Two hours, 44 minutes, 44 seconds. That’s how long it took for Taco vs. Grilled Cheese (our team name) to complete the Urban Dare challenge in Tampa, FL (results listed here).

The Hitchhiker’s Guide quotes the official word on what Urban Dare is, and then adds a curious bit at the end:

In total, Jay (Aazhmandius)* and I walked and ran and wandered over 6 miles around Ybor City and downtown Tampa. I mapped out our path here.
*Official results have my original team - myself and Mike (mJamus), but Mike couldn’t make it to the race, and Jay was going be on our support team (at home looking up info), so we just swapped Jay for Mike last minute.

We got up to Tampa at around 10:30, an hour and a half before the race began. The Florida weather had decided to get right to the point by getting things hot and humid already.

By noon, 36 teams were set to go, including our team, as well as Chuck (ChuckieMonkey) and Jonathan’s (mynameisnotJonas) team: Batman Isn’t a Real Superhero, He’s Just a Guy With a Lot of Stuff. We also met some friends from Georgia — Rachel & Melissa, whose team name they perpetually forget.

Here’s a rundown of how the race went for our team:

The race started off with a series of multiple choice questions, answering correctly meant your team could get their clues and be on your way. We, of course, got every question wrong. So we had a slight delay, but we were on our way nonetheless.

Once we got our clue sheet, I immediately called our support team (mentioned briefly above) to begin to decipher the clues and figure out where we were headed. Mike was our sole Operator at the beginning. Anything we needed for information, we called him. So I read him all the clues and he got to work on figuring out where in Tampa each one was.

Our first clue I knew the location of, so we headed there while I read the rest of the clues to Mike. We began in Ybor Centennial Park, and down the street was where Gameworks was, which was the subject of the first clue.

There was a bit of a line of teams waiting their turn at the two basketball games, but I figured we needed some time anyways to plan our route. By the time Jay had finished the dare, I had the location of at least 4 clues. One of them wasn’t too far away, so we headed in it’s direction.

Down the street from Gameworks was Jose Marti Park, so we took our picture and headed for the trolley station. The rest of the clues we had were in downtown Tampa, so we boarded the trolley to take it all the way to the end. We figured we would work our way back from the furthest point.

There were a number of teams on the trolley with us, but some of them got off at the next stop. Only one other team stayed on till the end of the line with us, which made us wonder if our plan was going to work out (I think it did).

We got off at Southern Transportation Plaza and headed across the Hillsborough River to Linear Park, where stood a statue of one Christopher Columbus.

In 1492 he sailed the ocean blue. Get your picture with his statue.

Click.

On the way, Jay called his wife, Lani, adding her to our support team. And I must say that she was an excellent addition to our support. Not to say that Mike wasn’t pulling his weight. But on the things that he was running into snags, she was able to find. Lani was the gas portion of our smooth-running hybrid engine support team.

The reason for the call was that we were having trouble with this clue:

We couldn’t figure out who was ranked #2 at the beginning of the year…so all we really had were a few guesses. I noticed USF park on our map, and we were right near it, so we swung by. Thankfully that was it, and we quickly finished the dare there.

We then headed to Channelside in the southeast corner of downtown Tampa. At this point we had an idea where most of the clues were, but there still were a couple that we hadn’t located. By the time we had gotten to Splitsville Lanes in Channelside, though, we had a location for each clue on our sheet.

A plate of whipped cream with a piece of gum embedded into the cream. I had to stick my face in the cream and get the gum, then blow a bubble. Mmm…nothing like a good bit of dairy on a hot, humid day. After a slight move in the wrong direction, we headed up the Channel District to Rustic Steel Creations, home of the subject of our next clue.

Simple and painless. At this point we’ve got all of our clues and their location on the map. What’s left is figuring the best route to take. We headed north to the Tampa Union Station.

Get it? Love… yeah. On to the next clue. Our plan was to circle around and end up as close to the end as we can, and then just high-tail it to where the final dare was (back in Ybor).

The next couple were pretty close to eachother:

I had been up in Tampa a couple weeks earlier, just to get an idea of what it would be like moving around the city area, and the picture of the barometer looked very familiar. There was a park with a statue and a pavilion that had a strikingly similar style top to it (left). In the excitement of the race I hadn’t given the picture a close look and firgured that the pavillion I had seen was what we were looking for.

The Confederate Memorial was easy to find, right across the street from the park with the non-barometer. Even though there was some construction nearby and they had fences up, we were still able to approach it for a picture.

It wasn’t until we crossed the street and were about to take the picture that I realized it was not the subject of the picture. It wasn’t anything like a barometer. Like any good hitchhiker, I refrained from panicking. We called our Operators to let them begin to search for a barometer somewhere in Tampa. In the meantime, we’d head for the next clue and hope that this barometer wasn’t somewhere out of the way, if we could find it at all.

One block’s walk to the west, and the clouds parted, as divine light rained down on a chance meeting with our lost barometer. I figured we’d be delayed a bit, but I never suspected we would stumble upon the clue in as convenienient as circumstances as we did. Thankfully, we got our picture and headed out with restored vigor (that’s Jay’s hand and my pointer finger, by the way…not my middle finger…just to be clear).

A few blocks down was Poe Plaza, the subject of what was the hardest clue for our support team to find.

We didn’t waste much time there, we had to find letters distributed around the plaza, each letter having a number assigned to it. Add up the numbers of each corresponding letter in our team’s word, and we are 2 dares away from finishing. We set out north to Perry Harvey Senior Park for our baseball dare.

Spin around a bat eight times and then run a small infield. Easy. Especially since I was filming Jay doing it. From there we hiked east toward Ybor, with the Green Iguana as our final destination.

We almost tried to hop on a convieniently arriving trolley, but by that time, we were on 7th Ave, which is where the 5 minute bonus was:

I figured since the Green Iguana was also on 7th Ave, we may as well walk down and try to find the brick if we could. We never did find it, but I think the trolley would’ve been just as slow.

Once we got to the Green Iguana, there were a few teams already there. Some of them were already sitting at a table, done. There were others working on a puzzle. So we found a spot at the bar and got into puzzle mode. I don’t mean to brag, and I’m sure there are many others that are better at puzzles that me or Jay, but we absolutely destroyed that puzzle. We were done in about 3 minutes.

We got checked out with all of the proper passport stamps and photos needed, putting us at a time of 2:44:44, just 1 minute behind 3rd place, 10 minutes behind 2nd, and 14 minutes behind first.

Fourth place!

Batman isn’t a superhero he’s just a guy with a lot stuff finished 19th, and Rachel & Melissa finished 22nd. Jonathan & Chuck had trolley issues, and Rachel & Melissa were competing after having driven 10 hours from Georgia. I mean, right after. They drove overnight Friday and arrived in Tampa Saturday morning.

Thanks Jay for racing with me, I was confident that we would do well, and I was right. And we couldn’t have done it without the support team, the best information-getting Google-searching Operators you can find. I had an absolute blast with this, and come November 29th, I’m pretty sure I’ll be back up in Tampa for the next one.