The Cardinals (-1) scramble

For this Street Scramble, three of the four Cardinals (Brian, Cameron, and Corinne) competed in the three hour pee-wee foot class because Gwen was out at the Gorge enjoying the Sasquatch Music Festival. Despite being just six, Corinne walked/ran the entire three hours. We pushed pretty hard and thought we had enough points for a first place finish, but finished second by 30 points. Looking back at the map and considering how quickly we were able to move through the first set of checkpoints, we could have planned a better second half for more points, but we still had fun.

We earned 410 points using this route: 14-35-27-53-15-32-34-33-23-45-13-54-12-24-25-26-11.

We (I) decided to grab the close, northern checkpoints first and leave the larger number of close, southern checkpoints for the end. We got through to 53 very quickly, so we added 15 and 32, which were pretty close (28 looked like it required a long walk around). We then wanted to make sure we got the southern, close checkpoints, so we headed that way and decided to get 34 and 33 on the way. In retrospect, we should have skipped 34, crossed highway 16 at Pioneer and gone for 36, 21, and 55. But we didn't. After 33, we got the close in bunch of checkpoints and finished about 7 minutes early. One of our favorite sections was going out the back of 45 along the trail to 13. Our least favorite part was going up the hill to 34, which, as we were walking up, we remembered that was our least favorite part last year on bikes.

On this Street Scramble, we adopted a Teriyaki Donut/Loves Ketchup strategy of M&Ms for the kids at each checkpoint. Of course we had to buy the M&Ms before the Street Scramble, which almost made us late for map issue. We gave out two M&Ms at each checkpoint and four where there were long stretches in between. I discovered it's hard to juggle handing out M&Ms from the bag while trying to walk, navigate, and watch traffic. Some kind of container for dispensing would have helped.

The kids liked having the rest of the festival going on around Street Scramble for things like the free stuff, the touch pool, and the rocket launching. Having Street Scrambles as part of other festivals, seems like a good idea.