Let’s see, where to begin? Well, we started working on the event in 2000, with our first event taking place in the spring of 2002. Our first tribe of intrepid travelers visited: Japan, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, San Marino and Bavaria, among other sweet spots along the way of that inaugural adventure. More importantly though, we all survived with smiles on our faces too boot—them and us! We learned a lot from that beta testing of our event. And since then, 15 events later, we have taken hundreds of world class travelers from twelve countries on our amazing around the world event fifteen times—so far.
The deconstructing and analyzing of the mega data of the annual travel adventure is stunning: over a cumulative 12 million kilometers (7.8 million miles) have been traveled through 85 countries across six continents—nope, we have not been to Antarctica, yet! We figure than on average, our travelers have at least twenty daily local interactions—trusting strangers in strange lands—to fulfill their uniquely designed cultural-oriented and highly participatory scavenges; which means that our travelers have had approximately 110,000 personnel encounters. And guess what? We have yet to hear of a single bad encounter after fourteen laps around the world visiting 85 countries and over 240 cities, towns, islands, city-states, villages, and oases, from Amritsar and Andorra la Vella to Zagreb and Zurich—and everywhere in between.
Where we have been:
It is extremely difficult to summarize all our events as one. Sure, the cookie cutter tag line is that it is an annual around the world travel adventure competition that mixes taking A Blind Date with the Word with the world travel championship…all while conducting an extraordinarily participatory, authentic and challenging site-doing scavenger hunt along the way. That said, each event is really different, as each event has its own unique personality matched both by those participating in them and the secret destinations that we inevitably visit. One focused on the Seven Seas, one Capital Cities, one city-states, one islands, another touching down on five continents. One took us to many of the ancient wonders of the world, while another had them visit the great souks, bazaars and markets of the world. Art, special cultural events and sports, have always been present too—as does food, nature and beauty. A few events have taken us to the exotic capitals of the ancient world, while others took us to more off-the-beaten path primitive locales where critters and nature’s bounty become the stars. The juxtapositions of each and every event are always constantly overwhelming us; as do the religions, cultural nuances, mother tongues and endearing faces we encounter along the way.
A destination world cloud of the event might look like this:
Whereas a site-doing word cloud might look like this:
Bottom line, it is extremely participatory, authentic and challenging, and we simply can’t sum up the event after conducting fourteen of them. So why try?
But below are links that include some data points, photos and a few words to help explain each experience from 2002 to last year’s event. They are our event photo albums per se. Enjoy!
A Photo Montage:
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