Empty Nest Adventures
Life after the kids are grown
Questival, For the Young and Young at Heart
When my BFF called and asked if we’d like to register as a team with them for Questival, I said sure! I had never heard of it and when I watched the promotional video it looked very intriguing. As I read more, I knew I was going to be happy we said yes.
It’s a “24-hour adventure race that invites you to build friendships, push yourself, experience your surroundings, and have a whole bunch of fun. Your team of 2 to 6 people will do exciting, unpredictable, and downright good things you never thought possible. We guarantee it’ll be like nothing you’ve ever experienced.”
One day before start time, we were emailed a list of 247 challenges. They were categorized into the following: Sport & Fitness, Community & Cultural, Food, Adventure/Quirky, Service & Environment, Social Media, Camping & Survival, Hiking & Travel, Checkpoint Challenges, and Check-In Challenges.
Each challenge was worth a point value depending upon its difficulty. After spending a few hours coming up with a game plan, we were ready. Game day arrived and we drove down to Denver for check-in. Each team was given a “totem” (a nylon flag) that had to be visible in all challenge submissions. This was to ensure that the challenges were done during the correct time frame of 7 pm – 7 pm.
After a fun kick-off party, the race began. Thanks to our pre-planning, we were a well-oiled machine. You submit completed challenges on an app that updates team rankings in real time. Each submission requires either a picture or video.
Some of my favorites were: Go tandem longboarding while singing “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart”, Leave a book at a little free library/tiny library, Use kitchenware to perform a boy band song of your choosing, Eat at a roadside diner and order the 12th item on the menu, Take a load off and do some urban hammocking in a creative place, Donate food items (2 per teammate) to a homeless shelter or food bank, Cross the border with another state and take a video doing your best Michael Jackson dance moves, and watch a sunrise. Also, (because another teammate did it) Find a lactating farm animal (cow, goat) and with the owner’s permission squirt the milk directly into your mouth.
My least favorites were: Eat 1 tablespoon of blue cheese and then immediately sing “I’m Blue” by Eiffel 65, Eat a worm, Eat two crickets (thank goodness for the guys for those last two!) and Challenge another team to a 20 foot cartwheel race. FYI, just because you could do flawless successive cartwheels 30 years ago, doesn’t mean you can pick up where you left off. Stretch thoroughly or you will pull a hammy. Trust me on this.
Doing this adventure race was one of the most fun things I’ve done in a long time. Not only was it fun, but educational (I never knew about Denver’s RiNo, “River North Art District” where there are gigantic murals painted on every building for 10 square blocks…so incredible!), and had a component of service to others. I also liked how you could make it as competitive or as chill as you wanted. We went the more competitive route, which always has the potential to make things go sideways, but I was really proud of our team. The fact that we went to dinner together after the race ended said a lot to us about our friendship.
Picking the right people to experience this with is critical. Crankiness is a given once sleep deprivation sets in, so it’s important that you’re pretty solid with everyone going into it.
Questival is put on by Cotopaxi, a company that aspires to “alleviate poverty, do good and inspire adventure.” Things I think we all can get behind! The registration fee is $33 for the earliest registrants and goes up as race day approaches. With that fee you get a Cotopaxi Luzon backback, a $40 value, which comes in 10 or 12 different colors you can choose from. It’s pretty awesome and I see myself using it for a long time.
Finally, an observation…there were 717 teams registered for the Denver race. At 2-6 people per team, that’s a lot of people. As I looked around at the kick-off party something was quite glaring. Aside from a handful of anomalies, our team was the oldest by at least two decades. Millennials abounded. I hope next year Gen X will be better represented. Get out there and sign up! If you’ve missed your town’s event for 2017, do it next year. I promise you won’t regret it.
https://www.cotopaxi.com/pages/events-questival-home
http://aventuras.cotopaxi.com/questival-for-the-young-and-young-at-heart/
Julie
Empty Nest Adventures 
Sounds like a great time, might have to try it next year!
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I think you would love it.
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Thanks for telling your story. This just sounds like so much fun. I hope to do it one day. I really think being older could be a real advantage – especially if you have raised one or more children.
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It’s really funny you say that because we said the same thing. We felt like our advantage was in reading carefully and being organized. When we got to the WY border, we saw another team take a quick picture then start to leave. I told them they had to take a video with their best MJ moves. They couldn’t believe they had driven all that way and it almost didn’t count.
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Sounds awesome! However, I can’t get past the worms. I would need to think like fish first before giving a bite.
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I don’t think I could have done it, honestly! Brett said it was freaking him out to have it wiggling in his mouth, so his strategy was to bite it hard and swallow fast. 🙂
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I’m dead!
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😂😂😂😂😂
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