Cartathlon 3!!

Holy cow, what a day!  Event 6 in the 50@50 Project was a bit loony, but as I said early on, my goal is to keep the events 'interesting'.  This one fits the bill.

Cartathlon 3 is an event sponsored by Willamette Week, a local publication that captures a lot of the weirdness in this town.  This outing was a scavenger hunt race around Portland.  We had a team of five - me and my wife, Camera Crew; and Doug, Renee, and Greg.  All great friends, all are obviously a little off kilter to be doing this with me. 

I told you I could sucker others into this.

Cartathlon 3 is designed to highlight Portland's thriving street food scene.  The food carts in town have gotten national recognition and have contributed greatly to PDX's reputation as a 'foodie' town.  Hell, a few years back Pok Pok won Restaurant of the Year - and they were a food cart at the time!!  For Eaters, this is a great town in which to live. 

What we thought Cartathlon 3 was going to be:  a race from food cart pod to food cart pod, with eating challenges at each that would require, say, devouring massive burritos or drinking triple Big Gulp-sized milk shakes or eating weird stuff from an ethnic food-oriented cart.  We thought this was going to be about eating.

What Cartathlon 3 was:  a lot of running around getting photos at iconic Portland landmarks or with stereotypical Stumptowners, and very little food.  We should have packed snacks.  Thank goodness we ate breakfast.

Our team - the Toasted Marshmellows - met up at Besaw's at 9 AM.  We promptly ordered cocktails and began wondering what we were getting into.  We had dreams of the aforementioned ginormous burritos.  We envisioned waddling from pod to pod, so stuffed and so satisfied.  Bex! pointed out that given our start time, we wouldn't likely eat til after noon, so we decided to order up.  Cuz folks, the original plan was to drink knowing we would get our fill at the carts.  My wife saved our bacon.

Mmmmm... bacon.

We enjoyed food and drinks, then wandered the three blocks down to the Willamette Week offices, which was the start point.  After checking in and having a team photo taken, we sampled an Oatmeal Stout from Ninkasi www.ninkasibrewing.com .  It paired well with the KIND bars they were sampling www.kindsnacks.com

The race organizers had us download an app called Cart Compass, which is all about food carts.  In this app, they had all of our clues for the day, broken into sections of the city - NE, SE, NW, SW, N - as well as a category for 'general Portland trivia'.  After standing around laying odds on whether or not it would rain on us, it was go time.  The rules required teams to visit four food cart pods, where we would complete some sort of challenge.  All other clues and photo ops were for bonus points.  We were given 3.5 hours to complete the course.  We would have the arrive at the finish line at the Green Dragon by 3 PM!!  www.pdxgreendragon.com

Because she had a pen, Renee was unanimously elected Writer Downer of the Answers, a task she performed most excellently.  Our Team Leader, Bex! was in charge of using her phone to snap all the pictures we needed to get to prove we completed all the various tasks. Once we figured out how to use that, we were on our way!

Since we started in NW Portland, we decided to snag some bonus points by hitting NW and SW.  I won't go into detail on all the places we hit but I will say that one of the challenges was getting a photo of an awesome mustache, which we found attached to a somewhat inebriated and very genial man.  He also had a cool little toy car that he said played the Blazers theme song.  The song is 'Get Ready for This' by 2 Unlimited.  Google it - you'll recognize it.  He was selling the car, so I bought it for $2. 

Now the car played the Toasted Marshmellows theme song.  Booyah!!  Take that, Blazers!

Another task was to do something kind for a stranger.  Greg plugged the meter for a very confused man who seemed somewhat skeptical of our intentions. 

After some rehearsing, I completed a task by played Patty Cake with a woman at a streetcar stop.  She said 'That made my whole day!'

We sang a bawdy song to a Pittsburgh Steelers fan to complete the 'serenade a stranger' objective.  We had a blast and made friends along the way.

We knocked out all of NW and SW, then hopped the yellow line to North Portland.  Or as it came to be known - the Black Hole.  NoPo was the location of one of the mandatory food carts, so we hit a few bonus locations on the way to Flavour Spot, a waffle cart.  www.flavourspot.com  This was an eating challenge.

The judge held a waffle that was spread with Nutella.  He then placed it in Greg's mouth.  Without using our hands or, heaven forbid, dropping the waffle-y goodness, we had to consume the waffle by passing it mouth-to-mouth from one to another.  We were so hungry that this was not an issue at all.  In fact, I am confident that had we dropped it, one of us would have snagged it in our teeth before it hit the ground. 

Challenge completed and 'stuffed to the gills' by the three bites of waffle we each had, we hit a couple of more bonus spots then had a bevvie (thanks, Renee!) at the White Eagle.  In hindsight, we should have just stayed there.

As it turns out, it's really difficult to get from that part of town to where we needed to go next, at least in a timely manner.  Every bus and train was A] 20-25 minutes out and B] wanted to take us downtown to the transit mall first.  Not good.  We made the decision to hoof it to the Rose Garden to increase our public transportation odds by 33% because the streetcar runs there.  We had a better chance of catching something - bus, big train, little train!

Well, we missed the streetcar by about 2 minutes - saw it pull in, realized it was too far to run for it, saw it pull away.  We walked up to Broadway & MLK to catch the #6 bus.  It arrived 9 minutes later but was full so the driver waved us off.  Still on foot, we walked south to Burnside and caught the bus out to SE 28th.  At this point, however, the race was pretty much over for us because we were almost out of time and had only hit one of the four mandatory carts.

At the Grilled Cheese Grill www.grilledcheesegrill.com we were given a - you guessed it - grilled cheese sandwich that was made with seven ingredients.  We were to dissect, taste, analyze and then report to the judge what those ingredients were.  We pretty much nailed it:  bread, butter, apples, cheddar and american cheeses, onions, cinnamon.  Again, five of us + one grilled cheese sandwich = hungry!!  Greg, Renee and Doug tried to order from one of the carts but although open, no one was inside.  Oh well.

We made the decision to skip the last two mandatory stops, head to the Green Dragon and have some food along with our free beers.  Alas, upon arrival the place was jammed full and, similar to the very full #6 bus, we waved ourselves right on out the door to try our luck elsewhere. 

Sidenote:  at the finish line they had one more eating challenge worth 400 points.  It was a habanero pepper filled with Aardvark Habanero Hot Sauce.  Not worth the gastrointestinal distress this would have caused, we all skipped it.  But it conjured a memory from some thirteen or so years ago when I was cooking with habaneros and I jokingly told my son (then 16-17 or so) I would give him a bright shiny quarter if he would take a teeny tiny bite of a habanero.  He agreed.  Not wanting to kill him, I shaved off the smallest sliver I could get with the chefs knife I was using - we're talking tiny here - and he ate it.  Then the fireworks started.  Good times, huh, son?

After striking out at Cascade Barrel House (no room!) Renee recommended Robo Taco, located at 607 SE Morrison (no website).  Fantastic food!  A great find, try them out - you won't be disappointed.

After settling on our strategy for next year - which is to wear Run DMC track suits and carry a boombox - we hopped the bus to NW and headed on home.  It was a great day, a lot of fun and good memories with dear friends.

But next year, we're bringing snacks!