Scavenging for Charity

Finally, I wasn't out of town during a D.C. SMASHED event, and boy am i glad. I had a ridiculous amount of fun. My team was me, the roomie, and his girlfriend, friends, and co-workers (kinda stunk that most of the team was his peeps instead of mine). In case you don't know, SMASHED stands for the Society for Mature Adults Seeking to Help, Educate, and Donate. The last saturday of June was the scene of their most recent escapades. This was the DC SMASHED Amazing Race Scavenger Hunt.

My team decided to go with a theme from the movie Waiting, and called ourselves "Push The Fish". We dressed up in aprons, with quotes from the movie written thereon, and wore nametags for our favorite characters. The theme went over decently well, at least with those that had seen the movie, and we were lucky to have accomplished it on such short notice. We spent the night before watching the movie twice through to get quotes and decorating our aprons.

The weather was beautiful for the event. My only complaint was that the organizer said we could only turn in 25 items at each of the three checkpoints, when in actuality we were only allowed 25 points of items. This was frustrating in the end since we wasted time collecting more than 100 points worth of items that we could never turn in.

More fun, was the tasks we needed to compete in. There were eight to choose from, and we managed to do four in the time, even doing four was difficult and required running from dupont to farragut to logan circle. We used squirt guns to shoot cups off of our teammate's head and passed around a greased up water balloon without our hands. My favorite task was in Farragut Square, where the team had to pitch a tent, then go inside while I pretended to be an attacking bear, and then take down the tent as quickly as possible. I really enjoyed the confused looks on the tourists as we did these tasks and ran down the streets. We also had some fun at a jousting task, where the roomie took a nice hit to the face from a roll of wrapping paper (hard to describe, so check out the before and after shots below).

Of course it wasn't all just racing around, we also had to by the task judges shots and beers to earn their respect and discretionary bonus points, because what is a race without a few drinks along the way ;-).

The race wasn't all fun, we also provided a public service, which is the driving source behind the SMASHED group. Their goal is not just to hang out and have a few drinks, but to raise money for charity along the way. So the 10 dollar entry free paid by all 300+ people (in 45 odd teams) all went to a charity that is associated with the Sierra Club that takes urban children out on wilderness excursions. And as an added bonus the Front Page bar provided 10 free kegs of beer (in Dos Equis and Heine Light form) as an after party for all the competitors. The beer companies were also sponsors of the event and had their own team competing and handing out bonus material.

So in the end, the day was Amazing fun and i can't wait for their next event! This time i'm going to try and get everyone i know to participate.