First, I thought the bus was going to be a dreadfully unnecessary bunch, but given the cost of staging the main event, all was forgiven. The baguette-to-battlefield stage was fairly standard stuff (N.B.: if someone hands you something that isn't a yellow and black envelop, open it anyway), but the battlefield made for terrific visuals. The 100 yard crawl was the obviously-better task (relying, yet again, on the basic ALOTT5MA maxim) and actually - with a Fokker DrI and a French airplane (which looked more like a mid-1920s DeHavilland than anything authentic used by the French) strafing the plane - looked like quite a bit of fun.
I do not understand the logic of doing a blind U-turn on someone when you are at the front of the pack and have at least a two-hour lead. Still, if you are going to try to eliminate someone, sticking them into that challenge was the way to do it. At one point in my life, I had morse code memorized and could probably have keyed out three to five words per minute and understood it at a rate of about two wpm. Even with that, I could not have made up time on the belly crawl. It's an art. And probably works better if you wear arm garters and spats.
The task was not undoable, however. There are breaks at the beginning of the message and between each letter. The first trick would have been to identify the number of letters, then break it down from there. Joe et ux figured out how to break it down eventually, but they were doomed by then. The speed bump was harder than the Sauna Bus, to be sure, but not hard enough that it made passing a struggling team impossible.
On the back end, the bicycle ride was cute but changed nothing. Next week, some sort of needle-in-a-vineyard challenge.
