Sorry about the recap being late this week but I’m on vacation in New Mexico and to say my wife has me on a tight itinerary is an understatement. With my apologies out of the way, here are the teams left:
Show begins a bit differently than normal with each team talking about how impressed they were with Margie and Luke. Teams begin departing at 2:56 am and fly to Munich Germany and then drive to Ruhpolding where they will take a tram to the top of a mountain. The last team to depart was Christie and Jodi at about 4:10am. On the drive, most of the teams called ahead of time to book flights and it seems that was quite beneficial. The first flight departs with 8 teams while the second flight at 8:45am consists of Mark & Michael and Christie and Jodi. Mark and Michael were 3rd to depart but failed to call ahead of time.
Tammy and Victoria are the first to arrive in Rupholding and get on the first tram without any other team. The rest of the first flight teams have to wait at least 15 minutes for the next tram or two. All the teams besides Kesha/Jen, Mark/Michael, and Christie/Jodi are now at the Roadblock. The roadblock makes a person run off the mountain and paraglide down to the bottom while the teammate must take the tram back down the mountain. If it is too windy, they can take a 60 minute trek down the mountain. At the moment, it is too windy so teams are trying to wait it out. All the teams at the roadblock decide to run down instead of waiting except for Mel since his groin injury is too severe for him to survive the run. Finally the last 3 teams arrive while Mel is still waiting for the wind. Not much long after that, all teams start running while Mel continues to hold out for the wind to die, It’s looking bad for Mel and he prays that the wind will die and IT DOES! YES! Go Mel! Mel is sailing down the mountain while editing shows us that Tammy, Margie, and Kris make it to the bottom.
Linda makes a wrong turn at some point on the mountain since she misses a marker. Mel sails to the bottom of the mountain and gets his team back into 5th place. What a turnaround. All other teams are finishing while Linda is still lost. She has managed to end up at a highway. Poor lady is distraught. She asks a person for help and a lady drives her to the cable car place.
The next clue is a detour. Balancing Dolly is basically a Segway ride through an obstacle course. “Austrian Folly” involves throwing pies at their partner’s faces until they find a cherry filling pie. Ha ha ha I hope they all choose this. At least five teams did so I got my fill of pie in the face humor.
After finishing the detour, teams are instructed to run on foot to the woodcutters to have them cut a piece of wood. The woodcutters were actually similar to animatronics as I guess the economy won’t allw us to have real people cut small pieces of wood. After the wood is cut, each team has their wood stamped with their next clue which tells them to head to the pit stop at Schloss Hellbrunn. Tammy and Victor reach the pit stop before any of the other teams make it to the detour and they win a hybrid go-cart. This team is now my favorite to win it all.
Meanwhile, Linda finally makes it back and Steve is awesome to her. Good job, man. Kisha/Jen can’t read a damn map for anything and are lost for the second time but finally arrive at the Segway detour. Mel/Mike hit the pit stop in second while Amanda/Kris arrive in 3rd after getting lost. Margie/Luke arrive in 4th with Brad/Victoria right behind them. For the second week in a row, Brad and Vic aren’t getting a lot of time. Hopefully this is a good sign for their future.
At this point, the only teams not to have checked in are Christie/Jodi and Linda/Steve. Many of the teams have a hard time finding the pit stop but in the end, Steve and Linda finish the race in last. Well, this was about as expected as the beekeepers last season. Steve was a bit emotional at losing but it was cool to see them care about making it further on the show. After the next elimination, I think Phil will have weeded out all the weak teams and we’ll have a real race on our hands!
