The Cardinals (plus two)

For this Street Scramble we invited our friend Maria (and her friend Garyun visiting from California) to join us. We all participated on bikes and I think everyone had fun. Maria had a bit of bike trouble partway through the Scramble, but I’ll let her post about that, if she wants.

During route planning, there wasn’t a clear route emerging (usually we’re able to find a route that’s a good loop with minimal backtracking and hill climbing). All the checkpoints north of Gasworks, on the hill, forced us to plan a zigzag route. We visited the following checkpoints for a total of 620 points.

S-34-16-15-14-42-13-11-23-12-33-24-21-53-26-35-22-36-52-37-44-31-32-55-27-E

As suggested, we started out getting the checkpoints in the park. Checkpoint 34 (the bench) was a little tricky (for me, at least) to spot in the sea of people that were already in the park: Garyun spotted it pretty quick, though, and Maria spotted 16 for us. We thought 14 would be easier to get on bikes than on foot, but we should have gone there first and then on to 34, etc.

We then zigzagged our way up the hill. I was confused at 23 (head-high window) because I had Cameron reading the question from his seat on the bike trailer and I thought he was saying “head high window” (which he was), but I didn’t understand at first that it was a window at head height. At 35 (trash can), we had the same problem as everyone else. We ran out of water at 36 (Woodland Park) and stopped at the zoo to refill our water bottles. Our favorite checkpoint was probably 52 (flagpole in park) because it’s right across the street from Cameron and Corinne’s school. We took a short break at 37 (rock wall) in the shade. At the end, we added 55 (mailbox shed), risking a bridge opening, but we were able to get across and back quickly. We finished with about 15 minutes to spare.

Looking back and knowing that we were able to easily get all the checkpoints between 99, I-5, Green Lake, and Gasworks, I would probably have ridden out to get 56 and 57, then up the hill by Ravenna Park, and visited all the closer checkpoints by coming back down the hill.