I also got the impression some folks were simply knocking over the sand castle and then if the clue wasn’t staring them in face, rebuilding and moving on. Clearly from the demonstration and from the teams that found them, the clues were actually buried underneath the sand with the castle just sitting on top. I think one team even mentioned that they had not been digging far enough and didn’t want to have to go back through all the castles they had already rebuilt.
I’m pretty sure that was the problem team TwinDoc was having – knocking over the castle, not finding a clue in the pile, and rebuilding without digging down to where the clue was actually located. Not a good move…
They might be quasi-famous, but none of them are such big deals that I could see a problem with it.
The hockey brother are probably the most famous and even then, only one of the brothers has played in the NHL. And that was over six years ago.
In the grand scheme of things, the YouTube sensations are about as famous as a local news anchor.
And the “2nd tier country musicians” are really more like fourth or fifth tier. They’ve only publicly released three songs. There are garage bands with a bigger output than that.
And did no one else catch the Twins claim that they were “deliverymen” was a joke?
I wondered why they weren’t using the bucket to scoop up sand rather than using their hands to fill the bucket. But putting the bucket over the castle and moving the whole thing is an even better idea!
I also wondered whether they had exactly 11 clues buried, or maybe some extras. If you are the last team looking for a clue and there is only one left under all of those sand castles, that would suck.
The guy from Team Youtube reminds me a little of Sue’s “boyfriend” Brad on “The Middle”. Just a little too enthusiastic about everything…
I’ve never found the Amazing Race as fun as say, Survivor, but geez this was an uninspired start. Bora Bora was pretty to look at, but beyond that… skydiving’s been done before (but this is the first time it’s from a helicopter! And the sand castle challenge seemed to just be a total chance-based challenge, with the added frustration of making the contestants do physical labor in the heat. (The alternative is that the contestants weren’t digging deeply enough, or couldn’t tell which had already been dug up, but I think that just makes it worse). I spent most of this episode reading wikipedia on my phone.
I assume that the four hour penalty is put in place according to efficiency - if the last three teams all take the penalty, then it makes sense to apply the penalty on the next leg just to save everyone the trouble of sitting around for four hours.
All three teams had the same penalty. There was no point to not letting them check in with the understanding that the “real” time they checked in was 4 hours later for the purposes of when they start next leg. I am sure if a team was still doing the challenge or if this was one of those “fake” pit stops where they have to keep racing, they would have had to wait the 4 hours.