The dinner afterwards was pretty epic, though I was happy to get home as soon as we had paid the bill.
As always the game had fun, challenging elements. Many thanks to the amazing staff.
That said, this may actually be our last. I don't think we've ever really said that before. We did our worst ever, we believe. Finishing in the bottom half of the pack and with 60 min in penalties was a hard pill to swallow.
We were very glad we were able to actually finish. It was an accomplishment in itself. But when I heard about how quickly the other teams had finished I realized that the time had come to admit that the Happy Haunts aren't what they used to be. We have no idea why, as we still feel that we are pushing ourselves to the limit. If pushed I guess I'd have to say that our decisions aren't as good and our mistakes are insurmountable.
We still move quickly, but that's not enough to compete these days. The current top teams truly do a fantastic job and you can't do what we did back at the last Enchanted Race 4 years ago - majorly screw up the first 2 quests and still be in the running. Another factor this time was waiting in lines. Part is luck - Simba's Pride told me they got lucky a couple of times and jumped right onto the Monorail and Train - but the other part is getting to the quests faster than others, as the lines get longer and longer as the day wears on.
I'm a problem solver type and I can't stop asking myself what we could have done better. We got out of the ballroom after more than half the teams were gone as we weren't looking up at the screen quick enough to get the code. We did pretty good at the Downtown Disney part, eye-spying signs to find words. It was the dominoes decoding part that stumped us. Why didn't we think to have at least one look in Fantasyland for ride vehicle descriptions? That would have saved us at least 20 min.
Why didn't we try as hard as humanly possible in the Big Thunder queue to see everything we could before actually riding the ride, so we wouldn't have to ride it again? We thought we were doing great on that count since we did see most of them and were only missing a couple of items when we boarded the train but duh, seeing things from the train is hard. We also totally missed the Big Thunder Mine 1880 sign. That one is mostly my fault as we had divvied up the questions. I wonder if anyone else had to ride it twice.
We then had a good middle period, with the train ride and the usual stabs at trivia we don't know, then Tomorrowland, with the Grim Grinning Ghosts music sheet in Innoventions (it's a sign!) and catching up with the Manhattans Project (NM, EH, and iSm) at the Monorail. Then GD was able to solve the structure puzzle without actually taking a tram and we nailed the locker puzzle, passing up Heffalump and Woozle (Prudence and LabRat) on the way to Bountiful Valley Farm. We really thought DCA was near the finish line but we were wrong.
That last packet of quests...sigh. As Prudence pointed out to us later, we should have skipped Flicks (spot words on signs and cross out letters) and gone straight to the Blue Sky Cellar to look for a French word definition, even though Flicks went very well for us. The Hollywood Backlot one was our ultimate time burner, walking around and around in a daze, and we never found a couple of those eyespys (the Between Takes sign was killing me, though there were some good victories in there). We were able to figure it out though. The Condor Flats one was a good quest but at that point we had totally lost all hope as the time slipped away. At 3:25 we found ourselves in Redwood, missing the Redwood quest paper, which we must have dropped.
We raced back to the Blue Sky Cellar to find the answers to the quests we had done and had 3 envelopes left to choose from. Each one we opened incorrectly was a 30 min penalty. We had to chance it, as the clock hit 3:30. We opened one - wrong. With 2 left we hoped a 50/50 chance would come through for us, but no! We finally opened the third envelope, drew on our awesome souvenier map (aww!) and got our asses to Zocalo.
Deep down I still feel like we could "get lucky" in the future, but the pressure of competing just doesn't seem worth it anymore if this is how we finish. I wish we could just enjoy ourselves instead of stressing. I have no idea how to not do this in a frenzy and I don't see us doing any better by taking it slow anyway.
Hell, I just might consider doing a Basic event just to see what that's like and attempt to not stress out. Maybe even bring someone else onto the team, just to force myself to not freak out on GD.
Perhaps there are ways to play this game....for fun.
Again, major thanks to MousePlanet and the MA staff.