Idiotarod 2008

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me!

After 2 weeks of ship-building and organizing, the Dirty Ethel Roberts took to the high seas of Brooklyn! It was mass chaos and ridiculously fun. The organizers switched up the starting points 3 times via text messages so we wound up in Chinatown and began the race by sprinting over the Manhattan Bridge before criss-crossing various neighbourhoods in BK. There were checkpoints with games (dizzy bat, jumping rope, tug o war, etc) and lots of opportunities to bribe the judges. The awards ceremony at the end was really fun, and we actually won an award for "best redirection of a team name". When we arrived, the judges told us that pirates were no longer allowed, so we answered, "well that's ok, cause we're Angry Whores!" And the prize???? A Muppets towel. Pretty sweet, I know, you're all jealous :)

Important takeaway lessons:
1. 7 miles is a long long way when you are pulling a shopping cart. Next year our cart will be lighter!
2. Buy sketchy things (like our blow-up doll figurehead, Judy) on Sunday mornings--the reaction I got was "A nice girl like you, skipping church on Sunday morning to come buy this? Here, you can have it for 50% off!" (note: I did NOT tell him I was skipping church, he just came up with it himself)
3. The manhattan bridge is really long too.
4. Ketchup smells really, really bad after you've been wearing it for several hours. The food throwing was the only real downside to the day.
5. Nothing tops a great support team! Learned it from OA and it was so true in this case--our advance bike scout and crack team of saboteurs/GPS trackers helped us find checkpoints and helped us recover when we were lost in some random part of BK.
6. We're not the only ones who go to all these crazy events--we found my friend Wonder Woman Santa at Idiotarod too!

Rachel has a sweet slideshow and summary of the day in numbers here, as well as links to other coverage. I'll have more pictures when I develop my disposable camera--I didn't trust myself with the digital that day :)

"Life's pretty good, and why wouldn't it be? I'm a pirate, after all."--Johnny Depp

When's the next event??