Getting ready for the Amazing Race

Getting ready for the Amazing Race was kind of hard. First, we emailed back and forth some clever names, such as GlitterGirls, which got several votes from non-team members. GlitterGirls would have required that we wear glitter to all the activities, which would have been A LOT of glitter. Then we toyed around with maybe using our kickball team name as a tribute (since we were champs last year and all). Our name was Holy Rollers. The name might not be what you think. We're not really holy rollers. The reason we were called that was because everyone (except one or two) were either Catholics or Lutherans. Also, most of us went to private school for elementary and middle school. So, being witty, we thought the name worked.

But, we thought about names some more, we came up with Team Spade. As mentioned before, Spade stands for the first letter of our pet names. Sadie, Pete, Annie, Dora, and Emma.

We bought some shirts and put our team name on them.

We thought about what kind of creative mode of transportation we could arrive in. You'd think with two people on the team with backgrounds in education (which supposedly is creative) we would have thought of something good. All we could think of was to arrive in a Gator or ride up on the little toy tractors. The day of the kick-off we decided we'd show up on the toy tractors, as we had access since Kelly's husband is a farmer.

We also wanted some sort of a banner. Emily and Amanda were put on that task. They went around Columbus looking like tourists with a camera in hand. They took pictures of some of the Columbus landmarks, such as the court house, Chaos I at the Commons, the Large Arch or aka the "dinosaur bone" at the Library, First Christian Church, and Tre Biccheiri (since their uncle is an owner it's a landmark to them). They also printed pictures of the team members. All of these pictures were put onto a piece of cloth, which made their banner.


Final decisions on the mode of transportation were left until the day of the kick-off because of the chance of rain.