Great Urban Race - Austin

Friday afternoon seemed to last forever...tick tock, tick tock. That's usually how it goes when you have something you're looking forward to. I've had a dream for a while of going on The Amazing Race. Annemarie and I tried out for the show last year and I really had my hopes up that we had a chance. It didn't pan out, so when I heard from my awesome friend Dana that The Great Urban race was a micro version of the show + you didn't have to be "selected" + it was in my backyard, in Austin, I was in!!!

I mentioned it last week and Mindi's face lit up…I knew I had my partner! J There was lots of chatting on the way and we got to Austin in no time to meet Dana and Liz for dinner at Shady Creek. The waiter stunk, so we decided to abort those plans and do a little pre-race shopping and grab Olive Garden for dinner.

Dana wasn't feeling well, so she and Liz decided to stay home and recover. Mindi and I sadly left on our own to make them proud on the race. We will definitely do this again with Dana as soon as she's back to her awesome, normal self!

We arrived at Pease Park at about 11:00 and hung out and made new friends until the kick off at noon. They encouraged costumes, so we got into it and dressed for the time of year as Easter bunnies. At 12:00 sharp, they passed out the clues and we were off!

We bolted to a shady spot and worked through the 12 clues. We had most of them mapped and we were so smart to buy a public transportation map to pinpoint lots of the locations! We were a tad confused as we started, jumped on and off the bus, but finally got back on track. We were headed to Whole Foods to get our canned food for one of the challenges, when we saw lots of people over at Waterloo records. We thought, "oh good idea" that they were completing a clue where you had to take a pic with a person wearing a concert tee. We found a guy with a Peter Gabriel shirt and were on our way. We got our canned food, canoed around Town Lake, took a pic at the Reagan High School baseball field and with Peter Pan at the mini golf course, then dropped off our food at the Mary Lee Foundation. After all of this running, we headed toward 6^th Street. Our "phone a friend" buddies Dana and Liz helped us solve a few clues and we took our pic at The Lucky Lizard and the big red mmmpanada stand. We did take a quick stop to dance a little to the tunes blaring on 6^th Street as people partied through the sunny Saturday afternoon. We had 2 clues left. 1) Where did Willie Nelson play on Nov 2, 2000 and 2) Take a pic with the longhorn statue at the co-op. This is when we realized that Willie played at the WATERLOO!! Oh, crap, we had to backtrack all the way to Lamar and take a pic in front of the store instead of inside. Oh, boo!! We ran our bunny tails down there then made our way to the longhorn statue. On the bus, we made friends with 2 girls from NYC and met back up with 2 other friends from the very beginning of the race. We all made our way to the statue and snapped the pic. We got back to Pease Park in just under 4 hours…hot and sweaty, but with big smiles!

It was a really fun adventure and can't wait to do it again…hopefully this season and with a bigger group so we can strategize all together and place in the top 25! Our final rank was 88 of about 230 pairs…which was just awesome for us rookies!

After a stop at Thundercloud Subs, on the way home to Houston Mindi just couldn't resist the cute bluebonnets on the side of the highway, so we stopped for a little photoshoot as the sun set! J