Amazing Trek - Absolute Physical Annihilation

Where do I begin?? I'll start Friday night when the leaders reminded us that Amazing Trek starts at 9 a.m and would go till about 1 p.m. At 5:30 a.m there was a loud knock on the door. "The Amazing Trek has begun. You have 7 minutes to get down to the parking lot". And so it began. The first task was to look at all the items on the back of a truck in the dark, remember them and write them down on a piece of paper. Our team got 19 out of the 27 things right so we had a 10 minute head start for the next task - finding 7 red bandanas, one for each member of our team, on the Mark center property. We ended up trading the other team for our last one and started off to the next task way ahead.
We ran down Old Yale road to Clearbrook road where we met Greg (the organizer of all of this) in a parking lot. The task was to pick up change with our toes. Keep in mind that this is 6 in the morning and there is FROST on the parking lot! It was awful! Half way through the other team showed up, which showed our team that the day was off to an unfair start, which was a trend that frustratingly continued all day long.

With the change, we had to go to McDonalds and buy a breakfast to take to an apartment way down Clearbrook. We started in the wrong direction but corrected quickly. The other team was not so fortunate, and they ran 5 blocks in the wrong direction before figuring it out, haha!

Once we got the the right place, Greg told us it was the wrong place, we ran all the way back to the road, he phoned for the address again, and it turns out we were right so we had to run all the way back to the first place we had found, SO frustrating! But it was a breakfast of gross things like olives, snails, oatmeal milk, gross brown drink with globs in it, spam, raw weiner-things and stuff like that. The other team showed up but couldn't come in until we were done so we took our time and rested a bit.

The next step was Starbucks on South Fraser Way. On the way there we crossed a street with a car coming, and Travis dropped his cell phone half way across. He had just grabbed it as Steve grabbed him and threw him onto the sidewalk and he rolled his ankle as he landed. It was hilarious until we realized he was actually hurt! So some of the guys carried him to the Starbucks and then he ended up being okay. From Starbucks we were on a photo scavenger hunt to do some different things and then we had to develop the best one at SuperStore and take it to a car in the parking lot. Here are some of our best pictures:

After getting the picture developed, we had to go back into SuperStore and find the prices on 10 items. From there we got a reference for a library book that we had to find at a library. It was 9 a.m when we got the the library and it didn't open until 10. We were SO mad because the other team was 45 minutes behind us and now they'd have time to catch up and we'd lose our lead! So we hid behind a snowbank so that hopefully they'd keep going to the next library. They did go on by, or so we thought, so we gave the all clear and the first person to stand up was Dan. He stood straight up and a girl from the green team was standing RIGHT at the bottom of the hill. Dan did the most stealthiest move I've ever seen in my life! He did this awesome slow motion flop onto the ground and then log-rolled under the fence back behind the snowbank. It was just the thing to break the tension and make things fun again. But the other team saw us anyways so we ended up going down to the library. The green team was wandering away so we decided to hide around a corner where Steve shook a squirrel off a fence. And then at 10 a.m we all ran into the library. Green team found their clue first so it was a foot race to the next place. We ran to some outdoor stadium and Team Red ended up beating them there other than Steve who was off trying to look for a different building. So 3 people from our team had to run backwards around the track while we took turns dunking our faces into a bowl of pudding to look for gummy worms and then dunking our faces into a bowl of rice krispies to look for a 2nd gummy worm. It was disgusting to say the least but our team got the clue first and again we were off and running. We missed a bus on South Fraser Way but Travis took one for the team by running it down and we all managed to get on. We took it down to a Sikh temple where we were supposed to have lunch. However, we were all covered in pudding and felt SO disrespectful for going in looking gross. When we finally worked up the courage to do it, they kicked us out. So we phoned Luke (Trek director) and he told us to go to a temple on the other side of Abbotsford! We were nice and phoned the other team to tell them what was happening but we were mad when we went back to a bus stop and waited around for a bus. We got on one after about 10 minutes but it was the wrong one so we got off and waited another 15 minutes for the next one. In the meantime we sang songs, Dan busked in front of the bus stop (people literally walked behind us and WAY around to avoid him, it was hilarious) and we took pictures of us all spelling "Ukraine" in sign language.We finally caught the right bus and there were these 2 old ladies who told us that we had to entertain them, so Travis did a magic trick and we sang Amazing Grace for them. We just finished and the Green Team got on the same bus!! Immediately talks started and we agreed that Red team would win (because we have 7 people) and we'd split all the gift card prizes among everyone. We were all satisfied with this, hugged the old ladies good-bye and dismounted at the Sikh temple. Sikh temples are an interesting place to be. We had to take off our socks and shoes, wear head coverings and wash our hands a LOT. These lunches are open to the public but we were the only white people there. You get your food (which was naan bread, green snot-looking stuff that was spicy and good, liquidy sour cream stuff and sweet rice) and boys sit on the floor on one side and girls sit on the floor on the other. An old man came around with oranges afterwards that we had to receive with 2 hands. Apparently the boys didn't know this (who would???) and some of the older men were upset but whatever, then write the rules on the wall for outsiders to read so we don't do stuff wrong next time! We bussed back to the first apartment we went to for "breakfast", pretended we were still rivals and did some mind games. Then we ran out to a field for an obstacle course where Steve was blind-folded, Dan was mute and had to act out what Steve should be doing while Kristine couldn't look at the course but was shouting out what Steve should do by watching the actions Dan was doing. It took a few tries before we got it, and it was SO frustrating to watch, and the guys in charge kept changing the course the whole time, so it really sucked.

But we got out of there before the other team and headed off, in a van FINALLY to Lori's (asst. director of Trek) house to literally find a needle in a haystack. Needless to say we hadn't found it after 45 minutes so we got our other clue and left. The next station we had 20 minutes to make up a dance routine to a song we didn't hear, and then we had to perform it and get marked. It was hilariously fun and such a fun thing to be doing right after something so tedious!!This picture is of the finale of our dance when Travis jumps across into everyone's arms and Petra and I in front do jazz hands. It was a pretty awesome dance! The final station of the day was driving out into the country to Steve and Evy Klassen's house (Steve is the Mark Center guy). They're house is on a hazelnut farm and looks out over the Fraser valley and WOW was it amazing! The task was to shoot paintballs with a sling shot to receive certain amounts of matches, to build a fire to burn a rope that was holding a bag of groceries in a tree. Each team was given a raw egg first thing in the morning and had to carry it all day to this point without breaking it to cook over the fire we built. I was in charge of the egg and it was safely held in my person all day. We had left the haystack thing before the Green Team had even shown up, so they were at least 45 minutes behind us. But lo and behold, they showed up here about 15 mintues after we started this task so obviously again were being helped along the way by not having to stay as long at each place. The last thing was to get dropped off at a certain place and run up the hill to the Mark Center and then it was done. Our team had some confusion and lack of communication as to where to be so the Green Team ended up getting there first anyways. There was pizza supper waiting for us so we gobbled it down and had a debrief to go over why they made us do all of this. It turns out it was the best way they could introduce stress to our teams so that we could see how everyone reacted under pressure. I think our team did really well, and the Green Team spilled the beans that we had met up and decided to not compete, just to get through it. So we all get $25 gift cards to either WalMart or House of James. And we all get to be so sore that we can't walk for a few days!!!