Day 1 

Omigod! You wouldn’t believe it!  

  Met all the other teams in Newark, a real mixed bag.  Got very little sleep, arrived in Frankfurt at 8:30AM, got on a train to Cologne, where we checked into our hotel and dashed out to meet our first challenge(s).  

Here’s how it works, all eleven teams choose from a big pool of multi-part challenges to complete that day in different parts of the region, video themselves (Let’s hear it for Flip!) doing it and then get back to the hotel and upload them to a private YouTube account for judging by 8pm., 

So what do we choose? We chose to get back on a train and go to Dusseldorf.  How far is Dusseldorf?  31 minutes on the Express and 29 minutes on the Local. 

 We floored ourselves by finishing 3 challenges which included going into the Japanese section of Dusseldorf and asking for three Japanese items that even the Japanese didn’t know what they were.  We surprised ourselves by completing not only that task (sounds easy, trust us, it’s not)  but three more as well.

Returning to Cologne it took us 40 minutes to buy the ticket, and an hour and a half to get back travel because we got off three stops too early. Finally got back to our hotel exhausted, but decided to get the dirty work out of the way first and upload the videos at Starbucks for judging first before treating ourselves to a nice relaxing dinner.  

Wrong.

Seems no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t access the internet, so we did what any smart women would do, we asked someone else to do it for us.  Long story short, we ended up at the apartment of a 26 year old    dentistry student, a darling Israeli girl, (not Jewish), Iman who made the mistake of asking if she could help us. Two hours later, three frustrated non-internet connected ladies went to dinner.. Bid each other a fond farewell –  

Got back to the hotel around midnight, tried for another hour but still no luck.  Lucky (for us, not him)  Fran’s son was still awake so we brought him into the Frustration Loop.  An hour later, still, no internet-connection. Did this stop Fran? Not a chance.  Luckily a half hour later as Fran was on the bed with her computer pulling her hair out, Judie heard voices from Team #3′s room next door, knocked on their door to see if they could help and discovered that almost everyone had been having the same kind of evening (minus the Israeli)  due to an as-yet undiscovered – let alone unresolved – problem.

Oh well, as our  favorite role model says -”Tomorrow is another day.”  We’ll think about it then.