Competitours Race – Day 1 (with video)

by Kent Wien on

As part of our Gadling on the Road series, Kent Wien and his wife Linda are participating as Team Gadling in the first run of Competitours, an Amazing Race like competition taking place in three different countries in Europe. Follow along each day this week as Kent documents their progress.

We arrived via train to Cologne from Frankfurt at around noon, which didn’t give us much time to brush our teeth, drop our bag off and throw up a post with video.

It was the video and post from yesterday that gave me fits. Trying to cram everything together before running out the door is a recipe for disaster, and sure enough, the browser froze, not allowing me to post anything. We finally got out the door at 2:10, 10 minutes later than scheduled and more than 24 hours after we had last slept.

I think we were running on adrenaline by this point as we raced through Cologne toward the train station.

Still I was texting with Grant, the editor at Gadling to get the first post up. He was able to work everything out, fortunately.

We elected to do the challenges north of the city. They seemed to offer more points than the scavenger hunt in Cologne, but the two cities, Dusseldorf and Duisburg involved 25 to 50 minute long train rides from our hotel, meaning we’d have less time for the challenges.

I made a shout out to everyone on Twitter, but it was Linda who came to the rescue when she looked up a few friends she had gone to school with who were living in the area.

Linda’s friend Sigrid met us in Dusseldorf with her son and we proceeded to traipse around the city accomplishing as many tasks as we could, which turned out to be everything we could do in the two cities.

Sigrid had to take her son home after just one challenge, but she proved to be a great help in pointing us in the right direction. We quickly learned to use strangers as much as possible, and I’d say we must have had discussions with over 40 people who were eager to help us along.

We sang beer songs in the world’s longest bar while drinking Alt Bier before heading off to find a statue that included references to the beer making history of the city. That proved difficult, as the locals had no idea what we were talking about.

Fortunately we found the answer in a map at the tourist board, who also had never heard of such a tribute.

We were spent. Exhausted. Kaputt.

Be sure to follow all of Kent’s posts about the Competitours race.
We went to the Japanese district to find three very odd items that aren’t related, but before we got too far, we found a fluent Japanese speaker to draw the symbols for us so we could simply point out what we were looking for.

It took a visit to a hardware store, a stationery place and a grocery store to find everything there.

We commented via video on some architecture, offering our take on the designs before heading out of Dusseldorf more than three hours later to visit the town of Duisburg.

We asked around on the subway ride about a statue in the town center of Duisburg, and a friendly person explained that this statue was rather unpopular with the locals after seeing the invoice from the french artist Niki de St. Phalle.

Finally we found a local who had the true story as to why this statue was so significant and we recorded that answer in front of the colorful piece while also discussing the contempt some had for such an expensive monument.

We didn’t stop for food for the entire day, since we were committed to finishing each challenge in the two cities. Occasionally we’d run across a team or two, and Elizabeth from another team even approached us and filmed the two of us describing the monument to beer that took us forever to find. I’m still not sure if Elizabeth knew what we had found.

We raced to our final challenge, a park that had been converted from an industrial wasteland into a recreation area and museum. Since it was 7:30 when we arrived, we could see the museum with only the lights scattered around the area. Apparently the place closed earlier than anyone planned, but we were able to walk right into the displays and get our video taken.

With an iPhone picture snapped to mark the time, we worked our way back to the station. While we were careful to walk to the park on the lit streets, all caution was abandoned as we went directly through the grassy dimly lit and occasionally forested area to the metro station.

Linda noted that this felt more strenuous than the Amazing Race because we were given the clues so far in advance that our minds were constantly thinking about how we’d shoot the next scene, make it funny and work our way to the challenge after that.

You could never take a mental break, and combined with the lack of sleep, we were approaching delirium.

On the way back to the hotel we ran into Steve Belkin, the man behind Competitours who was frantically searching for a place to make paper copies of the challenges for the next day. He looked more tired than we were, and I’m sure he didn’t sleep a wink, either.

After dinner, I went to edit and upload our 9 videos. Unfortunately, the Flip software was acting up, and I was starting to get frustrated. At one point it suggested a re-install of the editing software. Fortunately I read online about others doing the same thing and losing all their video.

I finally got six videos uploaded to YouTube directly and not through the Flip software. The last three videos I had to put through iMovie because these clips caused the Flip program to unexpectedly quit each time.

Little did I know my troubles were just beginning. Linda went to bed while I tried to upload videos by the 1 a.m. deadline. I was just going to make it, when I noticed that EVERYTHING had slowed to a crawl on our t-mobile €29 connection.

I gave up and came back at 6:30 a.m. to see if any of the manual uploads worked. Not a single video uploaded. When I tried again in the morning, the connection was much better and things started to sail.

I haven’t even looked at the challenges for Tuesday, but I’m happy to say, we did get everything done, albeit a bit late. Seven other teams were apparently in the same situation, since the standings show zero points for them as well. I suspect Competitours will allow some time for those videos to be uploaded.

And now we’re off for Tuesday’s challenges!

Read about the rest of the week: Pre-departure, departure, day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4 and day 5.

Competitours gets off the ground!

by Kent Wien on

As part of our Gadling on the Road series, Kent Wien and his wife Linda are participating as Team Gadling in the first run of Competitours, an Amazing Race like competition taking place in three different countries in Europe. Follow along each day this week as Kent documents their progress.

Without much fanfare – well, without any fans and a modicum of fare paid – the 11 teams participating in the inaugural Competitours event have finally met in person at the Newark airport before getting on a Continental 767-200 for the flight to Frankfurt on Sunday night.

Early that morning the challenges and the cities were finally revealed for the competition that starts on Monday, with a rather significant surprise for my wife Linda. We would be traveling to Cologne, with tasks to be completed in Dusseldorf, Bonn, Duisburg and Koblenz.

Of all the places we could have flown to in Europe for this challenge, we ended up in the area where Linda grew up! In fact, she lived just an hour away from Cologne.

Now, you might think this would give us an advantage, but after reading the challenges Steve Belkin, the creator of Competitours and his staff have put together, we’re not so sure.

While we could have poured over the details and researched the challenges all day Sunday we decided instead to meet up with fellow Gadling bloggers Grant Martin, Tom Johansmeyer, Annie Scott and Jeremy Kressmann for brunch at the Manhattan restaurant called Public.

It took an hour to get a seat, but the conversation made up for the delay, even though we were missing out on some valuable Competitours preparation time. Fortunately, this didn’t keep us from enjoying the Sunday brunch.

We’re officially known as “Team Gadling” although we joke with each other that we’ve actually become “Team Crews Control” since we’re both airline crew members (in Linda’s case, a former flight attendant) and we’ve taken a somewhat relaxed attitude about the Competitours journey.

I’ll introduce you to the other teams as we get to know them this week. These frequent flyers come from all over the country, and even Canada to participate in a game that, so far, seems to be very well organized and designed.

After parting with half the Gadling staff at brunch, Linda and I stopped into Paragon Sports to pick up an Arc’Teryx sweater for her before making our way to the airport about 3 hours before our departure time. We used this time to pour over the details and research some of the clues in advance before we met the other teams.

Monday’s tasks will include a scavenger hunt in Cologne worth 10 points, a visit to a church in Dusseldorf where we’re required to video our comments on its most prominent architectural defect and come up with an alternate, and hopefully humorous, explanation.

Other cities such as Koblenz offer challenges such as a go-kart race, with the top 50% of the finishers receiving 15 points and the other participants earning 5 points and a walking tour of the city worth 10 points.

Many of the challenges have two point values like the go-kart challenge above. Judges will award the top 50% of those participating in the challenge the maximum points. Other challenges score a fixed amount of points if they’re accomplished correctly. In all, there are 14 challenges worth a total of 175 points on Monday alone.

Since this is a trial run of the game, changes are to be expected in it’s design. Sure enough, a few days ago we were informed that instead of having a limit of 5 challenges to choose among a list of 9 to 12, we would be allowed to accomplish as many events as possible, at least in the shortened first day.

That’s changed the game considerably, and for the better, I think, emulating the harried pace of the Amazing Race to some extent.

So from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Monday we will be working our way from task to task, filming the results to be uploaded to the web for judging each night before midnight. We’re required to time stamp our progress with a picture sent via cell phone either by text message or e-mail to the judges. We’re not allowed to post the video from the competition online, but we’ll do our best to film some of the places and challenges we come across.

I’m currently on the flight to Frankfurt as I write this. Everyone else is trying their best to get some sleep, since we’ll be afforded only an hour or two to rest in Cologne before getting started – time which will likely be put to research rather than sleep.

Since it’s nearly impossible for me to sleep on airplanes, I’ll be running around in a mental fog when we get there, I’m sure.

Rumors are spreading through the airplane that one of the team members left a bag in the President’s Lounge. Keep in mind, lounge access was easily obtained for many of these teams which are made up of some very seasoned frequent flyers courtesy of Flyertalk.com.

Linda and I considered working our way over to the Newark pilot operations of my airline, but the thought of sitting around listening to dot matrix printers spit out flight plans while crews came and went didn’t really compare well to the idea of access to a private airline lounge.

Two teams are made up of travelers who only met each other today. We struck up a conversation with Kevin who is on one of those teams and discovered that not only did he retire very early from his job to travel the world for the past 4 years, he has lived in Germany and France for some time, and is fluent in those languages. So we felt our local advantage slipping away rather quickly.

I’m not sure how successful we’ll be, considering that, in addition to uploading photos and video for the day’s challenges each evening and reviewing and researching the revealed challenges for the next day, I’ll be hacking away on my mac, trying to report daily on the week long competition.

Follow along on my twitter account while I solicit your help with some of the clues to the challenges, if you happen to be a twitter user at www.twitter.com/veryjr.

We could use all the help we can get!

Read about the rest of the week: Pre-departure, departure, day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4 and day 5.

Jails, Homeless Shelters, & Soup Kitchens Turned Hotels

by Adrienne Wilson on

Call it coincidence, but in this month’s edition of concierge.com they’ve listed 10 hotels across the globe with a spooky past. (Coughs, can we say perfect timing for Halloween, hmm?) After going through each one, I noticed the history of some were creepier than others depending on what you tend to get spooked by. Shack up in a past crime den, nun’s cell, jail or my personal favorite an old soup kitchen. From the photos featured one might not ever know that these places have a tale to tell, but don’t let the looks deceive you. When you’re at rest in bed the howling you hear isn’t coming from the outside. It’s the cry of the mentally unhinged resident that stayed there before you. (Insert: horror laughter.) I’m only kidding – sort of.

Check out the Poor House: Hopper Hotel Et Cetera in Cologne, Germany which now sits as a cheap-chic boutique hotel, but was once a homeless shelter and soup kitchen. Heading to Puerto Rico? Stay at the old Carmelite convent, now one of San Juans’ most luxurious hotels was once home to 11 nuns that moved out in 1903. If you’re in need of prison time look at their picks out of Turkey and the U.K., just don’t say I didn’t try to warn you of their bone-chilling ambience.