Rub-a-Dub

Today was the Rub-a-Dub alleycat, a scavenger hunt style race that required the racers to find various plaques around the city and do rubbings of them, Indiana Jones-style. I dragged along four first time alleycat-ers–Jen, Doug, and our neighbors Seth and Nikki. My poor performances on scavenger hunt alleycats are well documented, so I was up for a nice ride around the city.

As expected, I stared blankly at the manifest for 30 minutes until Jen asked “well, what’s the plan?” To which I responded “ummm, dunno, do I?” Doug, being a suburbanite, offered little advice (though he made up for that with good conversation during the ride), so Jen and I tried to map out a route from the chaos. The manifest indicated that our lowest 50 scored rubbings would count (I was worried that we had only planned for 35 stops–hah), so we plotted a good mix of higher valued stops that didn’t require any crazy hills.

And off we went. A handful stops in Oakland went by quickly (though we nearly missed several of them–a portant of things to come), and soon we were cruising down Fifth Avenue to town. Once we in town, we missed the Frick building (I mixed up the Frick and the Dominion building, which would be ok except that we passed the Frick building), but hit a handful of other stops in town and in the North Side. As an added bonus, all sorts of folks were in ‘tahn for the Bon Jovi concert (duuude, Bahn Jovi? We gotta go dahn for that!).

We dawdled a bit looking for the plaque on the railroad bridge at 10th Street (never found it), and by the time we reached the Catholic church in the Strip District, we had to cut out the Lawrenceville/Highland Park leg in the interest of time. We did manage another stop or two on the way back to Flagstaff Hill, though we could not find the plaque on Phipps Conservatory (we didn’t try very hard).

Jen pulled in 2nd place among the women, while I’m sure I finished outside the to 10 for the men. Apparently the winners gambled on the highly valued Spring Garden stops, which required climbing up and over Mt. Troy. We were a bit intimidated by this when we saw on it on the manifest, but looking back it probably would have been worth it, as the climb up and over Mt. Troy isn’t all that terrible.