CitySolve Urban Race

Today, I learned that there is an awesomely-named "Cyborg Tax" storefront on Milam Street. Also, if I ever made it onto The Amazing Race on CBS, I would surely be destined for episode one elimination.

At noon the lovely Laurie and I embarked from Little Woodrow's on Morningside on a photo scavenger hunt in neighborhoods along the Main Street Corridor. I had persuaded her to partner up with me in the Houston edition of CitySolve Urban Race.

From the start it was obvious that we were at a severe disadvantage. Before the race began, I noticed we were surrounded on all sides by smartphone-wielding competitors. Nearly all of the answers on our clue sheets would be revealed to be local businesses and having Yelp (one of the race sponsors) or some other search engine at one's fingertips while on the run would have been an immense help.

And what was I packing? My bag of tricks had my netbook with no mobile broadband, a Key Map, and my venerable Nokia 6820. Yup, I was fighting this battle with 2004-era tech. We were mostly stymied on the clue sheets for what seemed like an eternity because I couldn't pick up an unsecured Wi-Fi network. Laurie had the inspired suggestion to try the public library. While hiking from Little Woodrow's to the Dryden/TMC METRORail station, a text message from my sister had come through with the address of one of the downtown answers, so we would eventually be in the vicinity of HPL.


As if we needed anything else to hold us back, we were within earshot of the station platform and heard the train leaving. Right there, another 10 minutes were lost waiting for the next. We didn't even reach our first "SolvePoint" until around 1:45 p.m. It was almost 2:30 by the time we made it to the second. By comparison, a few minutes later the winning team was already celebrating back at Little Woodrow's!

After getting a picture of the two of us snapped at Wimpy's under the Hyatt Regency, we turned up Bagby Street. As Laurie predicted, I was finally able to take the netbook online while sheltered near the doorway of Houston's Central Library. "Sheltered" was certainly the correct term for it, because this report would not be complete without paying little homage to today's weather. For the first day of spring, a blowhard of a cold front harassed us nearly every step. As we advanced into the finger-numbing vortex arcing between the skyscraper cliffs downtown, rainwater soaked the legs of my jeans and I had to frequently point my umbrella straight ahead into the gusts.

Only after having solved nearly all of the remaining clues was the magnitude of our cattywampus wanderings revealed. The SolvePoints at Coco's Coffee and Crepes and Bond Lounge were within blocks of our earlier trips to Lone Star Saloon and Franz and Co. Sheesh.


With only five out of nine SolvePoints tallied, we decided that it was right time to quit. As tempting as it would have been to pay a visit to the "Big Easy Social and Pleasure Club" next on our list, the CitySolve organizers were going to shut down the event soon at five o'clock anyway. We trudged back to Little Woodrow's, claimed our T-shirts, then departed to dry out and assuage our defeat under layers of mozzarella cheese across the street at D'Amico's.

So . . . when is the next iteration of the iPhone supposed to be released?