Amazing Race 10yr - Central Park NY

This year for my 10th birthday I did an Amazing Race party!!! We began and ended at the house but most of the activities were in Central Park (New York).

INVITATIONS: My mom helped me pick 12 of my best friends. Then she made an invitation that had the yellow and black graphics like the TV show I love so much (we sent the invitation by email). She included the time, date, place, and where to R.S.V.P.  

DECORATIONS: for decorations we put a yellow tablecloth with a black strip of tablecloth in the middle and yellow lettering with THE AMAZING RACE and my name. Then we got yellow and black plastic cups, pates, napkins etc.  

We also had kits for each team with two water bottles, a ball, a clip board, the clues (we would not see them because the chaperones held the bag), the key for the deciphering the coded messages which would lead us to the next challenge, a map of the Park with key locations, a length of rope, and two t-shirts with the team's color and a passport where our times and points would be recorded along the way.  We had 6 teams of two, identified by color: aqua, navy, yellow, pink, green, and red. 

ACTIVITIES: The first activity was a touch/feel challenge. One team at a time was blind folded, taken to a table where four mugs held different materials.  We had to feel each in turn and keep quiet.  Once out of the room the two team members could consult and write down their best guesses. The materials were: flour, lentils, feathers, egg white.  We handed in our answers and got the fist ciphered clue in exchange.  We deciphered the two lines, looked at the map and knew where to go.  

Each team was assigned an adult chaperone.  We headed into Central Park to a playground with swings. Our challenge was that one person was on a swing and the other person on the ground. We had to toss a ball back and forth 5 times with no misses. If we dropped the ball you started counting from zero. Our total time was recorded in out passport. Once we did this we had to decipher our next destination, which was the Merry Go Round.  

There we were handed the next envelope with Challenge 3: a sheet of paper with flags of different countries. We had to write the country (we had a list of possibilities) and their capitals and we were timed, with the results recorded in out passports.

The next ciphered message led us to our running challenge, number 4: one team member jumped rope 15 times with no misses (start again if you make a mistake) and tagged team member two, who ran a marked course from tree A to tree B and back.  Then the two team members had to tie their two ankles together with the rope and walk three-legged from tree A to B, which took a lot of team effort.  

Challenge 5 led us to a location where we had a sheet of paper with 15 pictures of me, the birthday girl, at different ages. We had to put them in chronological order. Once we got those correct we went back home. Challenge 6:  we had to pick between 2 songs and learn a few paragraph of the song and invent a choreography that lasted two minutes. The chaperones were all judges and gave us points for creativity and executions.  All the points were tallied up from our passports and the winners were given trophies while everyone else got a beautiful medal on a black and yellow ribbon.

CAKE: My mom and I made a huge tiramisu cake, which is my favorite. Before we sprinkled the cocoa we put a wax paper stencil with my initial.  When we took it off it made a B. Everyone loved the cake and the party!!!!  It took a lot of planning but it was worth it.