Amazing Race: finale!

The title on my last entry was "Second last episode" and I'm sticking by that claim. Sure, there was an hour of Amazing Race on the TV last week at the normal time, but since there were only three teams left it must have been rhe first half of the last episode. I'm sticking by that theory, and it's got absolutely nothing to do with any kind of mistake on my part about how many episodes were left. Honest. Really truly. Does anyone believe me?

OK maybe not, but it's absurd to have three teams left and pretend that one of them will be knocked out before the finish line. Lucky for Uchenna and Joyce it was a "non-elimination round". To get there the teams had to travel from London to Jamaica, all ending up on the same flight and with no advantage. Ron and Kelly used the time productively to have yet another fight about their 'relationship'. Kelly can't seem to understand that Ron is happy to be her boyfriend but just doesn't want to get married. I took the effort to rewind and copy her quote down verbatim, because I love a good double entendre: "I've been able to really show Ron what I'm made of. If he doesn't figure out the quality girl I am then he's missing out." Yeah, if he doesn't figure out that she's – hang on while I look up her exact words from week 7 – "a piece-of-trash redneck" he'll be missing out on a life of peace and tranquillity. At least he's had the grace not to ask to be sent back to Iraq to avoid her, tempting as it must have been at times. Oh that's right, he got discharged from the army, which proves his inability to commit.

Once in Jamaica the teams had to do the limbo to get a time when they could search a school for the next clue, then had to build a raft and use it to cross a river. Rob & Amber and Uchenna & Joyce were neck and neck at this point because as couples they were working with each other instead of standing around complaining like Ron and Kelly. Somehow she thinks she's still a nice girl if she calls him a "smart A" instead of what everybody over four years of age knows she meant. I hate hypocrisy like that.

The teams also learnt the classic Survivor lesson of just how much can go wrong during an 80km taxi ride: traffic jams, stopping to get petrol, being pulled over by random police patrols, drivers who speak English but need to be subtitled to be understood and – most devastating of all – flat tyres. It didn't help Uchenna and Joyce at all that the other teams could see their taxi's tyre deflating and were praying for it to explode. Not very nice, people.

It was enough to push Uchenna & Joyce into last place on at the pit stop, and be stripped of all their cash and possessions, but not quite enough to put them out of the race on the next leg. A remote resort in a poor country at 3am is not the best time to be begging. At least they were smart enough to aim for the airport first, where lots of wealthy travellers were just queued up to ignore them and refuse help. Is it just me, or do the white couples never have that much trouble begging? Had Uchenna & Joyce been less decent humans they'd have whipped off her scarf and claimed her baldness as proof of cancer.

By that stage the other two teams had collected a bag of 50 onions from one place in the middle of nowhere and chopped every one of them to smithereens at another place in the middle of nowhere. From there it was off to the Rose Hall Great House for the detour. The choices were to make a horse swim around a marker (unlike Survivor they denied me the pleasure of hearing them pronounce buoy as boo-ee) or golf. Mind you, the golf was just hitting a 16m wide green 140m off, but the tricky part was they all had to dress up first at the pro shop. Joyce and Uchenna managed to make up a lot of time because if you believe the editing he hit the green on his third shot. At least he hadn't dug a small canyon with his club head in front of the tee like Ron did.

The next leg was a flight from Jamaica to Puerto Rico. Rob and Amber were minutes short of making the 9.30 flight, but somehow managed to squeeze onto the 8.30 flight on another airline which was running late. Ron and Kelly had to wait for the next flight leaving three hours later, with Uchenna and Joyce another four hours behind that. Wow, this is going to be a boring final; the producers must be really disappointed at how easy it's been for Rob and Amber.

But wait! Jerry Bruckheimer's team managed to find a completely abandoned sugar cane mill that has regular daily opening hours! What were the chances of that! Isn't it funny how all these place use exactly the same sign writing company and the same font to dispaly their opening hours! And better still for Jerry, what were the odds that it wouldn't open until the next morning, by which time Joyce and Uchenna had caught up to the others and they were all even again? It's a miracle!

The real miracle was what happened next. Rob and Amber didn't read the instructions properly and fell well behind the other two teams! One person had to jump off a bridge about 30m down into the water. Who knows what happened, but they couldn't find their way to the start point, and both Uchenna and Ron were on their way back to shore by the time they did. With Rob already having performed six roadblocks it was up to Amber, and being the trooper she is she was in the water with barely a moment's hesitation. Mind you, Rob had to piggy back her to the car because she couldn't walk, but she wasn't complaining at all and Rob went up that little extra notch in my book as top shelf husband material. Can you imagine Jonathan and Victoria in a situation like that?

From Puerto Rico the teams had to travel to Miami. Rob and Amber managed to talk their way onto a flight that was just about to go, and Rob actually stopped to check with the flight staff that the doors were locked behind them and nobody could follow them onto the plane. Maybe someone at the gate thought that Joyce really does have cancer, because they phoned the pilot AND HE AGREED TO LET THEM ON! The look on Rob's face as the aerobridge slid back toward the plane was fantastic, but at least Amber managed a gracious congratulations for them.
Ron and Kelly missed the flight because they were too busy arguing with each other to follow directions to the airport. Kelly said 'left' when she meant 'right', but rather than getting over it and moving on they had to keep debating the point about whose fault it was while driving further and further in the wrong direction. Missing that flight is what put them out of contention, and there was much cheering here in Kingsville that our two favourite teams would be battling it out for the final.

The next clue box might have been back in the USA, but being Miami the local lingo is very much Spanish. The clue was to find a cigar shop called "The King of the Havanas" but the trick was that the shop is actually known by the transalation El Rey de los Habanos. Joyce and Uchenna's taxi driver asked a local for directions in Spanish, and they were sent straight there. Rob and Amber did the asking themselves in English, and sure enough nobody had ever heard of it.

In probably the most exciting finish for all the series I've been lucky enough to see, Uchenna and Joyce didn't have enough money for the taxi fare to the finish line in Fort Lauderdale. They tried begging from drivers of cars next to them at traffic lights along the way, but again no luck. I'm still not sure why the driver acted all surprised when they got told him at the end of the trip (and practically within view of the finish line) that they couldn’t pay him enough! They'd been telling him the whole way and begging in front of him. As easy as it would have been, they just couldn't bring themselves to run off without paying but were still $45 short. They managed to beg it in increments from a series of locals, one of whom asked "Can you please tell me what I'm donating for?" and made Joyce very uncomfortable trying not to lie.

For an atheist I have a pretty strong faith in karma and that good things happen to good people, and so it passed that Uchenna and Joyce were able to do the right thing by their taxi driver and still win the million dollars. Rob and Amber came a deserving second; we might not like some of the tactics Rob resorted to at times, but you cannot deny that nobody else played the game as hard or as smart. We didn't even see Ron and Kelly trying to find the cigar shop because they were so far behind (yeah!). Hubby and I were pretty happy with the order the three finished in, and it seemed the rest of the original entrants agreed with us. Either that or it's exhausting to cheer that hard, but there was a marked drop off in the enthusiasm level between Uchenna and Joyce's victory, Rob and Amber's arrival and Ron and Kelly dragging their sorry butts onto the finish mat. Kelly didn't let me down and kept complaining about Ron not wanting to marry her right to the end. Honey, you've already provided more than enough evidence to prove why that is; quit while you're ahead.