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Overview
The Urban Challenge
was first staged in 2002. It is a combination treasure hunt
and race, played in a national circuit of 22 cities, with the top
10 teams in each city qualifying for free entry to the National
competition. This year the Nationals will be held in New Orleans
on November 15th.
The top seven teams in the semi-finals at Nationals go into the
finals on the same day, with the winning team taking home the grand
prize of $50,000.
In the local (city) games, two-person teams take a 30 question,
multiple choice trivia quiz. The results of this quiz are used to
seed the teams into ten groups, which are released three minutes
apart. The trivia quiz is very important - teams who are seeded
in the last wave start 27 minutes later than teams in the first
wave!
At the start, teams are given a digital camera and 12 checkpoint
clues, and randomly assigned a starting checkpoint. They must
travel to and photograph themselves at each of 12 checkpoints, in
order, starting with their assigned starting checkpoint.
Teams may travel on foot or using public transportation only. Therefore
foot speed is a huge advantage, and very fast runners (and I do
mean very fast) have a huge competitive advantage.
If a team finds the "skip chick" on the course and takes
a picture with her, they may skip any checkpoint of their choice.
Teams who reach the correct twelve checkpoints (or eleven plus
the skip chick) are ranked according to their finishing times.
The clues are very trivia intensive, therefore it is almost a requirement
to bring a cell phone and have one or more friends standing by with
high speed internet access.
Team "Fish out of Water" - how it
happened
Hi, this is Alexandra writing.
In addition to producing "retail" treasure hunts for
large numbers of people, I've been playing in various types of games
for my entire adult life. But the Urban Challenge didn't initially
appeal to me, because I'm not a runner. I did once racewalk
the Honolulu Marathon in under 6 hours (for the Leukemia Society's
Team in Training program)...but being a fast walker doesn't quite
cut it in the Urban Challenge. Not when the top seven teams
in the finals in Las Vegas last year included a pair of EcoChallenge
endurance athletes, some Ironmen triathletes, and an Olympic 1500
meter runner. Not to mention, the teams in the finals at Nationals
last year covered about 20 miles on foot - in one day!
Since I don't like to play in games where I don't have even a remote
chance to win, I decided not to play in the Urban Challenge last
year. But when some former teammates of mine in the Stanford
game, Charlie and Justin Graham, won the San Francisco event in
2002, then finished third at Nationals, I became intrigued. (By
the way, Charlie and Justin, who are both about 3:10 marathoners,
claim that they were the least athletically accomplished
team in the finals last year - now that's a scary thought!)
So I got to thinking, why not recruit a pair of smart, fast runners,
and provide logistical / internet / phone-a-friend support for them?
I'd be very good at that, and I'd still get to be part of what looked
like a very exciting race.
Last fall I began planning to do that. I paid $100 in December
to enter a team into the San Francisco event, and planned to write
and produce a Mock Urban Challenge this summer as a warmup event,
to give the teams I recruited a chance to experience the game format
before they actually played on July 19th.
I did meet someone I thought would have an excellent chance to
win - he's a very fast runner (and a fireman with Engine Company
3 here in San Francisco). But he ended up deciding not to play.
Tis a pity - I thought he would have a good chance to win,
and now that I've experienced the game first-hand, I'm pretty sure
with me and Jen doing phone support, and with a good teammate, he
would definitely have finished in the top ten, and would probably
have finished in the top 3. Oh well, it all worked out in the end!
I held the Mock
Challenge in June and the winning team, the only team I would
have been interested in supporting, had already paid their entry
fee and had a support team lined up. They expressed interest in
having me support them, but there was that question of the registration
I'd already paid for...
So then I thought, I'll try to sell my registration. And
I posted an email to the [urbanchallengers] yahoogroups list to
either sell my registration, or recruit a teammate.
As fate would have it, Kim Woolley replied to my email a week before
the event, saying she'd like to talk about our forming a team. Kim
is from Phoenix, the HQ of the Urban Challenge, played in the pre-season
warmup game in Phoenix in 2002, and with her then-teammate, finished
7th in Phoenix in 2002, then went to the Nationals in Las Vegas,
and finished in the top third.
Game Day
On game day, Jen came up from Palo Alto to do support from the
computer at my house, where I have DSL. I had bookmarked
a bunch of solving tools on the internet, and printed out some instructions
for Jen (who didn't need them, she's the Google queen and a whiz
at research). Kim, for her part, lined up an army of
friends to provide phone-a-friend support from around the country.
I took the bus down to the start at Jillian's, and when I got inside
and saw all the other teams, I thought "I'm going to have to
concede superior foot speed to every other freaking team in this
race!" They all looked so damned - athletic. Sigh...
Well, there's something about knowing you can't win that calms
your nerves. So, I resolved to play smart, have a good time, and
make sure that Kim got to all of the correct checkpoints. Because
she had told us when we met that she had never missed a checkpoint
in the Urban Challenge. And I didn't want to be the person responsible
for breaking her streak!
When the trivia quiz began, it went very quickly. Jillian's
is a sports bar, with TV screens everywhere. The questions
were flashed on the screen for about 15 seconds each. We had
to mark off our answers with a #2 pencil on a Scantron sheet. Kim
said to make sure we put our team number on our sheet, because she
knew of at least one team who had forgotten to put their number
on their sheet, and guess what? They started in the last wave!
As we were going through the questions, I didn't know a
lot of the answers for sure, but we both had a feeling that we were
doing extremely well, with judicious guessing. We communicated
almost non-verbally, and seemed to agree on almost everything. On
only two questions, I disagreed with Kim about the answers - and
she was right both times. She also knew that the geographic
center of the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii, is North
Dakota. Go figure!
After they collected our sheets, the results were posted, one at
a time, on the TV screens. Teams would whoop and clap as they
realized they'd gotten a question right. Kim and I didn't do that,
we just kept score, but our excitement quietly grew. We got
the first eight questions in a row right...then on the ninth question,
we got it wrong because I had changed Kim's suggested answer. Oh
well, I won't make that mistake again.
There was one question where the answer wasn't given - I think
it was "How many words did Dumbo utter in the animated film?"
We had put down zero.
By the time all the answers had appeared on the TV screens, we
knew that we had gotten 15 (or 16) right out of the first 20, and
9 of the last 10. When they announced the Dumbo answer (yes,
zero, he wasn't named Dumb-o for nothing, I guess), we knew we had
gotten 16 of 20, and 25 total. (Only the first 20 answers
count, and the remaining 10 are used for breaking ties, if necessary.)
They scored the sheets very quickly. Within maybe 3 to 5 minutes,
the bib numbers of the teams in the first wave were flashed on the
TV screens - and we saw our number!
We dashed outside to wait for the official start, and were actually
the first team to have our passport stamped in the 2003 leg of the
San Francisco Urban Challenge.
The Race
We had been assigned to start with checkpoint #5. My heart
sank when I saw that, because I assumed it would be pretty far from
the start. Kim told me not to worry, any checkpoint could be a good
(or bad) one. As it happens, we were pretty darned happy with checkpoint
#5 when we found out where it was. It was the closest to the
start of all the checkpoints and we saw the skip chick when
we got there, and took a photo with her. So, we had our "free
pass" in the bag at the very start of the game, and had the
rest of the game to think about which clue to skip. A pretty
good feeling.
They’re Geoff Yaw’s Favorite! Checkpoint 5 shares
its name with a variety of Pepperidge Farm cookies. Find this
hotel within a half-mile of race headquarters.
{Geoff Yaw is on the Urban Challenge staff, and runs each
city's course a few days before the game.}
We dashed to the nearby internet cafe to fax our clues to Jen,
and read this clue to her on the way.
She found the answer almost immediately - the Hotel Milano on
5th street. Since Jillian's is on 4th Street, and the internet
cafe was halfway between 4th Street and 5th Street on Howard,
we literally almost wasted no time on this one.
We took only a couple of minutes at the internet cafe to fax
the clues to Jen (actually, to my efax phone number, which forwards
faxes to my email account as email attachments). As it happens,
the mail server that Yale University uses for alumni email went
down sometime on Friday night, the first time ever in all
the years I've had that email address. Jen, who checked
my email frequently throughout the game and was prepared to forward
the clues to all of Kim's phone-a-friends, never received the
fax! Who was it who said "the best laid plans...?"
Our backup plan if the fax didn't work, was to call the clues
in to my t-hunts.com voicemail phone, reading each one as a separate
message. We had given all of our phone-a-friends the password
to the voicemail. But this system also didn't work
very well, because there was a lot of ambient noise on the street,
and I forgot to spell some of the words (people's names) in the
clue - making it difficult for our support people to look things
up.
We ended up spending a lot of time on the phone during
the game, mostly with Jen. I was surprised at how much
time we spent, actually. We did manage to always stay a
couple of clues ahead, though, so we were never just cooling our
heels waiting for Jen to research something. We kept
her very busy, however, and I'm amazed at how cool, calm
and collected she stayed with the rapid fire requests we directed
at her - sometimes two requests to do two different things in
a 30 second time span!
You Go, Girl! Checkpoint 6 is a memorial to
the person who is credited with rallying the good people of San
Francisco in the 40’s to save the cable cars. Find the memorial
on the Barbary Coast Trail near the American birthplace of Irish
Coffee.
Ah, when I was growing up here in San Francisco, my mom and her
friends used to go here for drinks all the time. They called
it the "B.V." - the Buena Vista Cafe at Beach &
Hyde Streets, near the cable car turntable.
Believe it or not, two of the twelve checkpoints in this year's
Urban Challenge were actually clue sites I had used in previous
games I had produced - and this was one of them, used last year
in the YABA4 game.
I knew about the Barbary Coast Trail (in fact, I recommend Daniel
Bacon's book about it to all my treasure hunt participants)..but
I didn't specifically know who this person was from the 1940's.
Anyway, we had plenty of time to have Jen do research, because
this checkpoint was pretty darned far from the Hotel Milano.
In addition to doing internet research, Jen was also serving
as our navigator, looking up bus routes on Muni's interactive
web site.
The MUNI web site said to take the cable car from Powell &
Market to Beach & Hyde. Which would have been very thematic
with the clue but...NOT!!
While Powell & Market is very close to 5th Street, the cable
car is *not* the fastest way to get across town, traveling at
a glacial 9.5 mph and stopping frequently to load tourists.
Native San Franciscans know that you never wait at the turntable
at Powell & Market, because on a busy day, several cars will
come before you get to the front of the line. The cable car conductors
will always save a few seats for people further up the line, so
a good tip is to walk up a block or two and wait for the cable
car there.
Anyway, when we got there, there was a long line and no cable
car in sight. Not to mention, only half the cars that originate
there actually go to Beach & Hyde - the other half go to Bay
& Taylor, over a half mile away.
So, I suggested to Kim that we run (er, shuffle) up to catch
the 30 Stockton at Stockton & Sutter, which we did.
We got off at North Point and Hyde and ran down to the cable
car turntable, where we quickly found a memorial to Frieda Klussman,
and took our photo there.
Use the Force … A certain series of seven alpha-numeric
characters always appears in movies by George Lucas. Checkpoint
7 is the establishment on Fisherman’s Wharf at the address that
corresponds to the last numeric character in that series.
Aah, the only clue where I can say we made any mistakes that
cost us time.
I was pretty sure right away that the alpha-numeric characters
were THX1138. I thought that was the title of George Lucas's
first movie, starring Robert Duvall.
So, we were looking for a street address of 8 somewhere on Fisherman's
Wharf.
This is where a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
I knew that the streets in San Francisco running north/south
start their numbering at Market Street, and the numbers get higher
from there. So the street we were looking for was not one of the
north/south streets.
In the east/west streets, the numbering starts to the east at
the waterfront (the Embarcadero) and the numbers get bigger from
there.
So, I thought the address had to be 8 North Point, or 8 Bay,
or 8 Jefferson.
It briefly occurred to me that there was a restaurant on the
wharf with a big "9" on it...but I didn't remember an
8.
So, we walked down Jefferson, right past freaking Alioto's
#8 (!), and went to all three of the wrong addresses.
While we were doing this, we spotted the only other Urban Challenge
team we had seen so far in the game, crossing the street in front
of us.
Meantime, Jen was googling like mad, and had come up with a Motel
Super 8 labeled as being at Fisherman's Wharf - but the address
was in the 2400 block of Lombard, I think, and I knew that was
at least two miles from Fisherman's Wharf.
Then, as we were standing at Pier 39, looking around, Kim spotted
a huge 8 above Alioto's at Jefferson and Taylor, two blocks
behind us, across a massive parking lot. We had walked
right past it!
And at that exact moment, Jen called to tell us the checkpoint
was Alioto's #8. She had actually googled "8 Fisherman's
Wharf" as a phrase in quotation marks, and Alioto's had come
up!
So, I'm practically a San Francisco native (I've lived here since
I was four), and I never knew that Fisherman's Wharf was an actual
address, just like a regular street.
I ask Kim, the experienced one, how close we have to be to the
checkpoint, because we're two long blocks away from Alioto's,
and I knew the next checkpoint was in North Beach, so Alioto's
was out of our way. Kim said as long as the checkpoint was
visible in the photo, we were okay. So we took the picture there,
and headed for North Beach.
I'd say we wasted about 20 minutes on that clue. And I should
have known Alioto's right away!!!
Busting out the patented wacky equation™! The
blank in ____________ in America or _____________ Highway Plus
To establish and organize something for the future, esp. an institution
Equals Checkpoint 8 Find this saloon in North Beach.
Ah, this one should have been easier but...we at least didn't
waste any time on it. I thought the blank might be
"lost" but to be honest, though I had heard of "Lost
Highway" (a David Lynch film), I hadn't heard of "Lost
in America" - though someone later on told me it was also
the name of a movie.
We got this by calling my friend Hank Davis, who has been a teammate
of mine in the Chinese
New Year's Treasure Hunt for maybe the past 10 years, and
who owns Golden Gate
Jeep Tours. He used to live in North Beach, and he knows every
restaurant and bar in San Francisco. Seriously. (He also
played James Bond in last year's YABA game.)
So, we called him and asked him to rattle off some names of saloons
in North Beach. The second one he mentioned was the Lost and Found
Saloon - bingo!
Jen found that it was on Grant Avenue near Green, so we started
walking up to Columbus Avenue to catch a bus..it didn't help very
much, we waited for it for at least five minutes, and it only
saved us 6 blocks of walking. I could see that Kim was chafing
to just run but, it was uphill (slightly) - whine.
We got off at Green, ran over to Grant, and snapped a photo at
the saloon.
By the way, we saved some time during the game because Kim turned
out to be very good at taking photos of the pair of us with her
arm extended, so we didn't need to find strangers to take our
pictures for us. Unfortunately, our camera didn't work very
well, and usually the first shot didn't "take" and we'd
have to do it over.
Forget it, it’s Chinatown… Find the Chinatown
establishment that shares its name with the major work of an author
who lost his head for asserting that the English Parliament did
not have the right to usurp papal authority in favor of the king.
Ahhh....I couldn't believe it when I saw this clue!
I run a game called BATH (the Bay Area Treasure Hunt) in which
each team writes a clue. In the first BATH game held in September
2001, team Blood & Bones wrote a clue that led to this
very location! Info about the BATH clue is here.
I recognized this location right away - it's the Utopia Cafe
on Waverly in Chinatown. (Utopia is the major work by Sir Thomas
More. Remember the movie A Man for All Seasons? That was
about Sir Thomas More and his opposition to King Henry VIII's
separation from the Roman Catholic Church so he could marry his
mistress. Sir Thomas More was beheaded for his principles.)
We ended up walking to the cafe, because taking a bus would have
been slower.
Cast of Hogan’s Heroes? Checkpoint 10 is an
establishment in the Haight area. HINT: Elijah Price, Max Cady,
Noah Cross Get your photo with signage cuz it’s Checkpoint 10.
This is probably the only clue where I would quibble with the
UC folks about their wording.
I recognized the name Noah Cross as being John Huston's character
from Chinatown - he plays Faye Dunaway's father (and the
father of her daughter, his granddaughter - yuck). I think
Kim recognized Elijah Price as Samuel L. Jackson's villainous
character in "Unbreakable." Then Jen researched
Max Cady and found that he was also a movie villain.
So - villains? Well, we all agreed that while half of
the cast of Hogan's Heroes could be described as villains, the
entire cast certainly couldn't!
Whatever. There are two stores on Haight Street that might
fit this clue - Villains, and the Villains Vault. We thought just
plain Villains fit the clue better, so we decided to go there.
It was at Haight near Clayton.
It was a long way from the Utopia Cafe. Jen again was very
helpful in plotting our bus route. We ran up to Stockton Street,
caught the 30 down to Market and 4th, and then waited on Market
for a #6 Parnassus.
Shortly after we got there, the #71 Haight/Noriega came along,
and a couple of other Urban Challenge teams ran up and hopped
onto it.
At this point I was busy second-guessing our choice to wait...but
Jen's research had indicated we should take the 6 Parnassus, which
ran along Haight...and I wasn't familiar enough with the #71 to
know that it would have been just fine to take it. It went along
Frederick, a couple of blocks south of Haight Street. We could
have walked from Frederick Street to Haight in no time.
Anyway, we passed up the #71 and waited fr the #6. Which took
for-freaking-ever to arrive!
We used the time to call Kim's phone-a-friends, and our voicemail,
and read the rest of the clues to them (and it).
En Guard! True or false, in fencing, the epee
is heavier than the foil? If true, then the Cervantes bust is
Checkpoint 11. If false, then the Beethoven bust is Checkpoint
11. Find them both near the California Academy of Sciences.
We ran this by some tourists who were waiting for the bus with
us, and they agreed that the epee is heavier than the foil. Of
course, we wanted Jen to confirm this, because if we went to the
wrong place, we were out of the game. She did confirm it.
At the point that we got the answer to checkpoint #11, we were
still at the bus stop at Market & 4th, waiting to go to checkpoint
#10.
Once we got on the bus, we set to work calling Kim's parents,
and Jen, to give them the next few clues to research.
By the time we got off the bus, we had most of the rest of the
answers.
We snapped a photo at Villains (and saw an Urban Challenge team
heading the wrong way - we guess to Villains Vault)...then Jen
told us that the statue of Cervantes in Golden Gate Park was near
the bandshell, and the California Academy of Sciences.
I had never seen this statue, though I knew the general area
of the park it was in.
I recommended to Kim that we run it because we weren't really
close to any bus route. In order to get a bus, we'd need to go
to Haight and Stanyan, then get over a few blocks to Fulton somehow
and take a bus to 9th Avenue, get off and run into the park the
equivalent of a block or two. I thought it would be faster just
to run straight into the park and head cross-country to the bandshell.
Well, it would have been faster if I had any foot speed!
It was actually longer than I thought. I alternated a slow jog
with walking, as Kim got pretty far ahead of me. We got
to JFK Drive, and around every corner I expected to see the turnoff
to the bandshell, and Kim would say "is it this one?"
(sort of like a kid on a long car ride going "Are we there
yet?")..finally we got there and found the statue where Jen
had said it would be.
On the way, we saw an extremely tall, fit looking man and his
partner sprinting toward us, doing maybe a six minute mile and
making it look like they were cruising along in second gear.
It was a bit demoralizing, first because I thought they were
almost certainly very far ahead of us, and second because I felt
like an absolute turtle when I saw how fast he was, and
how effortless it looked to him.
Light the Fire … Find a lantern from the garden
of the Sesnons in or near the Takamine Garden at the Strybing
Arboretum. Get a photo with it cuz it is Checkpoint 12.
By the time we got to the Cervantes statue, we already knew that
the next clue was at Strybing Arboretum, not far away inside Golden
Gate Park, so we decided to jog over there.
Jen was extremely useful on this clue, as she guided us into
Strybing through the most logical gate, and talked us into the
Takamine Garden, which was marked on maps of Strybing, but had
no actual signage on the ground.
The clue we received in the game actually had a typo, and read
"...the garden of the Seasons..." (probably a spell-check
correction). Kevin McCarthy of the Urban Challenge told me at
the finish that he was very annoyed by this, since it was
his first typo ever.
Anyway, this is where we made a mistake that probably helped
us in this game, but would be a dangerous practice if we made
a habit of it.
We went to the Takamine gardens, found a lantern, and took a
photo of ourselves with it. Jen couldn't find any information
about the "Garden of the Seasons" so we just ignored
that part of the clue.
As it happens, there was a plaque directly in front of the lantern
we snapped, referring to the fact that the lantern was donated
in memory of the Sesnons (a family who had a large collection
of Japanese stone lanterns and donated them to both Strybing and
to the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park).
We never saw the plaque, so it was entirely by chance that we
got a picture with the correct lantern. How do I know? I
went back the next day and checked!
Although...Kevin decided at the finish that because of the typo,
he would accept a photo with any lantern taking in Strybing
Arboretum.
The dangerous part of what we did is that we could easily have
been disqualified for going to the wrong lantern.
This was the first location where we saw more than one or two
other teams. When we entered Strybing, we saw Justin Graham's
fiancee Victoria Reichenberg sitting on a bench with Brent &
Linda Holman (Stanford game veterans, and producers of The
Jackpot Game). Brent and Linda had done internet support for
the Grahams. They had started with checkpoint #1, so the Strybing
clue was their last checkpoint.
At that point they had not arrived yet, but that certainly didn't
mean that we were ahead of them, because of the staggered checkpoint
starts, and the fact that we had started four checkpoints ahead
of them.
When we left Strybing to catch transit back downtown, we saw
a lot of teams waiting at Lincoln & 9th for the bus. I
was moving fairly slowly, and I think it was at this point that
Kim said something about "I would rather poke my eye with
a sharp stick than miss a bus at this point."
Everybody at the bus stop was complaining about how much time
they had wasted in Strybing looking for a lantern that matched
the "Seasons" clue.
Anyway, I knew that the N-Judah Muni Metro line would be a much
faster way to get back downtown, since it went underground for
a good part of its route. So we walked up another block to Irving
to catch it there. Nobody followed us, I guess we didn't
look like too much of a threat!
We were the first team at the bus stop. But as we waited (an
eternity, it felt like, but maybe only 7 minutes total) teams
began arriving. Justin & Charlie finally arrived, and
we ran into Damian Garcia, half of Team
Fluffy Bunny, winners of this year's Los Angeles leg of the
Urban Challenge, who finished fifth at Nationals last year. Damian
was running alongside, and supporting, a pair of friends from
Los Angeles, Tyson and Nathan Sacco, brothers who are both extremely
successful runners. Damian's teammate, David Olds, was back
in Los Angeles doing phone support.
When we finally boarded the N-Judah streetcar, it was packed
with Urban Challenge teams. Maybe ten teams total. So, we
were really pessimistic at that point about even coming close
to a top ten finish.
Although we didn't know it at the time, several top ten teams
were on the N-Judah with us. Charlie and Justin corrected out
to second place, and the Sacco Brothers finished fifth in the
standings. And then, by some miracle, we corrected out to sixth
place!
We were really nervous about the Strybing clue. We very briefly
thought about using our skip on it, which meant we would have
to go to all of checkpoints 1 through 4, instead of skipping one
of them.
We talked about it, and agreed that we'd rather go for it than
find out we'd wasted our skip on a perfectly good photo! So,
at that point, we thought we might be disqualified, but we didn't
care, we wanted to try to get a good result.
Is it Accredited? Find the University of Wisdom
in bronze in the financial district.
Kim really shines at strategic thinking, and had been working
throughout the game on making sure that we made the right decision
about which clue to skip. I wasn't sure, but I thought
we should take the most direct bus routes, regardless of distance,
and avoid clue sites that required a lot of bus transfers, or
walking or running, because of my foot speed (or lack thereof).
We knew where the remaining four checkpoints were, because with
Jen's help we had solved all of them. Checkpoint #1 was
a sculpture outside the old Federal Reserve Building near Sacramento
& Sansome.
I thought Checkpoint 2, a restaurant near Union Square, would
be the most time-consuming to get to, and that we should go to
Checkpoint 1 at Sacramento & Sansome, getting off the N Judah
at the Embarcadero Station and backtracking, then taking the Sacramento
or California bus up to Checkpoint 3 at Hyde & California.
It was a longer distance, but a more direct bus route.
We had marked checkpoints 1, 2, 3 and 4 on the map, and Kim was
studying them on the Metro while we were riding back into downtown.
After a while, she said she thought it might be faster to skip
checkpoint #1 because it was so far away. I wasn't sure...but
we had to decide fast because we were approaching the Powell Street
station, where we'd need to get off if we were going to checkpoint
#2.
Long story short, we hopped off the N Judah at the last minute,
and headed up to Checkpoint #2.
I think this last-minute decision was definitely a good one,
though not critical, as we certainly would have finished in the
top ten anyway, because our time was 3:29 and any time under 3:56
would have kept us in the top ten. The decision didn't save us
27 minutes...but it definitely saved us enough time to move us
up a couple of places in the standings.
By the way, Kevin McCarthy confirmed at the finish that it was
definitely the best strategy to skip checkpoint #1 if you
could. Which was unfortunate for those teams who had to start
with checkpoint #1, and couldn't risk skipping it, because they
hadn't yet found the skip chick, and had no guarantee that they
would. The Urban Challenge is not a completely level
playing field, there is definitely a "luck of the draw"
factor.
Of Socks, Slacks, or Shoes? Checkpoint 2 shares
its name with a variety of Pyrus communis. Find this restaurant
north of Market within a mile of Union Square.
We had actually solved this one on the bus going up to
the Haight.
It was obvious that the word in common for socks, slacks and
shoes was "pairs" - and then Jen found that "Pyrus
communis" is Latin for "pear." So, is "pair"
just a homonym for "pear" - or does it have more meaning? I
don't know. Kim had an interesting idea, which I don't remember...I
think she knew of a brand of socks, slacks and shoes all made
by the same manufacturer (Clarks?)...
So, we asked our phone-a-friends to look up varieties of pears...and
one of them read off a list of five, all starting with B and C...but
Jen couldn't find any restaurants with those names.
Then Jen said there were a lot more varieties of pear than just
five! And we realized that our phone-a-friend had just read us
off the first five alphabetically. I madly tried to think
of other names of pears, and finally came up with "d'Anjou"
- then Jen found an Anjou Restaurant near Union Square, and so
we knew where Checkpoint 2 was.
{minor quibble - d'Anjou and Anjou are not exactly the same
thing}
Remember that fireman I thought would do well in the Urban Challenge?
Well, as we were jogging up Stockton Street to the restaurant,
we saw his Engine Company 3 coming down Stockton toward us. I
waved madly, but I don't know if he was on the truck, or whether
he would have recognized me if he had been.
That Guy Owes Me Money! Unscramble the words
below to form the name of Checkpoint 3. Find it northwest of Union
Square. — — — — — — — Ed Youth
This one was funny. I had bookmarked an anagram solver on my
computer, and we asked Jen to use it to find anagrams of "ED
YOUTH." She did, and began reading off the answers:
DE YOUTH
ED YOUTH
HUED TOY
HYDE OUT
DUET HOY
DUE HOYT
...
I said, no, use the advanced feature and restrict the
answer to one word. She did, and nothing came up.
So then...the answer "HYDE OUT" floated back up into
my consciousness...and I realized it sort of fit the title "That
Guy Owes Me Money" and I sort of remembered a bar
named the Hyde Out.
Sho nuff!
Can You See the Truth? Checkpoint 4 is an organizational
symbol surrounded by red brick in the Civic Center area. This
organization shares the same purpose as the beauty pageant contestants
in “Miss Congeniality”.
Ah, this one didn't require any research. I had scouted
the UN Plaza on Market near Leavenworth as a potential clue site
for one of my games. From the plaza, you can see a huge
"TRUTH" painted on the side of a building across Market
from it. And of course, everybody knows that all beauty
contestants wish for world peace, same as the UN (which was founded
in San Francisco, in 1945 I believe).
There was a bus running down Hyde, but we missed it. So we jogged
down Hyde (it was all downhill or flat, just like I like it),
as the Polk Street bus would have been slower and would have required
a long four block detour on foot anyway.
After we got the photo at the UN Plaza, all we needed to do was
get back to the finish line at Jillian's. Kim began to push me
a bit, and we just made a bus on Market. She sprinted ahead and
pretend to be a tourist asking the driver questions until I arrived,
huffing and puffing, about 20 seconds later. Ah, teamwork.
We got off the bus at 4th and Market and Kim made me jog to the
finish, because she had a feeling (she didn't tell me this until
later) that we had done quite well, and she wanted to make sure
we didn't get edged out of a top 10 finish. I think she was having
another "stick in the eye" moment just before we finished.
But not to worry - to our absolute astonishment, we crossed the
line 9th!!! And, since three of the teams ahead of us were disqualified
for missing checkpoints, we corrected out to sixth place. Out
of what - 150 teams? I don't think there were that many, though
that's the number Kevin McCarthy floated to me. It's hard
to tell, because they don't list the names of all the teams on
the web site, only the ones who got the checkpoints right.
We still don't know how we finished ahead of so many other teams.
But we were extremely happy. In fact, David Olds of Team Fluffy
Bunny was apparently on the phone with the Sacco brothers, the
team he was supporting from Los Angeles, who finished just ahead
of us...he said that he could hear us screaming in the background
when we heard we were in sixth place!
It turns out that the team who crossed the line first were from
Chicago, a couple of guys who had flown in to San Francisco to
try to bag a first place finish. They almost pulled it off, except
they apparently ran right past the Lost & Found Saloon, forgetting
to take a photo there even though their support team had solved
the clue. Oops.
The eventual winners were a pair of 2:20 marathoners from a running
club in the East Bay.
And just about everybody else in the top ten (except yours truly)
were really good athletes!
And not to worry about Charlie and Justin Graham. Though they
would have liked to repeat as San Francisco champions, not least
because the winning team gets free hotel and airfare to Nationals,
they still end up getting a free trip. They joined a mob of other
top teams, who scored 1, 1, 1, 2 and 2 respectively in their five
cities, scoring a mob total of 7 points. As the highest (or rather,
lowest) scoring mob this year, all five teams get a free trip
to Nationals.
We covered maybe 6.5 miles on foot, and 7.5 on buses.
Well, the top ten teams in each city qualify to go to Nationals
in New Orleans for free. They also get free admission to
next year's local game, a $100 value at a minimum.
If any of the top ten teams don't want to go, the UC folks
roll down their spots to the next ten teams - but if any of the
11th through 20th place teams want to go, they have to pay $500
per team. So there's a big - huge - difference between
10th and 11th place!
So, we're going to Nationals!
It is really easy to get disqualified in the Urban Challenge.
All it takes is a lapse in attention, like skipping a checkpoint
as the first team across the line did this year.
Or, if your camera malfunctions, you're S.O.L. So it's good to
have a backup camera and take duplicate sets of photos. Which
we did - for like, two checkpoints.
Or, if your camera is set to MegaHighQuality photos, and you
run out of room on the media card!
Also, you're not supposed to turn in more than one photograph
for any individual checkpoint. That's grounds for disqualification
as well.
And, if you use your skip to bypass an incorrect photo, you have
to DELETE that photo from your camera!
It's easy to get sloppy, and go to the wrong checkpoint, even
though it doesn't fully match the clue, because you weren't paying
attention (one team went to the Utopia Salon near Union Square
instead of the Utopia Cafe in Chinatown, even though the clue
clearly stated that the checkpoint was in Chinatown).
So, there are lots of ways to screw up in the "heat of battle,"
especially when you're tired and out of breath and you've run
several miles while trying to think, take photos, call friends
on your cell phone, catch buses, etc. In fact, I estimate that
a good third of all teams in the UC are disqualified for missing
a checkpoint. So if you get all the checkpoints correct, you're
already ahead of a heck of a lot of teams.
So, I guess a team's first goal should be fairly modest - not
to get disqualified!
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