Day 4 Photos: The Amazing Race, Man Overboard

The skies finally cleared up and we were ready for some racing today.  Before the big/amazing race, however, there were classes to be taken.  The kids tell us that folk dance is pretty intense.  We took a peek in and thought the kids were doing P90X.  Instead, they were just warming up before they had to do cartwheels and splits and back bends and hold up their own leg for a minute (apparently we’re a cheer camp now?).  In ID, younger campers learned about the Monkey King and Peking Opera, while the older campers had a discussion on the model minority and the bamboo ceiling.  In sports kids played kickball, folk sports and modern dance continued trucking along with routines.  Classes that were far along started learning how to shuffle to Party Rock Anthem.

In the afternoon we were finally ready for The Amazingly Awesome Amazing Race.  Teams competed to complete eight stations around campus.  Upon successful completion, they would get clues to help solve a final crossword puzzle.  The eight stations were as follows:

• Mat Stacker – teams had to stack two mats located on opposite sides of a room, while standing on top of them
• Lava River – each team member had to carry another team member a set distance, without repeating a method of carrying that had already been used
• Twister – teams used the rules of Twister to travel from one side of the playing field to another…except the playing field got smaller and smaller as the game went on…
• Amoeba – teams had to interlock hands to create one unit, and then walk together while carrying various, awkwardly shaped objects
• Rope Maze – one-by-one, blindfolded team members entered a rope maze.  if they messed up, the next team member went…except this new team member wasn’t able to see what mistake was made…
• Farmville – team members were given an animal to charade.  once they found their pairs, they had to charade their animal to the rest of the team and have them guess correctly.
• Parachute – using only their teeth, team members used trash bags to carry various objects across a room
• Barrel Roll – one by one, team members dizzy batted 10 times, then dove through a foam barrel.   once in the barrell, a counselor rolled the barrel as fast as possible to make escape that much more difficult.

The Ewoks took the crown, being both the first team to complete all eight tasks AND the first team to complete the crossword puzzle (in an impressing 24 minutes).  This crossword featured fun factoids about the counselors, such as the name of LJ’s car and several counselors’ guilty music pleasure.

After TAAAR was over, the entire camp played a game of Shipwreck.  In this game, counselor Barry called out various signals.  Depending on the signal, campers had to arrange themselves in groups of 1 through 5:

• Hit the Deck (1) = last person to touch the ground is out
• Man Overboard (2) = one person jumps on another’s back
• Man The Pumps (3) = two people pump a third person’s arms
• Life Jacket (4) = three people interlock hands and surround a fourth person in the middle
• Mess Hall (5) = four people stand on one leg, pretending to eat over the fifth person that acts as a table

Talia beat out Justin to claim this year’s victory before we went back to the dorm for lights out.