The Great Park Pursuit

One of the favorite shows in our house is "The Amazing Race" on CBS. Premise of the show is teams compete in a race around the world to win a million dollars.  I was reading something somewhere and noticed the State of CT advertising "The CT Amazing Race" called The Great Park Pursuit and thought it sounded like something fun for us to do.  The idea behind this race was to promote the parks around the state. Teams would be given clues as to where the weekly event would be and at the end the team with the most points would win prizes.     So the Cunninghames and Carrolls teamed up and registered as the Monroe Musketeers for the race.  First event to be held May 8th.

Well, back in early April I got an email from the state parks department explaining that their registration database got hacked and while no significant private information was lost they needed to shutdown the registration process while they investigated the problem.  As a result of having to shutdown the registration they decided it wasn't fair to have a true competition because not everyone who wanted to play had time to sign up.  Instead they converted the race to a "fun participation" event instead.. Booooorrrinnggg....  Uh, what's fun about no prizes?? ;-)

So anyway, May 8th rolled around and it was time to start The Great Park Pursuit.  The more I read about past years of the pursuit the more I worried that this would be one of the lamer things I roped us into.  That day started out rainy and not everyone (self included) was excited to trek out to the middle of nowhere but we couldn't come up with something better so we headed off.

Destination - Rocky Neck State Park in East Lyme

As we pulled into the parking lot the lameness meter was in the red.  There was a tent where we signed in and a bunch of people just milling around. One of the checker-in people said they'd had over 700 people in attendance already that day, which i found surprisingly high (thought it would have been 13 or 14)

We snapped a few pictures with the official sign and hit the snack bar. 

When we signed in there was a list of activities. I asked about them and was told they were on the beach. From where we were standing you couldn’t see the beach (or most of the park for that matter), it was under a bridge and around a corner.

The weather was not great. Rain had stopped but it was windy and cloudy.  After lunch we headed to the beach to check out the activities.  Cool + cloudy @ beach isn't my idea of fun and the lame meter  jumped to 11 when we saw what awaited us. Several more tents setup and each one had an activity - like a color scavenger hunt, beach bingo, poem writing and a bunch of stuff I can't remember. 

 

Really not what we thought we'd be doing and the kids lost interest quickly.  Though in fairness to the parks department, if our kids were 6 or 7 i bet they would have liked it.


BUT (there's always a but) as we finished snubbing our nose at the final tent and started back towards the tunnel to escape from the boring park the clouds suddenly broke.  In just a matter of minutes sun warmed the beach.  We decided to look around a bit and went to other side of the park and there's where the fun began.  We found a hill with a rock face so the girls and I climbed it. walked around a bit and did some exploring. 

Then we headed back to the beach. There was a 200 yard long breakwater and we decided to walk out on it. Just me, Meg, Alyssa and Amanda while Amy Jon and Lorri sat back at the beach (Jake skipped the event completely  - too old/cool for us).  walking out on the rocks was blast. The sky was blue, not a cloud to be seen, and it was getting HOT!  We went as far as we could. We didn't get to the end because the water was too high (or rocks too low) but we made it out about 90% of the way. 

In the end it turned out to be a really fun day. The whole point of the program is to get people out to the parks to see what they have to offer and the first week was a success in that regard.