The day started off at 4am. The night before, staff told us that we needed to be up and ready to go for 4am. At this god-forsaken hour of the day (who knew there was a 4:00 in the morning???), teams made their way into the Great Room where we waited for approximately 2 hours before staff finally showed up. Apparently this was to illustrate and get us accustomed to other cultures where time doesn't mean as much. Point proven.
We were given various clues that made us run across the city of Abbotsford. And when I say we ran, we litterally ran. I have never run so much in my entire life.
Clue #1 - we had to go find our team bandana's in a park, which surprisingly turned out to be one of the more difficult tasks considering it was still pitch black outside when we were looking for them in a very wooded area. For example, one of our bandanas was hidden in a swampy area, where we had to trudge through the most disgusting and raunchy smelling water I have ever smelled. No one dared to put on this particular bandana. In fact, we put it in a ziplock baggie so we wouldn't have to smell it all day long. However, because we went through the water, we ended up smelly just as bad as the bandana and we smelled like this All. Day. Long.
Clue #2 We headed back to the Mark Centre (this is where we live) for a 'missionary breakfast'. We needed to select 1 member of our team to eat a 'special' breakfast. I'm not a picky eater, so I thought I might as well give this challenge a go, but to my delight I ended up getting to eat the good breakfast...corn flakes and coffee. The other members of my team were forced to eat Balout (partially developed duck embryo eggs), seaweed, a can of gluton, a can of spam, hot peppers, gross fish and some weird looking prunes. It has never been so hard for me to eat a bowl of cornflakes as I was surrounded by people vomitting at the table and outside the door. Talk about gross. I would never wish this experience on my worst enemy. In the end, we decided to take the 20min time delay in order to not finish our breakfast. That was probably the best decision we made all day!
Clue #3 Fishing gummy worms out of a bowl of chocolate pudding and rice krispies with our mouths. You can imagine what our faces looked like.
Clue #4 Running to the mall to buy some things from the dollar store.
Clue #5 Running to the librairy to search for a book containing our next clue, which led us to the Fire Station.
Clue #6 This was probably my favorite clue/event. We were required to put on all the firefighting gear, go through an obstacle coarse carrying a heavy jug of liquid, unroll a hose while attempting to knock over a pylon (which is a lot harder than it sounds, just so you know) followed by running with a hose to the end of the parking lot where we had to use the hose to knock over a stop sign with the water. Lastly, we had to run up 3 flights of stairs for a picture (keep in mind we are wearing a few extra pounds of gear while doing all of this). Like I said, this was a fun event.
Rachael & Aleah sporting their gear
running through the obstacle course
Clue #7 Go to a U-Catch Fishery and catch a trout. Had it not be for getting lost/going to the wrong U-Catch place, we would have been in good shape at this point in the race, however it ended up putting us back about an hour or so. The fish we we caught, we had to carry around with us in a plastic baggie for the remainder of the day. Gross.
Clue #8 Eat lunch at a Sikh Temple. Talk about an interesting experience. The food was less than desirable, but I always knew I didn't like Indian food. However, the culture and the experience was pretty cool.
Clue #9 Road Block. We were so thankful to have a road block because it gave us a chance to catch up with the other teams. We were all given about 20 verses of Psalm 119 to memorize before we could get our next clue. Our team was successful and within 10 min we were on our way again.
Clue #10 We had to find a needle in a Haystack. Seriously. Thankfully we came across it pretty quickly.
Clue #11 We made our way to a Hazelnut Farm and had to pick a pail of hazelnuts before we got our next clue. The trick was that no 2 people could be touching a hazelnut at the same time.
Clue #12 This is where the trout we caught earlier in the day was put to use. We had to make a fire out of sawdust and a flint, gut and fillet the fish, cook it and eat it. The fire had to get big enough in order for it to burn through a rope, which then let a bag of cooking utensils fall down from a tree before we could even start to cook the fish. This was also a surprisingly fun task and where our team finally took the lead for the first time.
That's right, I'm gutting a fish! Who would have ever thought???
Rachael and I stepping WAY out of our comfort zones.
Jacob making our fire out of a flint and sawdust.
Team Thailand was having a little more difficulty with their fire.
Clue #13 We had to search Mill Lake for a "Trek Official" (we had no idea who this was) and had to perfrom a bible story skit in attempt to draw a crowd. We acted out the Christmas Story and we definitely drew a crowd and we were rewarded with Chocolate Chip Cookies. Finally something normal to eat.
Clue #14 This was the last clue of the day. Nothing like ending off an extremely long day with a corn maze in Chilliwack. We ran solidly through the corn maze looking for various clues before running through the finish line.
our lovely interns Jess and Sarah who put together this crazy day. Nice work ladies.
Sadly we did not finish first, but we did come in 2nd, so we were pretty pumped about that. The purpose of this activity was to help us prepare for working as a team and experiencing various things that we will most likely encounter while in a foreign country such as unappealling food and time differences. This was also meant to stretch us and stress us so that we could see how each of our team members respond under stressful situations. Our team worked amazingly well together - I'm not saying we are perfect, but we worked well together.
Team Portugal
Team Thailand
Global Servants
(although Heidi has since changed to Team Portugal - horray!)
Fall Trek 2010
When I got into my bed that night, I think I fell asleep in record time. My body has never felt so sore and I don't recall ever feeling that exhausted in my entire life. I don't think this is something I want to repeat any time soon, but it was a lot of fun.
All I could think of is that your dad would be so proud of you gutting a fish. What an unreal day! I am also very glad you got the cornflakes - I wouldn't have eaten any of the other stuff (cornflakes are bad enough! bring on the Reese Peanut Butter puffs!)
ReplyDeleteLove you lady. So good to see pictures of your beautiful face.