Bell City Chase 2005 Summary

This is a summary of the Bell City Chase in which Michelle and I participated on June 25, 2005. It is billed as a mini-Amazing Race, overall it was quite fun and I would recommend it to anybody looking for a physical and mental challenge. For anybody interested they are running a second Toronto event on August 27th. I don't know if I am eager enough to do it again this year, but I would certainly volunteer to be somebody's phone contact in August. The cost is $150 per team. You can get more details at www.bellcitychase.com.

The teams consisted of 2 people, Michelle was my partner, we have always said we would kill each other on the Real Amazing Race and thus this was a good one day test of that theory.

There were a total of 15 chasepoints and you had to complete a total of 10 of them, however three were mandatory. As there were over 600 teams the race is not linear like the Amazing Race TV show so you could do the checkpoints in any order.

It would have been impossible to complete the race without having access to the internet. Our internet contact was mostly with Sari by cell phone along with some help from Karen, Tanya and Richard. Thanks to all of them. The reason we needed help was that some of the clues were not that straight forward such as "find Henry Pellat's secret garden" which Sari looked up is in Casa Loma. As well not a lot of addresses were given so they had to be looked up. I have scanned in the clue sheet so you can see them for yourself. See a pdf of clue sheet 1  See a pdf of clue sheet 2

The race started in the Air Canada Centre at 10 am and the cutoff time to be officially counted was 6 hours, we made it in at 5 hours and 50 minutes, just in time. You can see the top 10 teams here and the full results here: http://www.bellcitychase.com/results/2005/toronto1/toronto1results.xls We ended up in 384th place out of 600 teams. The first place team did it in 2 hours and 46 minutes, almost half an hour before the second place team.

As you can see from the standings, over 100 teams didn't finish and many didn't make all ten checkpoints like we did. After about 2 hours we only had about 3 chasepoints done (and got a bit lost) and we both thought it was going to be impossible to finish, but we stuck with it, never gave up and finished in the nick of time.

One important restriction was that the only mode of transportation allowed was the TTC or by foot. As it was Saturday and it was Pride week I figured any surface route would be very busy and thus took the subway all the time. Most of the checkpoints were within a couple blocks of subway stops, this was good as the temperature was about 33 Celsius that day so the subway was a nice air-conditioned break.

The first mandatory chasepoint was a scavenger hunt where you had to collect 10 of 15 items (I have scanned in the list). We got some of the items at a dollar store on Younge Street (bar of soap, Canadian Flag pin, and a ball of string for the "something longer than your tallest team member's height"). The last one we got was the Sleeman's label, we asked at a whole lot of places but nobody had them, luckily somebody had just finished a bottle at the bar at the Delta hotel from the next paragraph.

The second mandatory checkpoint was a series of questions (that again I have scanned), many of them were part of the "product placement" of the sponsors, notice the references to Global and Volvo. You had to answer at least 10 of the 15 and the only clue of where to drop off the answers were "take them to Canada's largest hotel" (Answer: the Delta just north of the Eaton's Centre). My knowledge of German and Seinfeld paid off. Of course we needed phone help for many of the questions, good thing Sari is a whiz at word scrambles. One of the answers was given during the opening speech at the ACC (the age of the announcer's nephew), but I had trouble hearing anything and certainly didn't hear that.

The last of the mandatory checkpoints was a choice between climbing a rock wall, going to The Docks and "hitting some balls" or eating something nasty at Philty McNasty's. As McNasty's was on the subway line we tried that one and I had to eat both a live cricket and a live worm. Michelle had to eat a hunk of catfish skin that was sitting in salt water. I don't know which was worse. They were both pretty gross, I can't believe I paid money for the privilege of eating bugs.

And now a quick description of some of the other points:

4. A choice between 3 tasks, I'm wondering what the first one was, but we chose the lock challenge back at the Air Canada Centre. We were chained together back to back with a padlock and on the back of some of the chairs in a section of the ACC were lock combinations, one of which opened our lock. We had a tough time moving and started by trying the ones we could see from the floor, the second we tried opened the lock. This could have taken half an hour if we didn't get lucky as some of the combinations were about 20 rows up the stairs.

5. As Sari knew that Olympic Spirit was just east of the Eaton's Centre we went there. The building is an ode to the Olympics and on the third floor they have simulated winter Olympic events, I did the speed skating (just sliding back and forth on a piece of plexiglass while a video of a speed skater played in front of you supposedly going the same speed) and Michelle had to throw a fake curling rock on a plexiglass surface into the rings (she got it first try).

6. Another choice between two, we avoided the stair climb and did Where's the Beach - Definitely the stupidest chasepoint, we had to get 5 items out of a small inflatable pool, blow up the floatation device (not easy when you are tired and it is hot) and then walk around the outside of Eaton's Centre to three stations where you didn't have to do anything. Easy but stupid.

7. Ontario Place - Figured it was too far to get to and it wasn't near any other points.

8. # Chase - To get this clue we had to call #CHASE from a Bell mobile phone, the chasepoint was in the Distillery district but it was too far out of the way.

9. Dodgeball - The description sounded fun, but not for us.

10. Photo Hunt - This one was great, we were paired with another team and had to get 4 of the following 5 pictures (using a Bell Camera Phone of course): 1) A bald man 2) in honour of Pride week two people of the same sex kissing 3) another team with the same last number as your team number 4) A car with a parking ticket and 5) five people lying down with their heads touching.

As it was the corner of Younge and Bloor there was no way we were going to get anybody to lie down on the street so we went for the other 4. The bald man and other team with the same number were easy, as was the same sex couple kissing, we just asked the first two women we saw and they were instantly in a lip lock for about 30 seconds. This was too quick for Michelle as the camera phone was in standby mode and we had to get them to kiss again which they were more than willing to do. We asked a cop about the parking ticket and she directed us to a parking lot that had a car which had about 20 of them.

11. Didn't make it to this one but it looked fun.

12. Kids Help Phone - we skipped this one because you had to sell stuff for charity, who knows how long that would take.

13. Casa Loma - There were small signs hidden around the rather large garden, each sign had a letter and a number on it. We were given a word when we walked in and had to find all the letters in that word and add up all the numbers associated with that word. Our word was FRISBEE, we had trouble finding the "B" but eventually got them all and the answer was 103. There was a lot of running up and down the slope of Casa Loma, good thing this was our first challenge.

14. Grab your balls! - We got lucky here again, you had to pick a card from a deck and you had to find a ball with that number, the first ball Michelle picked up was number 5 and that was our number.

15. Paint Ball - Each team member had 3 shots at a can about 6 metres away. If you didn't hit the can then one team member must shot the other with a gun, they recommend shooting the person in the bum. We didn't hit the can so Michelle took a shot at me, the first one went over my head, while the second got me in the middle of the back, it really hurt and I got quite a red bruise/welt. See a photo of it here.

That's the end of the summary, contact me if you have any more questions or are considering doing the race in the future. My advice for anybody doing the race would be to pick up the Scavenger Hunt list at the beginning, we didn't do it until about halfway through. This meant we had to back track to pick up some of the items that we easily could have picked up along the way.