For those of you not already familiar with it, The Amazing Race is an American-origin (although there are versions in some other countries that started several years after the American one) reality TV show where a dozen two-person teams of various backgrounds race around the world, doing assorted tasks and participating in sundry competitions with the last place team normally being eliminated at each location, although sometimes a lucky last place team gets a reprieve. There are various obstacles along the way including U-turns which require a team U-turned to complete two particular tasks instead of just one task. The winning team gets $1,000,000. The second and third place finishers get $25,000 and $10,000 respectively, and the winners of some legs win money or vacations.
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At the most relevant point in this story I, Rob Voorhees, was 41 years old, I had lost Melissa, the love of my life, to a small plane crash three years before; it devastated me.
I have two children, Dirk a biological child of Melissa and I, age 20 and about to start his sophomore year in college, and an adopted daughter Zoe who had just turned 18 on June 2 and was about to start her senior year in High School. As soon as she was old enough to understand what it meant we told Zoe that she was adopted. However, I don't think that she really believed that until she was 13 or 14 because she looked so much like Melissa, Dirk and me that she (and everyone else who didn't have actual knowledge) thought that she had to be our biological child; apparently, she thought that we were just teasing her. The shape of Zoe's nose and ears is similar to those of the other three members of the family, she has almost the same color blond hair (that she wears shoulder length) as the rest of us, and all of us are/were tall, me six foot three inches, Melissa five foot ten inches, Dirk six foot five inches, and at 18 Zoe was six feet tall. Her only really significant physical difference was that she has green eyes while the rest of us have/had blue eyes.
Zoe and I have always been close, and we bonded even more after Melissa's death; Zoe was also very close to her mom. Zoe is smart, athletic (the star of the High School volleyball team, and an excellent swimmer), and very self-confident. I'm past the point now where I try and tell her what to do; she often asks me for advice but ultimately does what she wants. She is a classic extrovert and very independent.
I'm an ambivert, but given Zoe's personality it's normally fun to interact with other people with her around. I've got a Masters in Mechanical Engineering and have worked in that field since I graduated from Engineering School, and have owned my own company for the last decade. I've been lucky enough to have excellent investment opportunities and good investment advice so while I'm not filthy rich, I'm very comfortable without any money concerns unless I live to be 200 and can't work the last 130 years of my life.
That brings me to The Amazing Race. Melissa and Zoe always loved that show and when Zoe was 17 she talked me into applying to be on it. The next season would we filmed during the summer shortly after she turned 18 and I had employees who could easily keep my business running smoothly for the twenty-one days of filming, and a day of travel each way. Surprisingly after our application submission and several interviews we were accepted. I'm sure that it was primarily due to Zoe's looks and personality that we were selected.
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There were a wide variety of different teams in the race. The one that made the most dramatic first impression on me were a mother daughter team. The mother, Elektra, looked like, and turned out to be, five feet two inches tall, 105 pounds, brunette with a classically beautiful (not just cute) face, the nicest, tightest ass and thighs I'd ever seen, and little tits. The daughter, Alisa, who had to be (and was) adopted, looked to be about the same height as Zoe with short died red hair and what looked like snake eyes.
There wasn't much time to socialize before everyone had to start the race, although we all ended up on the same plane for the first leg. On the plane Zoe and Alisa seemed to gravitate to each other and when Zoe returned from one sweep of the plane during which she interacted with all of the other eleven teams her initial comment was "Alisa is really cool, and one of the only females my age that's my height that I've ever seen; and she's adopted, just like me."
Then Zoe punched me in the ribs and said "Did you see how hot her mother Elektra is?"
Zoe was worried about my love life. Over the last year before the race she tried to set me up with every over-thirty single or divorced woman that she knows. In actuality my love life was a disaster; I'd been laid a total of six times -- all one time (not even the whole night) stands -- since Melissa died. During the first two my performance was miserable. During the last four I felt no passion and it was no better than masturbating.
"No, I hadn't noticed," I blatantly prevaricated in response to Zoe's question.
"Liar," she chuckled, and then proceeded to tell me so much about Elektra that I found it impossible to believe she could find all that out in the time that she was circulating. Particularly interesting to Zoe -- and I had to grudgingly admit also to me -- was that Elektra's divorce from her husband Charles was in the works, and that Alisa was very close to her mother and definitely on her side in the divorce and was barely talking to her father, who she called "a classic asshole." "Plus, she's 38, the perfect age for you," she giggled.
Unfortunately, Elektra and Alisa lived about 900 miles from Zoe and me.
The second full day of the race proved very interesting. We were in an underdeveloped country and the last task of the day before we ran to the pit stop was driving a donkey cart. One of the rules was that both team members had to finish on the donkey cart.
Zoe and I ran into a couple of glitches during that day so we didn't see much of Elektra and Alisa who appeared to be proceeding smoothly. There were only a few teams behind us as we made the turn toward the "finish line" in our donkey cart when we saw Elektra and Alisa broken down no more than twenty meters from the finish. The left wheel on their cart had come loose, flew off the axle, and broke. They had no way to go the last twenty meters since the donkey couldn't pull the cart with them on it and with the axle stuck in the dirt. Elektra looked pissed, Alisa was crying.
"Dad, we've got to help them," Zoe plead as we approached them. "As soon as we finish I'll help them out," I replied.
As soon as our cart was over the finish line I grabbed a pair of work gloves out of my knapsack and ran over to Elektra and Alisa. I picked up the left end of the axle where the wheel had detached. The cart was heavy, but I thought that I could hold it up for twenty meters. "Get in the cart and stay as far right as both of you can; in fact, Elektra you should sit on Alisa's lap. Then go slowly until we cross the finish line," I told them.
Elektra and Alisa jumped into action and got on the cart as I instructed. With them on the cart I wondered whether I really could hold it up but I told them to get going. It took about two minutes to cross the line, and once we did I quickly dropped the cart. My hands, arms, and back were really hurting but I did no real damage to my body. All four of us grabbed our backpacks and ran a couple hundred meters to see our host Phil Keoghan, Zoe and I getting there a few seconds before Elektra and Alisa. Phil had a chuckle about what transpired with the donkey carts. Elektra and Alisa expressed eternal gratitude because the last two teams were less than a minute behind them so they had barely avoided elimination.
As we walked to the van that would take us to our hotel for the night, Elektra genuinely said "That was really selfless of you, Rob. You kept us in the race."
Demonstrating her out-there personality Zoe chuckled "Not so selfless, Elektra; if you were eliminated, he couldn't ogle your ass anymore."
Alisa broke out laughing and hugged Zoe. Elektra and I turned red, and I immediately changed the subject to speculation of where we were off to tomorrow.
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