Ballard Street Scramble

In order to know my neighborhood better, I participated in the Ballard Street Scramble this morning with a colleague from work. A Street Scramble is a fun competition that has teams running around local streets looking for 30 landmarks marked on a map. To prove that you are there, you have to answer a multiple choice questions relating to the building or place of interest. It sounds easy but the maps are not very detailed so you have to guess roughly where the place is. Here is a small snippet of the map where the triangle is the start/finish point and the circles are the places to visit:


Our intention was to do the 90 minute foot race, but due to being over optimistic and us deciding not to run in the heat, we got back 27 minutes late. This would have meant a 270 points penalty subtracted from the points that we accumulated by visiting the marked places. When we got back to the start/finish line, the organizers suggested that we should be enter the 3 hour one instead. This advice seemed sensible so we decided to do that. In the end, although we lost an hour against the competition (due to us finishing over an hour before we really needed to finish), we still did not finish last in our division and came in 10th out of the 12 teams. In general, this was good fun and I went to places that I had not been to before, but whether I will do it again, I am not sure.

For those of you who wants to know what I did on Independence Day - yes, the day that Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum saves the world from the aliens (only joking!!!) and one of the few National Holiday I get off work (not joking here :-(), I stayed at home all day catching up on watching a Hong Kong TV comedy series on DVD. I was planning to go to Gasworks Park for the WaMu Family 4th to see the fireworks but in the end I was just too lazy - I even missed it on TV. My goal is to go next year, but we'll see :-)