You couldn’t ask for a cleaner city to end in. Montreal has double-downed on being French. The stop signs are in French. The subway is only French, whereas in any country we previously visited the subway also had English (see Istanbul, Uzbekistan, Seoul). An interesting choice for a country whose primary language is English. One young woman told us the smaller towns are still filled with secessionists but the city and the young people have no interest in it anymore.

The first challenge we chose to do was a taste test of the two best bagel shops in the city. Supposedly bagel-lovers are evenly split between the two but Fairmount bagels won hands down for our crew. Sorry St Viateur.

Later we went to an old bar/hotel and we were supposed to photograph the most beautiful thing in the bar. I don’t know what people photographed before Vi got there, some stained glass windows and elaborate woodwork ain’t got nothin’ on her.

Before the scavenger hunt began I told Vi I wasn’t going to shave until we won. She asked what would happen if we didn’t win this year. I told her next year she’d be going with Gandalf.

Lucky for her, because she hates the beard, we won. We had enough of a lead that Montréal didn’t matter so that gave her the chance to drag me to a barber shop. She said it was her favorite stop on the whole trip.

The evening celebration is hollow because that means the around the world adventure is over and we all have to return to work. At the same time, we are happy to say we traveled to nine new countries with a wonderful group of people and did and saw many new things, some of which will never be repeated (hint: eat live octopus).

Order and Chaos over and out.

It’s a shame that most of my knowledge of Istanbul comes from the band They Might Be Giants. So other than nee Constantinople, I knew nothing. Vi didn’t have anything to add. The country is a hard sell in some ways. I mean the French can lure you with fries, manicures, and kisses. Turkey offers toilets. And then makes you pay to use it if you can find one.

We won the last leg, but given how many teams are competing for third we can’t slow down because a lower score on this leg could drop us into second.

Vi is ready for a long night sleep (I am too) but we decide sleep is for work days, not vacation.

Vi nominates me to jump in the Black Sea. The first team to do it gets a 75 point bonus. It’s 5 pm, cloudy, 67 degrees, and the beach is about 1.5 hours north by subway and then taxi. We leave immediately and plan the rest of the evening en route. When we arrive we pay the taxi to wait and drive us back to the subway. With the meter running I’m motivated to get this done as quickly as possible. I change behind a car and march across the stony beach right into the ocean. Vi snaps the photos – the rule is water up to neck. After .00001 seconds in the water I leap out.

Vi scrambles to text an image to our Ringmaster but she can’t get service.

“I can’t send the text! Hot spot me!” She says.

I’m dripping wet and locals who are at a nearby restaurant are gawking at the goofy tourist dumb enough to jump into the cold water but we understand the priority. I set up my phone and Vi shoots off the message.

A couple minutes later the response comes back, “Are you teaming up? Rainey just sent the same picture.”

Crap.

“No. What time did he jump in?” We write back. Missing it by a minute would suck. Whereas winning it by a minute would be great fuel to harass Rainey and Zoe (but mostly Rainey). That’s worth more than points.

We send him a text. His photo is timed 6:48.

Ours is timed 6:46.

Score!

Vi and I spend the rest of the evening trying to learn the public transit of Istanbul, slipping into a palace turned hotel to snap some flicks, getting charged 4x normal fare by taxi drivers when the public transit isn’t available. At 11pm the city is just waking up, people are everywhere, restaurants and bars are bustling, and the hawkers are battling for attention. Istanbul makes San Francisco look like a sleepy burb. We snap a photo of an art deco stairwell and call it. It’s after midnight and we are spent.

The next morning we are out by 7:45. It’s a city of 15M and the 7.5M that weren’t on the streets last night are now jammed into the subway. In Turkey, the average annual income is 10k but everyone has a cellphone in their hand and earbuds in. The fear or phenomenon that we are self-isolating even in crowds is worldwide.

The mosques and museums are overrun with tourists. Cruise ships have overloaded the city. The Grand Baazar is a web of streets with 41k shops and twenty times as many people. At this point we’ve seen enough bazaars and mosques so we go all in on the food scavenges. It’s hard to maintain weight when you’re walking 13 miles a day. We stave off wasting away by taking a cooking class and visiting 5 restaurants in 7 hours. The calamari on a rooftop bar and the homemade ice cream in a fancy high rise joint are Team favorites.

Vi and I fruitlessly search for some sort of little donuts. People point us in different directions but we might as well be asking for a unicorn. Everyone knows what they are, but no one’s seen one anytime recently.

We partake in a hookah, but like Bill, I didn’t inhale. Okay, I did. It was apple flavored and smoother than the Camels we’ve been sucking down second-handedly in the taxis. We chat with a local who tells us about the importance of pursuing happiness. He assumes that with my gray beard I already am wise to this advice.

Vi forces me into a Hamam to end the evening. It’s a no frills sauna where you sit and boil on heated granite slabs and dump cool water on yourself when you can no longer take it. The guys in the front room that own the place are smoking like their execution is tomorrow. Apparently they think a cloud of cigarette smoke is part of selling wellness. It probably masks the smell of all my hair burning off my legs when I sat on the heated stone.

We visit the last stop of Orient Express and the hotel built for it. The Pera Palace hotel was one of our favorite sites.

Vi and I at a hookah bar “enjoying” some chichi (if you pronounce it chi-chi they laugh and laugh and then say she-sha)

The Pera Palace interior.

A classic car outside the Pera Palace Hotel.

A photo of Vi cooking is almost as rare as snapping a pic of a Sasquatch by a waterfall.

As hectic as Istanbul is, they’ve figured out that slow traffic on the escalators stay on the right and the movers and shakers pass everyone on the left. This goes true with every country we’ve visited, even on the road. Take a hint, USA.

Our last morning in Bosnia we had to see a Church and a Mosque. At this point, we get the idea. The rest of the world is far more religious than the Bay Area. Compared to recent cities, Banja Luka wasn’t all that.

We leave in plenty of time to get back to Zagreb but the border patrol has something else in mind. It is the morning after a holiday weekend and everyone who vacationed in Bosnia is headed back to Croatia.

We avoid one of the large city crossings and instead head out to the countryside to the border crossing only to find a line of cars a quarter mile long. There’s no other choice. We sit in silence as our hopes for a full day in Zagreb spiral downward. As minutes tick forward we worry about not making the necessary scavenges. A soul sucking hour slips by and the car is silent except for the sounds of stomach acid digesting our innards. We fear not making it back to do the mandatory Zagreb challenges. It would mean we lose the leg and drop way out of first.

Another fifteen minutes later we are back on the road. We get to Zagreb and have 7 hours to scavenge the city. Zegreb reminds us of Belgrade, a European city with stone streets, graffiti, a handful of monuments, and a bunch of restaurants serving meat. And then the lucky people of Zagreb were graced with a ten minute street performance from Rainey and Sal. Sal started with juggling oranges he found on the ground from the fruit market but quickly switched to invisible baseballs and proceeded to launch them into the stratosphere. Rainey just juggled real socks. Real stinky socks.

So high you can’t even see the invisible baseballs.

Vi says these Balkan countries start to run together. All staffed by gruff cabbies, reeking of tobacco, teeth stained with nicotine, racing down stone streets, honking their horn at every heartbeat. A little research reveals we have hit 7 of the top 10 smoking countries. It’s a sign how far U.S. healthcare has advanced in the last couple decades, we cancelled cigarettes in favor of legalized pot. It’s all natural and gluten free.

We close out the leg and hear other border crossing horror stories. One team had to unload every bag and go through it item by item. Another set of teams got stuck at the border for over five hours!

We get the announcement: we are headed to Istanbul next!

Vi found us a lovely hotel room for $17 a night in southern Montenegro. One of the scavenges was to stay in the lowest price hotel room on that night. The competition had no idea what they were up against. And if it were up to Vi we would have stayed at a campsite sans tent.

The next morning we went into Albania to storm a fortress and the neighboring city Shkoder.

In Shkoder we were supposed to eat at a patisserie. It was breakfast time so we stayed on the light side and only had eighteen desserts for the four of us. The waitstaff gawked at us…mostly because Vi ate it all with her hands behind her back.

On the way back from Albania an impatient driver named Sal hit a pothole/rock and blew out the front tire of the car. At that speed the car should have hydroplaned over it. However, Rainey and Sal changed the tire in less than six minutes! Whoever said haste makes waste had never seen our pit crew. Despite losing driving privileges, Sal is opening a driving school upon returning to the U.S. Between tire changing skills and driving at 133% the speed limit for only $23 a day, there are some real lessons to be taught.

Driving north through Montenegro brought us back into Bosnia to Mostar (another repeat for Vi and I). The old city center surrounds a small river gorge and sports a sexy stone bridge best seen at sunset. Absolutely incredible that some weirdos find stone bridges sexy.

We left Mostar after dinner at a scavenge selected restaurant. Vi had chicken noodle soup and I had gnocchi and a salad just to have a taste of home. A couple hours later we found a hotel and splurged on 7 hours sleep.

Due to proprietary algorithms of SalGPT the exact route of our travel is not fully disclosed in this blog. Any perceived impossible geographies or improbable timelines are deliberate. If you want to hear more, buy the rights.

South of Sofia, Bulgaria there is a breathtaking remote monastery tucked between soaring mountain peaks. This is coming from people who have seen so many mosques and churches in the last two weeks that they are welcomed as converts by all religions.

That said, the next stop was a mosque that tried its hardest to be cute. Even better, it was in North Macedonia: cha-ching, another country added to our travel list. Made memorable by my first speeding ticket in almost 30 years. While I stood by the police car I looked back to see our car shaking with laughter. I was going 133 km/hr in a 100 zone so I suppose I deserved the 23$ ticket.

As Vi blow dries her sink-washed dungarees at 6:15 am, I wonder why she hasn’t come around to my way of cleaning. My Wash Machine is a plastic bag with two dryer sheets in it. Put in the dirty clothes, close the bag, and drive on a Serbian highway for tumble dry. A few hours later you have fresh smelling clothes the way Mother Nature intended.

Border crossings are interesting. It’s always easier to cross into the country that is lower caste. You want to go to Bosnia? Excellent, come right in, don’t forget to fill your wallet first. You want to leave Bosnia? Did you remember to empty your wallet first?

Sarajevo is off and on rain but crowded shoulder to shoulder for the May Day weekend. We scour the city center for scavenges. Battle scars from the Bosnian War still pock mark sidewalks and buildings. We eat sausages in fluffy pitas as a scavenge because our cholesterol levels were getting dangerously low.

We find artists hammering jewelry in copper and tin. Drink exotic coffee. Eat more. Meet some locals who are enamored with Vi and want to practice their English. We stop for gas and Rainey fans open the wad of money from four different countries and says to the attendant, “I don’t know which snicklefritz is yours.” The befuddled attendant selects bills from his hand like a game of Go Fish.

We head north of the city to do a hike when the light rain turns to a downpour. But then it looks like the rain is bouncing off the road up ahead. Sleet and hail starts ricocheting off the windshield. But we don’t see that as a sign to stop.

I verbally Jedi mind trick the clouds into dumping their stores all at once and ten minutes later they’re done. We bypass two fences with signs warning the trail is dangerous and enter at your own risk. We shrug at the bear and wolf warning signs, we know carnivores won’t touch rancid meat. We see these warnings as mere speed bumps on the road to points. Unstoppable forces at work.

Beard update: in the rain it soaks up water so that I end up hiking with an extra nine pounds of water weight. If I whip my head back and forth bullets of water spray from my chin at near lethal force. Even better, once it gets sunny I can put the hairs into my mouth and slowly drink the gallons of stored water. I am now a human camel. I offer Vi a sip but she declines solely because she isn’t thirsty yet.

After the hike we squish into the car and head for southern Montenegro. It’s a five hour drive into the middle of the night on a highway that winds through narrow valleys and over steep mountains. The road turns to dirt and stone and narrows down to one and a half lanes.

Rainey says, “There are better roads on the Moon. We are driving on rocks past campsites and all of a sudden we are in another country. This is some serious Twilight Zone shit.”

We exit the Twilight Zone into Montenegro. The roads widen and become the smooth asphalt we are used to. Montenegro signage welcomes you to the EU, they use the Euro, but actually aren’t in the EU yet. It’s kind of like every actor who “is” an actor despite never having a paid role. They’re visualizing success.

It seems like they’re making it. New hotels and concrete skeletons of more to come poke up from the coastline sullying the views of the Adriatic Sea.

Vi and I had visited Kotor in 2016 but wanted to go back so Rainey and Zoe could see it.Even with a giant cruise ship pouring people into the walled city the charm radiates. The fact is civilization will never build another city like it. The uneven stone streets and narrow passages have lasted around 900 years and will probably last another 900.

Our day ends at 1130pm. what a shame, so much more to do!

Ps. Vi says the beard paragraph is gross and does not improve. I’m posting when she isn’t looking so you don’t get robbed of the enjoyment.

Our Ringmaster has devised a five day scavenge that can cover seven countries. It starts in Sofia, Bulgaria and ends in Zagreb, Croatia. It requires passage through Sarajevo, Bosnia, but can include North Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, and/or Serbia. He jammed the book with 158 scavenges across a ton of cities.

We also get to team up so Vi and I are with Lawyers Without Borders (Zoe and Rainey). They’re on their 13th GSH and know that Bill throws in all sorts of scavenges to lure people one direction or the other to waste time or test their logistical skills. Cars, buses and trains are allowed but no flights.

We start with Sofia and its city center challenges. It’s one of the oldest European cities replete with massive churches, other ancient stone buildings, and a healthy peppering of Soviet-era monoliths.

Food scavenges included a pomegranate liquor and tripe soup. One of us didn’t think tripe soup was that big of a challenge the other one is dry heaving thinking about it.

We traveled to Nis, Serbia to dampen our high spirits. Holocaust deniers might claim that it was used for serious study, but the rest of us know what a concentration camp really is- a sad reminder of how horrible people can be. I give the curators of the Crveni Krst camp credit for sprinkling in stories of heroism and escapes among the dismal logs of what happened there. We are so lucky to live in a relatively free and safe country.

I think scholars collected all the “suggested strong passwords” from Apple and Windows and created the Serbian language. Pat, I’d like to buy a vowel…

Our Ringmaster has devised a five day scavenge that can cover seven countries. It starts in Sofia, Bulgaria and ends in Zagreb, Croatia. It requires passage through Sarajevo, Bosnia, but can include North Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, and/or Serbia. He jammed the book with 158 scavenges across a ton of cities.

We also get to team up so Vi and I are with Lawyers Without Borders (Zoe and Rainey). They’re on their 13th GSH and know that Bill throws in all sorts of scavenges to lure people one direction or the other to waste time or test their logistical skills. Cars, buses and trains are allowed but no flights.

We start with Sofia and its city center challenges. It’s one of the oldest European cities replete with massive churches, other ancient stone buildings, and a healthy peppering of Soviet-era monoliths.

Food scavenges included a pomegranate liquor and tripe soup. One of us didn’t think tripe soup was that big of a challenge the other one is dry heaving thinking about it.

We traveled to Nis, Serbia to dampen our high spirits. Holocaust deniers might claim that it was used for serious study, but the rest of us know what a concentration camp really is- a sad reminder of how horrible people can be. I give the curators of the Crveni Krst camp credit for sprinkling in stories of heroism and escapes among the dismal logs of what happened there. We are so lucky to live in a relatively free and safe country.

I think scholars collected all the “suggested strong passwords” from Apple and Windows and created the Serbian language. Pat, I’d like to buy a vowel…

Before we begin- we did tie for second place on the Georgia round. Okay, onto Jerusalem.

Let’s just start by saying the real estate agent who sold the Western Wall to the Jews and the same land to Mohammad to ascend to Heaven and then somehow convinced the Christians to anoint, bury, and resurrect Jesus as part of a time share in the same plot not only created the birthplace of modern religion but also probably lawyers.

It takes only a few minutes to conclude that there will never truly be peace as each group has a religiously legitimate reason to have their share/control of this desert rock. The most plausible possible future is massive widespread atheism makes everyone too apathetic to fight. Then, Disney takes over the Old City, throws in some rides and Mickey Mouse and hijab Minnie, thus creating the happiest place on Earth.

Until then, each group lives in fear of what the other might do. One savvy Muslim observed that the extremists keep ruining it for everyone. A Palestinian, in regards to other countries funding Hamas, said “what are we going to do? Keep throwing stones at Israeli tanks?” His honesty and desire for a safe world to live in were far more real and important than 2000 year old caves and prayer walls.

So given all the religions, how do you choose which one to support? Let’s start with the basics of the Big Three. Each has their own mythology with its origin story and death defying heroes like a Marvel movie. Like the movies, each story comes with their own body count with the Bible being a big book filled with 2.9 million deaths (that Old Testament is a bloodbath). They all have a history of treating women as inferior. All have justified killing others in the name of their God and simultaneously claim to provide a proper framework of how to be a pious life.

Given all the similarities we need to drill down to the details. First, the art. Bloody Jesus versus geometric tilings, easy choice. Two of the three have hummus and falafel, the third has the Body of Christ. Sorry Christianity, cannibalism is a hard sell. Tahini and Garbanzo beans win. Jews serve cheesecake for breakfast. Judaism wins. The easiest way to a man’s God is through his stomach.

Crossing into Palestine was easy, coming back was more interesting. Going through a series of one way doors and getting to an unmanned fortified X-ray screening with a voice overhead telling you what to do felt like entering prison. Two young Muslim women were in our same small cohort. One of our travel teammates had hip replacements and when he set off the metal detector all the doors audibly locked. Fear flashed across the faces of the Muslim women slightly ahead of us. They pushed on the metal door in front of them and it wouldn’t open. They looked back at us and their panic didn’t match our carefree attitude as we waited to be cleared by the border patrol. The best part of this trip is the glimpse into other people’s lives, not just worlds.

The worst part of this trip was taking a large group tour to the Dead Sea and Masada. Our Ringmaster wanted us to experience it on a level playing field and, I doubt inadvertently, experience how terrible it would be to travel the other way. We suffered mandatory stops at souvenir/coffee shops with hawkers almost as slick as the water in the Dead Sea.

The Dead Sea is maximum salinity, 33%. That makes it more dense than most humans so that people float (and there are some pretty dense people). Like toothpaste, you don’t want to drink it or get it in your eyes, but somehow they tout it as healthy.

When we went in from the Jordan side years ago it was just a rocky, muddy beach. The Israel side has bars and restaurants that summarizes the economic differences between the two countries.

We found that everyone we talked to was kind and willing to help. The old walled in city with a maze of narrow stone streets is a setting unlike anywhere in America. The blend of cultures, religions, and excellent foods make Jerusalem a place worth visiting even if you aren’t on a pilgrimage.

The cable car up Masada. We walked down in the desert heat just wondering what people were thinking 2500 years ago.

We rush back to the hotel to be told to get 5 hours sleep. We are headed to Sofia, Bulgaria at 4am! 5 for 5 for countries Vi and I have not visited.

After 48 hours of scavenging we meet at the hotel and turn in our logs. One of the teams has Covid and will skip the next leg. A chill runs through the group as we know it could happen to anyone.

At the same time, we are eagerly awaiting the announcement of where that next place will be. We call out guesses and finally someone says the answer:

Israel! We are going to Jerusalem for three nights and we leave in a few hours. Vi and I are thrilled: 4 countries in a row we have never been to.

Hello Israel!