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puddin:
The Accidental Columnist
The Amazing Race - Episode 7.4
by Dan Weltin
March 23, 2005
Leg number four. Boyfriends Lynn and Alex will start things out at 3:49 a.m. They're a little cocky because the other teams are far behind them. It's true that most are, but Married Couple Uchenna and Joyce are actually only about 20 minutes behind. Oh well, wouldn't want to get hung up on technicalities.
Teams must drive 25 miles to Cabana La Guatana. The Boyfriends arrive at 6:00, but it doesn't open for another half hour. No one is there besides them when it opens. Guess they can get a little cocky.
ROADBLOCK
At the ranch, one member of each team must perform a typical Gaucho challenge: Ride a horse around barrels and spear a ring in 40 seconds or less.
The Boyfriends get it on their second try, while Joyce (who arrived in between trials) keeps getting bucked off the horse.
Meanwhile, Brothers Greg and Brian get lost and arrive after Patriots Ron and Kelly complete the Roadblock. Survivors Rob and Amber get lost as well, but in a stroke of luck, stumble upon the ranch.
After completing the Roadblock, teams must drive 25 miles to the airport where they'll take one of two prearranged flights to Buenos Aires. The first departs at 9:30 a.m., the second leaves five hours later at 2:30 p.m. Once there, they'll take a taxi to a tower where they'll meet a man in a trench coat who has their next clue.
Boyfriends, Patriots, Married Couple and Brothers all make it to the first plane and are especially happy because Rob and Amber are nowhere to be seen. Plus the four teams all finished their meat last episode. Little do they know the pilot is holding the plane for Romber. Ha ha!
Off/On Daters Ray and Deanna, Old Folks Meredith and Gretchen, and Mother/Son Duo Susan and Patrick will all be stuck on the second flight. And speaking of those teams, back at the Roadblock, Deanna struggles with her horse and Ray gets upset. He gets even madder when the Old Folks arrive and complete the challenge first.
DETOUR
Flight #1 lands at 2:30 and since Romber was last on, their luggage will be first off…and they'll first to the clue.
Now teams must take a train to the city of Tigre and find the docks. All five teams head out on the same train.
The Boyfriends head to the front of the train to try and get a headstart, but Romber (or STD as the Boyfriends call them) quickly follow.
The clue at the docks is the Detour. This week teams either choose Shipwreck or Island. In Shipwreck teams search a 7 square mile delta for a shipwreck matching their picture. In Island, teams must travel the same delta to locate an island marked on their map.
Here's the breakdown:
Shipwreck Island
Rob and Amber Lynn and Alex
Brian and Greg Ron and Kelly
Uchenna and Joyce
Meredith and Gretchen
Ray and Deanna
Susan and Patrick
The boats have trouble and a couple of them break down. Lynn and Alex must radio for a replacement boat which costs them some time. Rob and Amber's boat gets a crack in it and forces them to go slow, but they find the clue first. In reward for his huge effort, Rob gives the boat driver his Red Sox hat. It pays off because Rob and Amber arrive at the Pit Stop before Greg and Brian who experienced no boat trouble at all.
Speaking of the Pit Stop, after teams find the clue, they must return to shore and travel 35 miles by taxi to the La Martina polo club (this week's Pit Stop).
Uchenna and Joyce start out doing Shipwreck, but they switch to Island when the accidentally find the correct island.
After finding the clue, the Patriots get stuck in a slow cab and the Boyfriends' cabbie gets lost. Both mistakes cost them and they bring up the rear of the first-flight teams.
WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER THREE TEAMS?
Meanwhile, the loser three teams are heading to the train to Tigre. Off/On Daters and Old Folks make the first train giving them a slight lead over Susan and Patrick. The Mother/Son Duo, however, think the reverse is true since they don't see the other teams on their train. Suckers.
Ray and Deanna get lost on the way to the clue, so Susan and Patrick catch a break and catch up. Ray and Deanna quickly bounce back, however, and take the Old Folks down instead. The Off/On Daters find the clue on the island and start heading back to shore. Old Folks run into them and think they're heading to the island, not back to shore so they follow. It costs them some time before they realize their mistake.
Luckily for them, Patrick is all but giving up. Baby. Maybe if he had a better attitude they wouldn't have finished in last place and been eliminated. Sigh.
LEADERBOARD
1st Place Survivors Rob and Amber
2nd Place Brothers Brian and Greg
3rd Place Married Couple Uchenna and Joyce
4th Place Patriots Ron and Kelly
5th Place Boyfriends Lynn and Alex
6th Place Off/On Daters Ray and Deanna
7th Place Old Folks Meredith and Gretchen
Eliminated Mother/Son Susan and Patrick
http://www.the-trades.com/column.php?columnid=3066
puddin:
Villagers shrug off deception to stay in 'The Amazing Race'
By THERESA CAMPBELL, DAILY SUN
THE VILLAGES - Riding a horse around barrels in impressive time, and racing in the coastal waters off of Argentina in "The Amazing Race," Villages snowbirds Meredith and Gretchen Smith proved even as the oldest couple, they still have what it takes to stay in the game.
Seven teams are now left. The fifth leg of "The Amazing Race" airs 9 p.m. Tuesday on CBS.
The following is a recap of the fourth episode:
Tuesday's show began with teams driving 25 miles to the small town of La Lunta to find a ranch known as Cabaña La Guatana for their next clue. Arriving at the ranch, the teams opened their clues to find a roadblock. In this roadblock, one team member had to participate in a traditional gaucho challenge. First, they had to ride a horse around a series of barrels and then, using a stick, spear a ring at the end of the course. If they could perform the task in 40 seconds, a competitive time for an Argentine cowboy, they would receive their next clue.
Some of the teams struggled in the horseback riding challenge, and when Ray and Deana saw Meredith and Gretchen arrive at Cabaña La Guatana, Ray quickly brushed the Smiths off.
"It's the oldsters," Ray said. Yet in a head-to-head battle, Deana lost to "oldster" Meredith, who completed the course in 36 seconds while Deana had to stop because her foot fell out of the stirrup.
Opening their clue after this challenge, Meredith and Gretchen excitedly drove to Mendoza Airport to catch the 2:30 p.m. flight to Buenos Aires, and then were instructed to travel by taxi to the English Clock Tower and find a man in a raincoat for the next clue.
The clue from the man instructed teams to travel by train 20 miles to the city of Tigre and find docks located at 700 Lavalle.
At the docks, the teams opened their clue to find a detour. This detour required teams to choose between "shipwreck" and "island." Teams choosing shipwreck had to search a 7-square-mile area filled with abandoned ships for a specific shipwreck using only a 30-year-old picture as a reference. To complete the island challenge, teams had to use a map to travel four miles through the confusing delta waterways to the San Antonio River and find an island on which their next clue was located.
The Smiths chose the island detour. Following Ray and Deana, they were unaware the younger couple was steering them away from their clue.
Ray ranted about Meredith and Gretchen on this leg of the race, calling the seniors, "a couple of decades beyond where they need to be."
"I'm not losing to a 70-year-old man and his wife, even if it was checkers. They don't belong in the game with us," Ray said.
After finally finding the clue, Meredith realized Ray had been trying to confuse him, and Meredith took it all in stride.
"Guess he was lying to us. Part of the game," Meredith said.
While opening the clue, the Smiths discovered they needed to travel 35 miles by taxi to the town of Vicente Casares and find La Martina, the most prestigious polo club in Argentina and the pit stop for this leg of the race.
Rob and Amber placed first, while the Smiths came in seventh. Susan and Patrick, the mother and son team and good friends of the Smiths, came in last and were eliminated.
Next week marks the fifth episode of "The Amazing Race," which CBS announced will run two hours. A preview of the program shows this leg of the race is a challenge for Gretchen. She was shown on TV after a fall and with a bloody face. Was Gretchen OK? Will the Smiths make it to the sixth leg of the race? Fans and viewers will have to tune in Tuesday to see. _)^
Theresa Campbell is senior features writer with the Daily Sun. She can be reached at 753-1119, ext. 9260, or theresa.campbell@thevillagesmedia.com.
puddin:
Local duo loses 'Race'
Susan Vaughn says she's still tight with her son Patrick, who complained about her nagging before they were eliminated from "The Amazing Race" show Tuesday.
"I knew when Patrick and I were cast on the show that the bond we had would not be tarnished by the experience," says Susan, 54, of Hamilton.
On the show, the pessimistic Patrick, 26, a Hollywood writer, constantly brushed off his mom's optimism as they were last to reach an Argentina polo club.
"I expected there would be moments like you saw (Tuesday) night. The editing doesn't show all of the positive things that Patrick said to me, and things he said about our experience," says Susan, judicial affairs director at Miami University in Oxford. "He and I are a great team and best friends."
Susan calls traveling eight days through South America on the show "a once in a lifetime experience and I wouldn't trade a moment of it."
John Kiesewetter
http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050324/LIFE03/503240323/1038/Life
puddin:
Posted on Fri, Apr. 01, 2005
The Kansas City Star
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Having polished off his burnt-ends sandwich, Phil Keoghan finishes off a reporter's final futile attempts to probe deeper beneath his bland exterior.
"You see, I don't separate the personal and the professional," said the host of The Amazing Race, the popular reality show that airs Tuesday nights on CBS. "Isn't the ideal to actually work in a job that is your personal passion? Isn't that what we all want? To wake up every morning and do what we want to do and be paid for it?"
If this is Keoghan's passion, it's impossible to tell from that stone-faced look that he usually wears in public. It's the same look that has made him famous on The Amazing Race.
The show's 11 million or so faithful viewers all know the ritual: Exhausted teammates arrive at the end of each leg of their round-the-world journey, huffing and puffing. They look Keoghan hopefully in the eye, searching for just a hint that they were not, indeed, the last team to arrive at the station and, therefore, are "Phil-iminated."
Last week, Keoghan and his father, John, whom he flew in from New Zealand, were seeing America from a Mercedes SUV they are driving from New York to Los Angeles. (He was to wrap up his tour Monday with an appearance on The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson.)
Along the way, he was attending tryouts for an upcoming edition of Race and promoting his book, No Opportunity Wasted, a companion to the Discovery Channel series by the same name.
Later, over lunch at a Kansas City, Kan., barbecue restaurant, he explained that barnstorming was something he had done from the start of his TV career 11 years ago. As one of several "road warriors" for the quirky FX morning show Breakfast Time, he scoured small-town America looking for offbeat or compelling stories that might interest his cable audience.
"The producer used to say to us, 'You're going to Lebanon, Kansas. You will find five stories. End of subject,' " Keoghan recalled.
Journalistically, this may have been easier for an outsider who carries the traveling gene. (John Keoghan recently heard from someone who met father and son on the Appalachian Trail in 1983.) Today, though, Keoghan recalls the marketing lesson.
"People like local news," he said. "I learned that you could create a lot of local press, a lot of good will, by going to the market and talking to people face to face and letting them have a story out of you being there."
Keoghan conducted an interview with a Denver radio station en route to the barbecue joint. After lunch, it was off to a bookstore to sign copies of No Opportunity Wasted.
The book begins with a near-death experience Keoghan had at age 19, when he was diving into a shipwreck for a New Zealand TV show. He became disoriented inside the ship's hull before being rescued by another diver.
Keoghan claims to have no memory of those final terrible moments before he blacked out, but the ordeal had a transforming effect. He decided to make a list of adventures for himself and began checking them off as he accomplished them.
He learned barefoot water skiing. He got a skydiving license. Later, the stunts became more elaborate: hiking up an active volcano and having a four-star meal prepared at the top.
All the while, Keoghan rode the wave of nonfiction TV. He hosted various syndicated and cable adventure programs (including one, inevitably, titled Keoghan's Heroes), where he was "paid to have fun." He was a finalist for the job of Survivor host. When The Amazing Race came along, he said, CBS President Leslie Moonves told him, "When your name came up the second time, we wanted to give you a shot."
It's easy to make fun of Keoghan's all-work, all-play mentality. Then again, he was on the road for 363 days in 2004, logging nearly half a million miles. And after the resurrection of Race, who can blame him for not wasting this opportunity?
Besides, he gets to share it with his father, John, an affable retired agricultural consultant who now runs a bed-and-breakfast with his wife on New Zealand's south island.
While fetching coffee and bagels that morning, Keoghan was spotted by Karen Jaggers and Jeannie Sheahan, mothers of students at a local elementary school. They wanted Phil to come by and surprise John Sheahan, who was giving a report that day on New Zealand. The idea of jazzing up the boy's show-and-tell made him break into a big grin.
Hopping into his rig -- a G-class SUV donated by Mercedes -- Keoghan took a shortcut out of the parking lot, over curbs and grass, like a teen-ager who'd just gotten his license
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/entertainment/11275007.htm
puddin:
Villages snowbirds take fifth place to remain in 'Amazing Race'
By THERESA CAMPBELL, DAILY SUN
THE VILLAGES - Villager Bill Petri admits he is simply amazed that Villages snowbirds Meredith and Gretchen Smith are still in "The Amazing Race," and are showing the world that retirees can compete with 20- and 30-year-olds.
"Good for them," Petri said. "I was expecting them to be out of the race long before this, and Meredith and Gretchen are doing wonderfully. I'm very proud that they are still hanging in there, and that's a good thing for all of us seniors to see, that they are hanging in there with the young guys."
The race, which began with 11 teams, is now down to five.
Tuesday's show featured the racers competing in challenges in Botswana, while taking in sights of African scenery and exotic animals crossing their paths. The teams began by driving 141 miles past the city of Maun and then 48 miles to Sankuyo Village, where their next clue waited under a water tower.
After opening the clue, teams learned it was a detour, where they had to make a choice between two village chores: "Carry it" or "Milk it." To complete the Carry it, team members were told they had to balance three items on their head: a basket filled with corn, a bucket of water and a bundle of logs. Next, without using their hands, they had to carry their load to a cooking area 70 yards away. While the balancing act was difficult, teams that could master the technique would finish quickly.
For Milk it, teams had to choose goats from a pen, tie them up and milk them until they had filled a 10-ounce cup. While the task appeared simple, milking the goats was not as easy as it looked and was a challenge for some teams to do.
The Smiths chose the Milk-It task and did well.
Reaching the route marker, teams opened the clue to find a roadblock. This roadblock required one person to navigate their team's Land Rover vehicle through a crocodile-infested river crossing. Then, continuing through the bush, the driver had to choose a driving path by removing the marking posts along the way. However, trees felled by elephants blocked each path, and the racers had to remove logs in the path, then drive to the next clue posted on a small tree.
Opening the clue, teams were instructed to drive nine miles to the Khwai River Lodge, Botswana's oldest safari lodge and the pit stop for this leg of the race.
Rob and Amber stepped onto the mat in first place.
Meredith and Gretchen arrived at the Pit Stop in fourth place but were told they had to return to the roadblock because they had not taken a clue directing them to the Khwai River Lodge. They panicked a bit, and then jumped in their car in search of the final clue.
And in the end, the Villages snowbirds made it, beating out brothers Greg and Brian back to the lodge to claim fifth place. The brothers came in last and were the sixth team eliminated on "The Amazing Race."
Villagers and fans will be able to tune in at 9 p.m. Tuesday on CBS to see how the Smiths do in the next leg of the race. Previews of next week's program showed Meredith and Gretchen receiving a rousing standing ovation from townspeople. What's that all about? The Smiths can't tell, so that means fans will have to watch the show to see.
Theresa Campbell is senior features writer with the Daily Sun. She can be reached at 753-1119, ext. 9260, or theresa.campbell@thevillagesmedia.com.
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