Teriyaki Donut's route and report

Omar (7), Emmett (4) and I walked the Fremont Street Scramble, while Elizabeth got her weekend's run in by jogging as a solo team (she would have won, too, if she hadn't been confused answering two checkpoints).

I let Omar do the route planning and navigation, although I modified his zig-zagging route to pick up the downtown Fremont checkpoints, and I took over navigation for those checkpoints as well (based mostly on which way the stoplights would let us go). Omar and I mutually decided to pick up an extra checkpoint (56, the rusty truck) when we were approaching 47 (house on the garden fence) with 45 minutes left to go.

Emmett was obviously the slowest of the trio, and he definitely got tired, but he kept going to get the M&M's I offered as bribes. I started off with one M&M per checkpoint, then upped it to an extra after every 3 checkpoints, then an extra at every 40 or 50 point checkpoint, then an extra on top of that after every 3rd 40 or 50 pointer. Finally, for the worst hills, I doubled the bribe. They got 6 M&M's at checkpoint 56.

Our route: 24, 57, 44, 34, 21, 12, 46, 33, 23, 42, 32, 22, 47, 56, 27, 41, 53, 11. 560 points, and we got back with 8 minutes to spare, which was good enough for 2nd place in the Family division. We walked around 4 miles. Gmaps route.

A few notes:

• Possible route improvements (besides going straight to 56 from 22 instead of backtracking): cross the bridge for 45, go from BF Day north to the Aurora overpass and 37 before heading to 56, and picking up 25 or 26. Of these, crossing the bridge was probably the best idea, and maybe even getting 51. But I brought this up to Omar and he didn't change his route, and, as I said, route plannning was mostly his job.
• We saw the Cardinals leave for 46 initially (again, I considered this, but it wasn't decisively better enough to change Omar's route), after which they followed our route and caught up with us by 21 (small church statue). Their kids were older than Emmett, so I figured they'd outpace us. We did see them coming down from 56 as we were heading up, and not at all after that. Based on when and where we saw them, I figured we'd cover the same checkpoints, and it would come down to a time tiebreaker. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to see they finished a minute or so after us. Still, neither of us were going to beat an adult pushing a kid in a stroller or an adult with older children, so we ended up in 3rd and 4th, respectively, at least that's what they told us when they were handing out ribbons. The results now say we were 2nd and 3rd, so perhaps someone got misclassified.
• At the Troll, we saw a couple of bicycle teams with numbers apparently running a checkpoint race. We also saw one of the teams heading south on Stone Way as we were heading back home. Apparently this was The Merrell Oyster Race. Also at the Troll, Emmett really wanted to stop and play. I told him we could do this afterwards, and Elizabeth had to escort a clearly too tired Emmett there for a few minutes of playing as Omar and I retrieved the car and navigated the streets of Fremont.
• Someone asked us what we were doing near 46 (urn with sticker), so I had to give the quick 30 second Street Scramble explanation. Meanwhile, up at 56, the owner of
  the truck was on hand to explain all about it.
• As we were leaving 41 (rock near fire hydrant, which we could see from the Burke-Gilman Trail), we caught up with a number of other teams heading back. One of them managed to distract Emmett after he got his feet tangled in Omar and tripped and cried. As we were heading down the alley to 11 (Lion on mural), we all guessed the answer would be a Space Needle, and we were all correct.

We all had fun, especially Omar, who got to hand out the ribbons. Emmett really wanted a pink ribbon, so we exchanged his ribbon with someone who got a pink (special award) ribbon when they were misclassified as Veteran Men.