2007 Survivor Beach Hat Tournament

i was waiting for pictures to publish, but meh, its been too long.

i've survived my first TD experience.

• our columbia sponsored shirts got cancelled. instead of shirts printed with the tourney logo, we bought white shirts and made ppl paint them in their tribal colors (or not, depending on their mood). the columbia sponsored water bottles were awesome.


• fewer ppl showed up sat night than expected. more ppl showed up sunday than expected (==> financial fiasco). more organization from me would've helped. we managed to sneak 8 extra ppl into lunch (we'd only paid for 40. i have no morals, i know, but neither do the restaurant owners. they claimed the buffet lunch of chicken, fried rice, fruit, french bread, pasta salad cost $180 a head).


• we didn't get to do a lot of our survivor challenges, but our buried water idea turned out beautifully (we dug holes in the sand and buried trash bags with ice wrapped around 5-gallon jugs. we used electric pumps (meant for petrol, but completely new) to pump water up).


• some cable tv channel showed up to film.


• nobody got seriously injured, so our team of 6 paramedics (3 male, 3 female--who knows why they separate their teams into male and female ones) got pretty bored.

i also survived the weekend, despite some serious set backs:

• jon, alicia, and i rented bikes on saturday to venture to the nearby supermarket. little did we know that the road to the supermarket was a MOUNTAIN road. i was heaving and hoing all the way there. and my back brakes didn't work, so careening wildly down wasn't really an option (especially with all the construction trucks and buses coming the other way). and then we had to heave and ho all the way back (uphill both ways! downhill both ways!). and then my pedal fell off. luckily, we were pretty close to home by then and the road was flat for the rest. i rode it one footed using the push-pull method. i would raise the pedal with the top of my foot and then push it down again. i lost my shoe in the process.


• kevin made a pipe out of a coke can. it worked much better than the aluminum foil one we were using before.


• sat night, one of the guys started blowing fire from the tikki torches. and then he swung fire from the ends of ropes (like at that waterfire festival we went to last year). in between flaming feats, he'd walk on his hands. turns out we had a circus performer amongst us. awesome.


• no one actually got naked for the glow-in-the-dark game of disc, but i'm ok with that. there was a huge hole in the side of the field. christina ran straight into it and face planted. her wig went flying. did i mention that i love slapstick?


• when we went to find our tents, we found a cow. maybe it was a water buffalo. anyways, it was standing between two tents. what was it doing? you guessed it: pooing. it left a huge paddy right in the middle of the path, next to a lamp that wasn't working. we chose tents on the other side of the grounds.


• apparently, other ppl found the tents super hot (i thought it was quite nice). they moved to sleep on the beach, right before it started raining. whoops. and apparently, the sex noises from one tent kept the dogs howling all night. i was oblivious to it all.


• and then sunday went swimmingly. one ruffian tried to sneak past me without registering, but i tracked him down (i had to tackle him to the ground and stick my knee in his mouth). nancy, you should really teach your brother better manners.