I got to New Orleans two days early, which gives me one good day to explore the city, rest, oh and maybe hit the casino, before what was going to be a pretty bit race. There were not many of the unathletic, just there for fun types that there are in the preliminary races. Bourbon Street has an interesting smell in the morning that will definitely wake you up. The race began easy enough, taking the streetcar to Tulane, where there were three challenges including solving a word search. Dannel wont admit it, but I got us through that thing pretty quick. There was a triangle puzzle which looked like someone sabotaged it, so we took our best guess and moved on. We caught the streetcar back to the French Quarter, and with Hans and Kat's precision support system, we hit every stop we needed to hit efficiently. The one hiccup was a particular hotel, where two REAL six foot alligators were waiting for us. I don't know who was more petrified, me or Dannel, but I psyched him into picking up the gator, I grabbed the tail, and we carried it around the room. The gator must have an enlarged medula oblangata because he was not pleased with being picked up. Hans, like a knight appearing from the horizon appeared on a bike with the hot sauce we needed, and we cruised into the finish line in second place, which was astonishing, easily qualifying for the final race for the 10K. I was asked, ALOT, how we finished in second place, what our strategy was. Well the answer is, great support team. We had a couple hours before the final race, so we grabbed a bite to eat, showered, and came back refreshed for the next race. I was admittedly nervous, because we had a one in ten chance at ten thousand dollars. We waited around for a little bit before being loaded onto a bus and being taken to City Park. Let me just say, we are horrible lego assemblers, murder mystery solvers, and boat paddlers, and this led us to be terribly behind right off the bat. We were the last team off the lake and we missed the bus to town, and ended up having to run back, which is at least a few miles from where we needed to be. It was basically a disaster. We ended up going through some of the worst parts of New Orleans, and compounding this, there was a three hour time limit virtually assuring that no team would finish without penalties. My thought was to finish everything in the French Quarter, and just take our penalties, but the others decided to head down Magazine Street and actually try to finish this. We actually got to our first stop, Tee Eva's, just before the time was about to expire. Dannel, like a trooper, still tried to finish an ENTIRE SWEET POTATO PIE. This is normally good, when you are not eating the whole thing, and you haven't ran probably 10-12 miles cumulative for the day. Poor Tee Eva thought something was wrong with the pie, and I laughed as I snacked on some free samples of pralines, and had a diet coke and caught some of the LSU game at a neighboring bar. Ok, thats a bit of a stretch, but yeah, the race was over before he even finished the pie. We never even went to the finish line, we headed to the hotel, showered up, and went to the after party at the Tropical Isle, which was actually pretty fun even though we did terrible in the second race. The fact that the Beard's completed all the checkpoints and finished in time was rather amazing. They deserved it, Good Job.
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