Amazing Race

Enough of the desert, this week they went to the Netherlands! (Mom, if there was ever an episode for you to watch, this was it.) The show opened with everyone catching the same flight to Amsterdam. Why? Because flights from Dubai to Europe are limited.
(Side note, if you will. I think there is a reason that they don't have travel agents on this show. Once you start booking international flights for a while, you get a serious feel for the, uh, flow of travel. You know when to look for flights from here to there. And most importantly, you get a feel for how to get in and out of different continents. For instance, Skyteam has a 7p connection through Moscow that looks like it would have beaten the flight they picked. I bet with some time I could find even better.)
The first thing the teams did this week was drive to a certain statue on the bridge of a dike. Well, the first test for one team was putting the car in Drive, but I'm pretty sure that the producers didn't expect that to be a challenge. After the statue, they had to go to a nearby town and find the bell tower. One member would climb the steps and count all of the bells. Pretty straight forward and the first five teams did it without much problem. The last team had mucho trouble. I'm curious if she could have simply counted the keys on the players keyboard, but I didn't pause the screen and find out.
Next it was off to another nearby village to find a windmill. Then they had to change into authentic Dutch garb and choose between challenges. Each team had both a male and a female outfit and that was good for some cross dressing fun. Especially with the Globetrotters.
They got to choose between two sets of tasks. One consisted of a strength test with a hammer and a bell, a traditional dance and some salted herring. The other had them strip down to long underwear, swim a creek and then play golf with weird clubs and balls (and a strong wind).
This proved to be too much for the team of poker playing ladies. They couldn't ring the bell and they couldn't drive the ball far enough. This let the perpetually troubled team catch up and endure a penalty that they suffered from accidentally walking when they should have saved time by riding a bike. The poker players eventually quit.
I liked the scenery this week and watching the Globetrotters do an authentic Dutch dance was possibly the high point of the season. But . . . it's a real shame when a team quits because they couldn't actually complete a task. The High Striker, in particular was apparently too hard for a team of women. The golf probably would have been easier on a different day but was obviously beyond them if it was windy. Still, this was a team just waiting to be eliminated and if it wasn't this week it would have been the next. There are four strong teams left and the weaker ones are almost all gone.