'Amazing TREK'

One of our scanvenger hunt photos:

Week four is over… but wow was it a long, fun, tiring, and exciting week. I already mentioned the Silent Retreat, but to add to that, yesterday ( Feb 9 ) we were forced to participate in an ‘Amazing Race’ or here it’s the ‘Amazing TREK’!!
Ok… first of all, I have to through in that we didn’t get to bed until about 1 am on the 9th because we had a hint that something was going to happen at 5 am and wanted to set some payback up. You know, give them a piece of their own medicine! We set up foil with honey on them on the floor by the door, taped our light switches down so they couldn’t be turned on , and strung a web of string from my bunk bed to the towel rack in the bathroom. Our thoughts were that whoever woke us up would open the door, dashing towards our beds while getting foil glued to their feet, and completely running into the web and knocking themselves back into the honey. Harmless right? Right. Because it didn’t work like that in real life. They came as we predicted and open the door and started screaming. We all, 4 in a bed, held our breath and laughter to see if our little scheme would work. We heard her ( Amy McDaniel ) trying to turn on the light… crunching through the foil, and trying her best to hold back the laughter. She had a flashlight so see saw the web and didn’t come running in as we had hoped. But when she left the room, our laughter erupted the room.
We were told we only had 7 minutes to make it downstairs before our first task started. We scrambled around trying not to get in our own traps and still make it down stairs. I walked out the door with jeans, a cut off shirt and my shoes, socks, and sweatshirt in my hand. I opened the door to see it dark and POURING down rain. We all rain down to start our first task: Memorizing. Have you ever tried this? Memorizing at 5 in the morning? I don’t recommend it. We were given 1 minute to memorize as many things as we could in the back of a minivan. After, we had 2 minutes to write the things down. The Japan team ended up with 20 and my team ( Peru team ) had 19. So Japan got a 5 minute head start and we were off. We had to find 6 bandanas of one color for each on our team that were hidden all over the MARK Centre property. It was rainy, cold, and I was ALREADY socked. Not a good start to a long day.
We walked around looking for the bandanas and finally found them. We were given our next clue and it led us into the Great Room of the Centre. Being pumped about finding ours first after a 5 minute delay, we were given brain teasers for our next task. Again, I don’t recommend!
We completed those before the Japan team came in with there bandanas and were given a roll of toilet paper and were told to count the sheets and then to rip the squares and to make triangles. We needed exactly 396 triangles. Two of the girls on my team ended up eating toilet paper just to make it come out right. We finish and we given our next clue. We had to go to a city blends and buy a chia. Luckily we were given a driver who couldn’t do anything but turn and do as we told her to do. Every turn, stop, and brake was determined by us. After buying the Chia, we were handed the next clue.
The Abbotsford Airport. We, having bandanas either wrapped around our heads or on our arms, we ran into the airport. BIG MISTAKE. We found that the guards don’t take things that well. We found our next clue somehow without getting interrogated or possible kicked out!! Next we headed to John and Christy Best’s house for ‘breakfast’. Not the type of breakfast I would ever chose to eat. It contained a 2 liter of Coke, sticky rice, and a can of sardines. Gross right? It all had to go down!! Some of the rice made it’s way to the bathroom toilet… but other then that, it all went down by the grace of God and we moved on.
We were directed to a house where, when we pulled up, saw 2 piles of hay. As we figured, we had to find a needle in a hay stack. Talk about getting frustrated and completely down!! We were almost to the point of tears when we heard ‘I FOUND IT’!!! That was like music to everyone’s ears!! We got over the excitement and screaming and we handed our next clue. That led us to the hot tub at this same house. At the bottom of the hot tub was a laminated letter hocked to a rock. I reach in and pulled it out. That led us to the MARK Centre to check our emails.
Photo scavenger hunts are the greatest. Ten different ’poses’ to our next clue.

Our breakfast: Rice and Sardines

We finished with quick ease. We had to develop one and trade it in for our next clue, which was in a car somewhere in the 7 Oak Mall’s parking lot. All we had was the license plate number. That was another needle in a haystack. I found out that Canada people have license plates on the back AND the front of each car. That’s one thing nice about Canada!! We fell behind and when we got our clue we learned that we were now 20 minutes behind the Japan team. How? We don’t know.
The Fire Station was our next stop to either play Bocce Ball or doing a Firefighter’s workout. We chose the Bocce Ball and Laura and I dominated!!! We were led to a park/stadium to find 2 bowls. One filled with chocolate pudding and one with rice krispys. We all had to stick our faces in them to retrieve a gummy worm from each bowl. Fun fun!! Next we were directed to Luke and Greg’s apartment. We arrived and got to change cloths and to warm up. It felt great to sit by the fire. We couldn’t help but to notice the small of fish that stayed in the air and just lingered over everything. We waited and waited for the Japan team. They arrived and we were told our next challenge. And ‘challenge’ is a big understatement!! Set before each team was a plate of 2 dried squid. Talk about a gross thing to eat for lunch when you had sardines for breakfast. Our stomachs weren’t handling things very well. We got the squid down somehow and were headed to our next task: the library. We found a book with a paper of a different language written on it. We were stumped. How were we supposed to figure out what this was?! We were finally told that it was Panjabi! We were directed to the Sikh Temple. We were to cover our heads with our bandanas and to eat what we were given. It was kinda tough but we again somehow got it down. Indian food is pretty good as long as you don’t know what your eating!
Next, we headed to Sonja and Amy’s house for a icebreaker. We had to smash a bag with a frozen t-shirt. We melted it enough to get our next clue out. We headed to Castle Fun Park for some fun. We had to win enough of tickets to buy some candy for our driver, who didn’t want it so we graciously ate it. Next we had to come up with a romantic song and serenade a mystery someone to their front porch. We sang and Dave, a friend of TREK, walked out on the porch. AWKWORD!! We were handed our clue and we headed to Surrey. We got a tiny ‘nap’ in and arrived at King George Skytrain Station. We were to ride the Skytrain to Commercial Drive in Vancouver. We next ran to a Gelatto shop called ‘True Love’ and buy Luke some Gelatto. He had just received some from Japan team so we walked in, got out envelope, and walked back out the door. We then had to ride a seabus to Lonsdale Quay. The finish line was in sight!! We relaxed during the ride and planned how we were going to sprint to the finish line. Give it our all. We got off the seabus and climbed a spiral staircase to a huge letter ‘Q’. Everyone cheered as we ran to them… it felt like we had just finished a marathon. We were done!! It was a little after 6 pm and we were finally done!! We took pictures and packed into cars and headed back to Abbotsford for some pizza.
The length of that day was indescribable. It felt long but short at the same time. We estimated that we walked/ran a total of 8 miles during the whole day. From running down streets when our driver left us, running in malls and buildings, to just sprinting to the finish line. We were all sore and that is not even the word that comes close to the definition.
We got to relax and enjoy pizza and to talk about the whole day. We had a small debrief where we were asked questions and to just express our feelings. We were told that the reason for this wasn’t to have fun. It was to teach us about the field. Each task had a relation to something that one of the past TREKers had experienced. It helped to get a taste of what it may be like. They challenged us by saying that, yea… that whole day was stressful and tiring, but what would we do if we had to wake up and do that all over again? What would we do? How would we handle it? It may be like that in the field. We may have a long day and have no idea when it will end. You just have to keep going and keep pushing. We are only there for 3 and ½ months… so why not go hard and do what we can. Sleep can be regained and restored… but the time we have there is only for a little bit. It cant be rewound and started over. Once it’s done, its done. No going back and reliving it. We are going to serve God and we need to serve him with our whole heart. Serving whole-heartedly and without holding things back. This is only happening once… live every moment!!

We had a great day and I enjoyed every minute of it and just realized that everything that happened that day was necessary and that it did really stretch us. We drew closer to each other and we learned some major lessons. Life isn’t always easy but lessons have to be learned, days aren’t always going to be fun and relaxing but days may bless someone new, and we aren’t always going to have things our way but we learn lessons by having things thrown at us. Good lessons learned!!
Oh… and just so you know… we didn’t win. We won when it came to completing tasks and points earned, but when it came to finishing first… we lost. That was another lesson learned! Humbling ourselves and learning to go along with things!

Japan and Peru teams gathering at the end in Vancouver