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Ran with my 17 year old son Ryan. Here's the route we took:
http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1499783
Came in 15 seconds overtime but got them all. I see now that our competition took a slightly southern exit out of Post Alley to take in those along the waterfront directly west of the start which we took in on our return. Hindsight shows that heading east to Capitol Hill earlier, after #12 or 41 would have saved some distance. We were trying to minimize climb, especially in the last portion. Conditioning maybe the key to better performance! Enjoyed the holiday questions. Besides sidestepping the Jingle Bell Run, late route through the south took us through Seahawk throngs - not eanticipated.

This morning, I solved The Emerald City Search (put on by the Seattle Times and the UW Alumni Association, among others). Night and Day 2004 sort of led me to find it, since I thought yesterday the 'treasure' was in Jack Block Park (see the tiny picture at the top of the Street Scramble home page). This turned out to be wrong, but it was very close, and I came back today after an additional clue and found it at Seacrest Park (the western terminus of the Elliott Bay Water Taxi, just up the block).

Meridian Geographics is looking for someone outgoing and organized to help support our events in 2008 and beyond. This is an approximately half-time position with flexible hours. It is ideal for someone with an entrepeneurial spirit who wants to put his/her heart into three growing event series and see the results of her/his efforts in the smiling faces of lots of happy people!

For details, visit our Work for Street Scramble page.

Hey everybody –

Because we are working with the Oktoberfest people to put on the Brew Ha-Ha Street Scramble, we implemented registration in AthletesLounge.com instead of Active.com. A few things are different that only affect teams with youth and children:

1. When you register a family team, there is no place to enter info about your teammates. You can help us by sending that info (name, sex, date of birth) to me, terry@mergeo.com.
2. When you register a non-family team, you have to pay $15 per person. There is no way to get the $5 child or the $10 youth price. However, you can register children and youth participants separately, then enter their team name where it says "Team Name (Optional)".
   

Definitely seemed easier than previous scrambles. Finished with no problems and a relatively high 750pts with 29 minutes left to spare. Easily had time to get #31. Here is our route:

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1128989

Bill Cusworth

This past weekend I created the course for the Pigs on Parade Street Scramble.

I wasn't sure whether I really could use pig sculptures for all the checkpoints. I couldn't ask questions about the artists or titles, because that info is readily available on the Pigs on Parade brochure. However, for most of the pigs, it was easy to formulate a question about the pig itself. All pigs have a small placard with a fact about Pike Place Market, so when the pig itself had no askable features, I could use the placard. (And yes, if you want to cheat on this event and make small children cry by stealing their win from them or their parents, you are most welcome to study up on Pike Place Market and/or visit all the pigs ahead of time.)

Spent six hours this morning designing the street half of the Seward Park Street Scramble. Weather was great, much warmer than yesterday, which I spent vetting the Everett course.

I didn't know much about the area around Seward Park, so I picked locations that looked interesting on the USGS map. As usual, I didn't have any trouble finding interesting spots. A surprise: MLK Way is one big construction zone, apparently for light rail. There is still one lane open in each direction for driving, but it's possible to cross MLK only at certain intersections. We'll have to scope out the open intersections closer to the event. Or perhaps there's a website with up-to-date info.

For the past two Street Scramble seasons, we’ve been riding with one child on the pedal trailer and the other in a bike seat. This year, our younger child is ready for riding on the pedal trailer, so a few months ago we started talking about what we wanted to do. We settled on getting a tandem for me and our eight-year-old, but didn’t find much time to get out and look at tandems.

Fast forward to last weekend. We visited a couple bike shops and came up with the idea of renting a tandem so we could try it out and see if it worked for us. I was a little nervous about trying out a tandem on a three hour Street Scramble, but with kids’ baseball and soccer games, there wasn’t a lot of other time to try one out.