From the Cutting Room Floor - Tar 30.6

The Amazing Race, Season 30, Episode 6: "The Claws Are Out" #TeamExtreme Recap

And so, the adventure continues! **SPOILER ALERT*** Once again, and with honor, Kristi & I landed on the podium. This time we were back in FIRST place. We're the first team of the season to win two legs and are feeling stronger and more confident as we work out our strategies for this race. Prague is a gorgeous city and close to my heart as my great grandparents were from this area. I've always wanted to visit and am more compelled than ever to go back!

When we signed up for the Amazing Race, we did so because of the incredible opportunity the race presented - a potential trip around the world, being tested in all different realms, a prize of $1,000,000 - not because we were going to be on TV. The cameras, the producers, the sound guys/gal, were all secondary to the competition. We almost forgot that there was a TV show being produced at times, we were simply there to compete. The aftermath of the show has been an incredible gift and given us the chance to relive one of the most [amazing] experiences of our lives.

Why didn't you plot against a strong team in the back of the pack and eliminate someone with the W-Turn?

For those of you who don't know the rules of the race, once you've used a u-turn, you can't use it again in the race. [After speaking to some other races from TAR30, I may have been wrong about this]. Regardless, Kristi and I were feeling really strong about how we were racing and with an hour lead on 3 other teams, we felt like we would be wiser to let them battle it out among themselves. Though the "social" game of TAR isn't quite as mission critical as in say Survivor, it is still a crucial element. Being a good team isn't the only reason you get u-turned. You can have a target on your back for being a strong team, for being untrustworthy, for being annoying...

To risk u-turning a team that we were likely to beat to the mat that day regardless, wasn't worth it. Even had we used the "burn" tactic, wherein, the first team to arrive u-turns a team in the back of the pack, and then the second team to arrive u-turns the first team, thus making it void and leaving only one team u-turned, there was still a chance that team would survive. Well-Strung nearly did. Then we'd be left in a race with a pissed off team and we would have a target on our back for not only being "good" but being "untrustworthy." The U-Turn was an unnecessary weapon for us to use in this scenario.

That said, Jess & Cody absolutely made the right decision in U-Turning Well-Strung. Though all of us were sad to see them go.

Why did you decide to keep your cab in Prague?

We let our cab go at the Roadblock in Belgium and then got super lost finding the printing press. We said we'd NEVER let our cab go again. But then had a terrible cab in Morocco, so we abandoned ship! Haha! See, learning from past mistakes...

On the flight to Prague we asked a local an overwhelming number of questions about their taxis. There are a lot of fraudulent taxis in Prague, as well as only certain ones that travel in certain places. We made sure to learn the trustworthy taxi companies (AAA was one of them). We also knew that cabs were difficult to track down in the city, but were informed that any restaurant would happily call one for you. The Firefighters did that! But, waiting for a cab during the Amazing Race is a form of torture.

So, without giving away too many secrets, we found a way to communicate with our cab driver that we were in a very important race and that we wanted/needed him to wait for us. We also learned how to say "thank you very much" in Czech (děkuji mnohokrát - pronounced djay-qwee-A moots-graat), which goes a long way while traveling.

Why didn't others do the same?

This was the first leg where you really needed a cab, so I don't think the "keep your cab" mentality was quite front-of-mind. The driving time between the detour & roadblock was probably about 15-20 minutes without traffic. And from the roadblock back to the city center about the same. To be without a cab would have been horrendous. You couldn't do it. Hence why so many teams spent so much time trying to find a cab, versus trekking on foot. I don't think many teams thought about keeping their cab at the Rudolfinum and then some others had issues retaining them.

Why did you choose "This" over "That?"

Since we had no information about either detour, we decided that we would go to the closest one. Our cabbie told us that "This" was closer, which apparently wasn't true, but it worked out. The most important thing was that he knew where it was. We got there about 15 minutes before Yale, as they were taking public transportation. I think Kristi and I would have been able to get through "That" pretty quickly as well, but "This" was way more fun.

"This" had some elements that made it very tricky. For example, the "perfect pour." (If the photo of the perfect pour was double-sided, we're total idiots...) I knew we needed some foam, but the area to which we needed to take it for approval was quite a ways away. By the time we got down there, our foam had deflated almost to nothing. On round 2, we brought our mug of beer and another mug full of foam, and refilled our foam right around the corner from the brew master.

What was so difficult about finding the party boat?

This is actually so freaking funny... After we rearranged the kegs, tapped the full-keg, and delivered a perfect pour to the brewmaster, we had to deliver 2 kegs to "Fidelio at Naplavka Smichov." That was ALL the information we had. We first went to our cabbie who was waiting for us, and showed him where we needed to go. He offered to drive us, but we had to go on foot and we're not allowed to have someone lead us. We tried to follow his directions, but apparently our concept of 200 meters is wayyyy off.

This was approximately the route that Kristi & I took, maybe a little shy on the back & forths:

We asked so many other people for directions. Everyone just kept saying, it's at the river, which we thought meant it was a restaurant or brewery on the river. Mind you, the river is long, as rivers are... There was no indication of Fidelio being a boat. However, if any of us had slowed down enough to use someone's phone to look up each individual element of this, we would have learned that Naplavka means "embankment," Smichov is a district in Prague, and Fidelio...yeah, nothing about Fidelio. We were too fixated on this last element, Fidelio, to realize that Naplavka Smichov is a very specific embankment. Not the river itself...

If you did it right, the brewery was merely a 5 minute walk to Fidelio if you went directly there... But Fidelio was tucked behind the wall of the embankment, so you didn't see it while you were walking past it. We past it two or three times before actually finding it. Don't worry, we got it right the second time!

Jen, how did you solve the Roadblock?

The Roadblock was a memory challenge, which I happen to LOVE! Yay! I hadn't seen this episode with Flight Time & Big Easy (though I watched their season, so not sure how I missed it). This was allllll new. As soon as I walked in, the ringing was overwhelming. It was deafening. I just decided right away that I had to be extremely methodical about listening to the phones. I think I was also the only one who plugged their other ear... As I was hearing the words, I'd put them into small individual phrases so that it would be easier to remember.

I made a whole lap around the room, listened to every single phone, but still only had 6 words. At first I was stressing but, it was still only Daniel and I in the room. So, I just started at the beginning and SLOWED DOWN.

The phones weren't real, meaning that picking up the handle didn't trigger the recording. I'm fairly certain that the recording of the words was on a loop, so if you picked it up right after the word played, you'd hear silence for long enough that you'd think there wasn't a recording. But, if you picked it up right before it played, it would seem like the words played quickly. In a nutshell, if you went too quickly, you'd miss words.

I finally got all 8 words and went into the room to solve the puzzle. This was around the time that Evan arrived. The form had a bunch of random questions you had to answer (to confuse you) and then had one section to write the 8 words in, line-by-line. I'm a very visual person, so I immediately went to write the words down on the margin so that I could visualize how they should go together. Apparently that was not allowed. So I started over. I first tried: "It is the meaning of life that stops," which is completely morose...

The real Kafka quote, however, is beautiful: "The meaning of life is that it stops." A little less than 3 years ago, I held my father's hand as he took his final breath. His death taught me to appreciate every moment for what it is. So, that's what Kristi and I have tried to do on this race. "Life has meaning and purpose because it's finite. And our experience on this race is finite as well, whether or not we win, or go home next leg," I say, as Kristi finishes my thought, "we want to enjoy every moment."

Why didn't you work with Daniel?

It didn't even cross my mind to work with Daniel. The twins are the nicest people on earth and their dad jokes are out of this world. Evan had been calling them the "plaid dads," which I think would have been a more appropriate hashtag, but maybe it didn't fit with the theme of the season.

Anyway, my decision to not work with Daniel was simply because I didn't need to. The Firefighters and us were the first two teams there. The edit made it look like Kristi and I somehow arrived long before them, but we weren't there more than a minute before they arrived. We were still at the clue-box when they got there.

At this point we knew Well-Strung had been U-turned because Indy told us when we saw them as we were leaving the detour. So, we knew we didn't have a ton of time pressure. In the same way we didn't need to U-turn, we didn't need to collaborate.

Did Jess sabotage Brittany & Alex?

Before you read on, please remember that behind the "characters" that you see on this show are real people with real feelings and real lives. Be kind. It's fine to be critical of race decisions, but let's not make it personal. All of these people are in a race for $1MM. No one knows who or what to believe or when you're being lied to. As a racer, there are things you don't know until the show airs. Yet, all our opinions on scenarios are filmed BEFORE THE SHOW AIRS. You have to be on your toes, looking over your shoulder, questioning every decision, conversation, interaction, to see what it may tell you about a team's trustworthiness.

I don't think Jess sabotaged Brittany & Alex, but she was uncomfortably sneaky, and intentionally so: "The last thing I wanted was to give everyone all of my hard-work and then see them leaving the roadblock before me. I didn't feel comfortable sharing the actual answer until I was heading out that door with the clue in my hand." This is completely fair, but there was probably a better way to go about it.

In the context of the race, I give her props for thinking on her toes so quickly. I couldn't have come up with that plan on the spot. Might not be the same game Kristi and I are playing, but this girl is in this game to win it. I also completely understand why Brittany is expressing reservations about trusting Jessica moving forward. Don't forget she's also in a race for $1,000,000.

What We See:

Jess asks Brittany, "How many words do you have? I have 5, but I'm missing 3."

Brittany responds, "Which ones do you have? I'll tell you if I have the one that you're missing. Ha!"

Jess says, "This, Is, It, and then Stops," then states, "let me know if you find another word."

We then see Brittany & Alex hand in their sheets, while Jess changes "this" to "life." After B & A get it wrong, she turns her in form, gets it right and gets her clue.

What We Don't See:

I've typed out the scenario, word for word, but we are still missing so much information. For example, we don't see when Alex got in the mix. We don't hear anyone explicitly say "let's work together". And we don't see who did what when they were solving the puzzle... In other words, we don't have all the facts, so how can we judge?

So, what should Jess have done?

By telling them the word before she left, Jess prevented an all out war. Had she not done that, she would have guaranteed that she and Cody would be racing with a target on their back. Jess could have gotten the same results without potentially burning bridges by negotiating the collaboration. She was in a power position because she had more words than Brittany & Alex combined. By saying, I'll give you my words if you let me get the clue first when we solve the puzzle, she would have preserved some relationships. Easy for me to say in hindsight though. All said and done, it's a race.

Next WEEK:

Off to Zimbabwe next week! When we left Morocco we were worried that would be our only African experience. Morocco feels more middle-eastern and Mediterranean than African. We are over the moon excited to go to Zimbabwe! My face says it all! Next week shifts to two-hour time slot from 9-11 pm ET & PT and 8-10 pm MT & CT, only on CBS :)