amazing race ~ team purple!

ready....GO! ha ha ha! that's just for you brandon. :0) this year's amazing race was fun!

• first off was the six mile walk through gresham. we had to find and take pictures of about 20 different varieties of trees. fun, but it started pouring down rain during the middle of it. guess who didn't have umbrellas?
• we then made a quick winco run for groceries for the weekend.
• next was a trip to a naturopathic doctor's office. a friend of the pastor...he writes poems and we each read one and then he handed us a stack of pictures for our next clue.
• the pictures were of approx. 25-30 statues/sculptures in the portland area that we needed to find and take pictures of...so many! we didn't end up finding them all...
• we headed to milwalkie city hall to pick up our next clue. when we arrived, we discovered that the person who was to give us the clue just went on lunch. since we had 45 min. to kill, we decided to go get pizza for lunch. :o)
• on to photograph a miniature statue of liberty and a bomber plane. random picture opportunities...
• we then went to a shop called the broken arrow, and bought a bow and four arrows. you should've seen the guys in there when they asked the four of us girls if we had ever shot one. ha ha ha! nope. we were all excited though.
• next was a frustrating stop. we had to go to the goodwill outlet. i had never been there before...basically it is a goodwill without ANY organization. everything is in big bins that have wheels on them. you have to dig...apparently they left us clues in several places but the bins get rotated out frequently...we searched for about 30 min. before calling it quits. we called our pastor and he gave us the next clue.
• next was a stop in downtown portland to pick up a clue from a friend who works in a skyscraper.
• we had to find a specific shop and buy a trinket that our pastor would like...
• next we had to take a picture of a specific tree in washington park.
• then the fun began...in washington park there is a place to shoot bow and arrows. (i really don't know the correct terminology...) anyways. it was so fun! all three teams were there at the same time, which caused some competitive sparing, but i loved the challenge of it all. we were supposed to hit paper targets twice from a certain distance. definitely harder than i thought, but i started to get the hang of it. i would love to go back and try for an afternoon.
• oh, then we headed to the beaverton malibu raceway to race go-karts. THAT WAS AMAZING! we only got to do three laps each, but it was so fun!
• next we went to a place called Ceramic Cafe where we painted on tiles. i love being creative, but not always with a time constraint. at this point, we were really starting to get exhausted.
  

• we all agreed and headed for the very last stop in forest grove at the college campus. we found the last clue and headed off to stub stewart state park. we were the first ones to the camp because we skipped a few things, but it was still about 830ish. so we raced for pretty much 14.5 hours. long day!!! the last team came in around midnight.