Nashville Oyster Race, Passport 5

Just to clarify, the whole race took place on Saturday, October 24. Since I didn't sit down and write about the whole race at once, OffExploring kept putting the posts out of order (The site organizes the blogs by date and time stamps. I can change the date, but not the time of the posts).

For Passport 5, we were told to bike to Centenniel Park and that two of us would be paddling once we got there. The third person could help us search for a clue box from the banks of the pond. Having scoped out the area the week before the race, we knew that we would be biking uphill the whole way there.

We decided to head up Church Street instead of Broadway/West End. The incline didn't seem to be as steep, and traffic was better. Knowing the pond was on the north side of the park, we cut over to Patterson Street and Park View. We came out right across from the pond. This gave us a huge advantage, as we saw the clue box on our way around to the checkpoint.

All of our team members are pretty good paddlers, so we did not choose ahead of time for this one. Isaac and I were paddling, and Karen took pictures from the the banks. I wish we had taken more pictures at each of the challenges! We paddled straight to it and retrieved a plastic bag with a piece of paper in it. We actually were pretty fast at this challenge!

Once we were out of the boat, we looked at the paper with Karen. There were a whole bunch of trivia questions that we had to solve. Each answer was a number that we had to convert to a letter to spell out our next location. We had to call a few people for help on this one! The answer spelled out "Love Circle," which is a big hill in Nashville that offers one of the best skyline views of the city. I have been there before and knew the general area, but could not remember how to get there. When you're on a bike, general areas don't help much! We tried the GPS and calling several people, but no one was answering. (Thank you, Jason Duke, for calling me back! You were the only one who did!) We eventually figured out where we were going.

This time, we had to go up West End. Love Circle is on the opposite side of the intersection from Murphy Road. Again, it is a BIG hill. This was one of my greatest challenges of the race. The bike I was riding did not have as many gears as Isaac's or Karen's, and I was really struggling. Isaac and I traded bikes and he shifted the gears way down when he gave it to me. The result was that I couldn't get traction and my legs were just spinning around on the pedals as I started to fall over. Plus I couldn't reach the ground since his bike was higher than mine! Luckily I was able to catch myself without getting hurt. I was able to get it in a better gear and ride most of the way up the hill. (I did have to walk it up the last little section.)

We had to leave our bikes on the side of the road and climb to the top of the hill. Here we met the only unfriendly race volunteers of the whole day. We were supposed to use the answers from our three questions from throughout the day to figure out the combination to a lock on a tackle box. We didn't know what was going on, so we were yelled at move back. There were only three boxes so we would have to wait. The volunteers only let you try two combinations and then you had to go to the back of the line. They also didn't know how the locks were supposed to operate (Left, right, left? Do you pass the number before going on to the next?). That wouldn't have been so bad if they had been nicer about it. The first couple combinations we tried were wrong (we were using the last letter instead of the first). After that we had the right combination, but couldn't operate the lock properly. We lost a ton of time on this one, but we weren't the only ones.

There were several teams like us that kept getting sent to the back of the line. We started comparing combinations and turning methods on the locks. Eventually the volunteers took pity on us and started being a little nicer. Team after team was passing us. It was so frustrating! We eventually got it open. We were to retrieve three stickers to take back to the Transition Area. At this point, Karen got really cold from her swim in the Cumberland, so we had to bundle her up in Isaac's fleece for the ride back. We biked back downtown to the Transition Area.