know that we basically trekked from one end to the other and then to the side.

As our lucky day would have it, when we got to the site (which turned out to be repelling), they told us that there probably wouldn’t be enough time for us to go since they only had an hour left before they had to shut down and there was quite a line in front of us. We decided that since we had nothing else to do anyway, we would wait and see. I was quite excited when, at about 10 to 4, I was getting harnessed to go down the side of the building.

The terrible part of this story is that of all the things I said I would not do in this race, one was climb a ladder. I am just as terrified of ladders as I am of elevators, maybe even more so. When I went into the building to start my ascent to the top, there were regular stairs. Fine. The further up I kept climbing though, the stairs started changing from carpeted to stone to a tight little curling cement stairway. I felt like I was up in Notre Dame all over again. And then as I curved around the last stone stair, I came into a tiny stone utility room. I thought it was a big trick and that I had somehow missed the top of the building. Upon further investigation though, I realized that the arrows pointed up and the only way up was on an old metal, wobbly ladder. I shook the whole way up. I just kept looking up and praying that I would make it.

Somehow I did and then once I was up there, I had to use Dad’s trick of looking straight ahead instead of down. Well, to be honest, the first trick was to actually climb over the high railing so that I was standing on the ledge to repell off of. I tried so hard to be brave, but I was absolutely shaking. The guy who helped me told me to trust the rope, but it took all of my strength to actually lean back off of the building with nothing below to catch me should the thin rope not hold its own end of the bargain. Once I got started, I was fine–and really, nothing was quite as bad as that dumb ladder–but it was the getting started part that made my legs shake so much.

All in all, I was pleased that I got to do at least one thing that day that I really enjoyed, despite the ladder part. So, in part celebration of the day being over and part need of air conditioning again, we made our third and final stop at McDonalds. There was supposed to be an after party celebration at a bar and grille, but we were too tired to even try to navigate our way there and, besides, we didn’t want people asking us how many challenges we had finished. In talking with other teams though, we felt better because we were at such a disadvantage to start with and they, even those who have lived in Chicago all of their lives, were having trouble figuring out some of the clues.

By the time we got back to our hotel, Carla threw up (she still wasn’t feeling well from several paragraphs ago), showered, Carla passed out in bed, and I watched the Olympics, we were too far gone to really think back through the day. In retrospect, I am pretty sure that we will not be participating again unless they make it a little bit easier for an all-across-the-board variety of people. This is not to say that we don’t want to do The Amazing Race though! It was just a lot of stress, frustrations, heat, and sickness to handle in one day.

Even though I may sound negative about this experience, looking back, it really was memorable and, only a week later, I am already weeding out the bad memories and remembering only the funny ones. Who knows, probably a year from now we’ll be stupid enough to try to do it again. But hopefully not… 🙂