In early May, I heard about this new TLC show via some short blurb in a magazine…maybe Popular Mechanics…I can’t remember. I almost forgot, but days later I went to the TLC website and looked over the show description and application. There wasn’t much information, but the gist of it was, this was some sort of contest where teams of 4 would have to complete scientific challenges, and design/build things in a race to ‘escape’ from a remote Scottish island. TLC (The Learning Channel) produces great shows such as Junkyard Wars and Battlebots. TLC’s jingle is "Life, Unscripted", and all of TLC’s "reality" shows are about technical competition rather than about backstabbing (Survivor) or eating bugs (Fear Factor). So I was definitely interested in this.

Linda encouraged me to do it, saying, "This is YOU, go for it". I filled out the application, and we had some fun making a 3-minute audition video that showed off my workshop, my custom-designed, scratchbuilt radio-controlled twin-gas-engine mini hovercraft, and the scaled-down bathroom I built for the kitties complete with automatic vent fan, automatic litterbox, and paw cleaning ramp.

Things happened quickly after that. The day after receiving my application, they called me in for a half-hour interview at the SF Hyatt with Paul Bartick, the casting director. I then received a callback to participate the next day in a mock team mini-competition/audition in Golden Gate Park. Two weeks later, I was told that I was on the ‘short list’. The next day, I was called by Paul and he said I was guaranteed a spot in Week One of filming if I wanted it, or if not, they’d try to get me in to one of the other 5 weeks of filming.

The producers were a cagey bunch. Here is all that I knew beforehand:

• I’d be a contestant on a 4-person team, competing against another 4-person team in a reality competition.

• We’d be building some sort of craft.

• There were going to be daily "Challenges", possibly related to building part of the craft...or not.

• We were to bring only socks, underwear, swimwear, nightwear, and items of personal hygiene.

• Electronics, tools, watches, and reading material would not be allowed.

• We’d stay in "modern tents with comfortable sleeping facilities...proper bathroom facilities with hot water are nearby."

• We wouldn’t have to eat bugs or forage for food.

• There was no prize money…we were doing this for the adventure of it.

• Being the first week of filming, things might be extra chaotic.

• This show would be aired by The Learning Channel (TLC) but produced by the BBC.

This wasn’t much information…but it sounded like something unique and challenging to do, so I told Paul to "Bring It On" and sign me up for the 1^st week of filming.

Luckily, the Glasgow flight was late as well…in fact, the plane never showed and they had to snag an extra one from the hangar.

To pass time, I tried to identify who else in the waiting area *might* be on the show. Couples, families, and anybody not travelling alone could be eliminated. Also, anybody over 50 or under 20 were probably out. I spotted Kareem and Scott as potential contestants, but didn’t talk to them.

I met up with the other 7 contestants (Scott, Sabrina, Shawn, Christy, Kareem, Shawn, Sam). Everyone immediately began chatting about who they were, where they came from, etc. We had been previously advised not to reveal too much about ourselves, since we did not know who would be on the "other" team…but it just didn’t seem so important to not tell who we were.

1:00pm: began bus ride to Mallaig along a windy and narrow road, stopping at Loch Lomond for pictures, Fort Williams for lunch, and miscellaneous other places to take pics, stretch, pee, or puke.

Half of us tried haggis (ground sheep’s lung, stomach, heart, liver, kidney…mixed with some spices)…it tasted fine, but only if you didn’t think about the ingredients.

The scenery was simply beautiful. Lots of green, lots of dramatic mountains, and lots of streams and waterfalls from the daily rain.

7pm: checked in to West Highland Hotel. We each got our own room. My room had an amazing view of the ocean. Us 8 contestants then wandered about the tiny town and viewed the Isle of Rum, which lay 18 miles offshore and hung under a thick blanket of ominous clouds.

8pm: had dinner at the hotel…our last civilized dinner for a week. I had seen so many ‘fresh’ lamb grazing in the hills on our bus ride that I just had to have a lamb dish for dinner. YUCK! It was the worst, most gristly lamb I’ve ever eaten…

After dinner, Rebecca arranged for us to briefly call home and say "hi" to our significant others.

By this time, we were already trying to figure out what the teams would be. It was apparent that Scott, the naval architect, and I would be split. There couldn’t be two Asians on the same team, so Sabrina and I would be split. Sabrina and Christy, the two girls, would be split. And so on…Stephen & I bet a Scottish Pint…he eventually won the bet.

Overall, I had an enjoyable day getting to know the other interesting and talented contestants, and seeing the countryside.

2pm: arrived on the Isle of Rum. We landed at a pier in Loch Scresort, the large natural harbor on the eastern side of the island. A fleet of Land Rovers was there to move us and crew around. The crew was staying in Kinloch Castle, a beautiful work of architecture built in 1897 for a very rich family, and now functioning as a nifty youth hostel. There are currently 25 permanent residents of the island.

At the island’s community center, we were given the first of what would be many processed lunches –wimpy sandwiches that looked like a robot had made and packaged them in clear plastic boxes. On this day, they tasted good.

We gave up our electronics, cameras, travel clothes, and watches.

We were given a general safety talk, but still no information about what events the week would hold or what teams we’d be on.

We were issued steel-toed boots, Wellys, black rain gear, and dry bags and we headed up to camp.

5:30pm: Camp hosts Wee Davie Austin and Giles Trussell set us up with towels, toiletries, sleeping bag & pad, etc. There were indeed modern & new Mountain Hardware tents (complete with plastic windows to view the clouds) and a giant communal dome and a mess tent dome. But "modern bathroom facilities"?! I think not. 3 chemical toilets in fabric privacy tents. "Hot water?" From a kettle…No showers were in sight! I’ve been backpacking before for up to 4 days, but on those trips, the weather was warm enough to allow me to go swimming or into the creek to at least rinse off a little. Here, the expected highs were 60F, overcast, with periods of rain and wind. Things were generally DAMP.

To make us feel better, all of the crew we met complained to us about how they were sleeping 8 to an unheated room down at the youth hostel in the castle.

Wee Davie cooked us a nice dinner.

SIDEBAR: The Production Crew

A talented bunch! There was Jan, who directed The Mole, Phil, who co-produced Weakest Link, and Graham, who was a Team Expert in Junkyard Wars. The crew totaled 32 people. There were 2 main cameramen, 2 soundpersons, a digital video person, various producers, liaisons, & camp hosts. In addition, at various other times there was a pyrotechnics crew, RIB (rigid inflatable boat) & Scuba crews, and a helicopter crew. Supposedly, BBC makes better reality shows because they are more unobtrusive than US production crews, which average 85 people and have more cameras on, and more often. This, no-surprise, makes the contestants act unnaturally.

Thus began the filming of Escape from Experiment Isle.

Over the next SIX hours, they filmed us zooming towards the beach, jumping off the RIB, running up the beach, joining the host for a welcome and being split into teams, changing into team outfits. Then we *finally* began the competition. At the same time, we opened crates that were sitting on the beach. Based on the items in the crate, we had to guess what sort of "Escape Rendezvous Vehicle" that we were going to have to build. This would be the Vehicle used in a big, final race to a place where we’d signal the actual "Escape Vehicle", which was also unknown at this point.

When given the signal, we opened the crate. Inside were 4 plastic cups, a magnet, a plastic snail, a tide table, a ceramic cup filled with red sand, and a bag of fine powder. I looked at the 4 cups, saw a paddlewheel in my mind and said, "paddleboat". Stephen looked at the fine powder and said "concrete", and Christy said "concrete paddleboat". Kareem sprinted to tell the host of our guess. Steve, the host, was shocked that we had guessed the exact craft in just 15 seconds. We felt pretty good about ourselves!

But we lost our advantage in the very next challenge when we were handed a map and compass. We wasted LOTS of time looking for an ‘X’ or something to indicate where we were supposed to go. By the time we noticed that there were orienteering directions written on the back, the Red Team was off and running. We mostly gave chase and basically did not do any significant orienteering. They arrived at the next challenge 79 seconds before we did.

The next challenge was to fill a tall plastic tube with water in order to float a key to the top. All we were given was a leaky bucket and four cups. Stephen plugged the leaky bucket with the plastic bag of cement from our crate and we were able to catch up and beat the other team by a few seconds. Meanwhile, we had to re-enact parts of that contest, and do comments and bits with the host.

We boarded a special extended-wheelbase Land Rover Defender and took the rough, potholed road back to the Kinloch Castle area. There were many beautiful waterfalls and Red deer wandering about.

That evening, we did the Forge Challenge. I was the designated person. I had 90 seconds to go into the forge, pick three items, and get them out of the forge. We got to go first since we won the previous challenge. All we knew was that these were ‘bonus’ items and were not absolutely essential to building the boat. The forge was full of stuff that was obviously useless junk. I picked a cement mixer, portable drill, and big spool (to make a paddlewheel). Shawn picked a cement mixer, portable drill, and a car battery.

There was some argument from Shawn as to whether I should have assumed the items were functional. Our gas-powered mixer was not. However, neither was their electric-powered mixer, which required AC current so could not be driven by the car battery. The producers conferred and decided that all items should be functional, given that we would not have had time to verify functionality in the short time we were allowed in the forge.

We were asked (on camera) why we did not steal both cement mixers. It just hadn’t occured to us to do that.

Blue Team (Cobalt Assault): Dave, Kareem, Christy, Stephen

Red Team (Red Herrings): Scott, Sabrina, Sam, Shawn

Scott had studied naval architecture in the Coast Guard, giving the Red Team some advantage in hull design. Our team had no boat design experience, but I was confident about building a sound, working paddlewheel propulsion unit.

At 11pm or so, we were given a list of materials that we’d have to build the boat hull. In front of AJ’s DV cam, we discussed possible designs. We discussed a catamaran design with a paddlewheel in between the two hulls, and a canoe design with an outrigger and the paddlewheel in-between. The Red Team still hadn’t guessed that they’d have to build a paddlewheel propulsion mechanism…they just knew it would be a "concrete boat". We kept quiet about our paddlewheel design.

We went to sleep well after midnite…This was one LONG LONG day…

SIDEBAR: "Camera Voice" & Re-enactments

TLC’s jingle is "Life, Unscripted". This is true…we did not receive scripts. But we did do "Re-enactments". If I had a great idea and pitched it to the team, sometimes Jan, the director, and camera crew would zip over and say, "do that again". After awhile, we developed "Camera Voice", with clear professorial voices and gestures, and got better at explaining things simply & clearly. The funniest thing was, sometimes we’d do the Camera Voice to each other by accident, even when the cameras weren’t rolling.

SIDEBAR: Daylight…lots of it

Because we were so far north, it was only completely dark from midnite to 3am. Also, when it was cloudy (most of the time!) there were no cues from the sun as to what time it was. Plus, they had taken our watches away. Coupled with jet lag and an 8-hour time shift from Pacific Time, I was often completely baffled as to what time it was! The worst was in the morning, when I’d snap awake, look outside, and have absolutely no feel for whether it was 4am or 9am. The daylight also meant that they could (and did) film us as late as 11pm!

SIDEBAR: Gear…lots of it…all for the keeping.

We were issued more gear today: our color coordinated gear and thermals and wool socks.

The list of gear we got to keep: fleece/thinsulate gloves, hat, black rain jacket, black rain pants, steel-toed boots, Wellington rain boots (Wellys), thick socks, converta pants, blue fleecey jacket, blue gore-tex shell, blue tee-shirts, black longsleeve t-shirts, thermal underwear, and a camera case (the use was never really explained…).

In the morning, we pitched our outrigger design to the producers (off-camera) and it was approved.

We had not actually seen the materials we would get to use yet. We were shown a bicycle that we would receive later for use in the boat’s propulsion mechanism. We were not given a list of materials that would be available for building the propulsion unit.

Late in the afternoon, we were shown the hull materials, and were told we had to build a TWO-person racing concrete paddleboat, and immediately began to design & build the hull. They like to have us design and build at the same time, on-camera…thus they don’t reveal materials or info until right before we start. We began building an open-top box out of wood. I wandered off and re-calculated the displaced volume and had Kareem check my calculations. We were reaching the conclusion that we wouldn’t have enough buoyancy when Vanessa, the science expert, came over and told us that our design would not float…and gave us a 10-second Escape Penalty for providing the information. Grrr. So we made wider box and went for a 28" wide hull rather than 18", and figured we might not need outriggers any more. We poured 10 bags of sand (800 lbs) into the mold and faked-up a hull shape. Then we lined the sand with strips of plastic, then a layer of chicken wire.

Beginning at 9:30, it began to rain. We frantically mixed and slathered, mixed and slathered the concrete as it rained. By 10:30, we looked like filthy drowned rats. We ran out of cement before finishing the top 4 inches of the sides of the boat, but there was nothing further we could do so we sounded the horn…10 seconds before the Red Team was going to sound theirs. This gave them a 10-second Escape Penalty.

Thankfully, they let us take showers at the Kinloch Castle Hostel, and we got some more hot food to eat. Nice!

Grateful as we were for the showers, we discovered that the crew were lying about their eight-to-a-bunkroom-with-no-heating. They all had decent rooms with 2 persons per.

That was a hard day’s work! The concrete hull building was some manual labor!

Late as it was, we (minus Stephen) did a video diary in the communal tent, patting ourselves on the back for a good day’s work.

SIDEBAR: What, no prize money?!

Though the producers made a lot of effort to tell both teams the same rules and stipulations, they managed to constantly tell us contradictory information. Rules and their interpretation depended on who we spoke to. Often, clarification of the rules were needed after the segment of competition was in progress or completed. There were many discussions as to the fairness and equality of the rules—had this competition involved a cash prize, us contestants would have been fairly upset at the rules. Also, the pressure to win money would have made the week less fun and too stressful. We were there for the adventure of it all, and we got it!

SIDEBAR: Midges vs. Weather

Scotland doesn’t have mosquitoes, but they have a close cousin called the midge. The little bugger is tiny like a gnat, so you can’t see the darn thing to swat it. Luckily, I guess, the constant wind kept the midges from flying around looking for targets to chew on.

We were woken up early as usual (8am or so), but basically waited around for hours for things to get decided and set up.

11-1am: Because our team won the hull-building challenge (by a huge 10-second margin), we got to pick materials for the next challenge of building an air pump. One pile of materials was obviously to build a piston pump, the other, a bellows pump. We chose the piston pump materials, figuring it could pump a high-volume of air quickly and this seemed like a good thing =)

3pm: We built the piston pump in the alloted 60 minutes. This was barely enough time because we spent extra time to make our own custom flapper valves for high-volume flow instead of using the small car-tire valve stems. Kareem and I got bloody knuckles pounding in a bulkhead piece in the last minute. It was a fun building session! As usual, they didn’t tell us the exact nature of the competition we’d be having with these pumps.

Because everybody on our team was eager and capable of providing design and competition input, we often ended up all talking excitedly at once, and getting into disagreements where we’d get nowhere. So we established a "break" rule, where anybody could say "break!" and everybody had to stop talking and switch back into discussion mode. This worked fairly well for us.

After dinner, we went to put our hulls in the water for testing. We peeled away the wooden molds and scooped away the mold sand. Voila, something resembling a boat hull ‘appeared’. The ‘beach’ was all treacherous rocks and we had to move the hull about 20 feet over the rocks into the water. The science experts (Graham & Graham) directed the move, setting up long 2x4s and large wooden rollers. I was uncomfortable about the stress concentration, but not enough to stop the move. As soon as the hull was slid onto the first roller, the floor buckled upwards! This brought our spirits down quite a bit. After a quick dinner break, we repaired and thickened the bottom of the hull, and finished off the sides with a little more concrete. We also painted the hull to seal any tiny holes, and used a flashlight to find & patch 4 more holes. Things were pretty good again!

We did a Team video diary in the communal tent. We were slightly discouraged that we did not get to test our hull, but were happy to have finished the hull.

SIDEBAR: The Camp

Although Wee Davie and Giles were excellent camp hosts and provided us with food, drinks, hot water, and shelter, and every last piece of camp equipment was good quality and brand new…living conditions were not great. The camp was often swept with tremendous gusts of wind and rain. Clothes got wet and stayed damp. Gear got muddy, dirt got in the tents. Keeping oneself clean was a challenge. The lush, grassy-looking hillside we were on was actually very boggy, puddly, and muddy –occasionally we’d be walking around and suddenly step into a bog and sink 15 inches deep into some muck between clumps of grass. These conditions wore on everybody a little, but made things that much more memorable!

SIDEBAR: The Weather…with a capital ‘W’

A website advertising trips to the Hebrides Islands cheerfully says, "Don’t like the rain? Visit us in May, where there are only an average of 17 days with rainfall!" Crikey. Hey, after all I’m from the SF-Bay Area, where one of the reasons housing costs a fortune is that people love living in good weather. There aren’t 17 days of rain from April thru October here! And we don’t know what "humid" means. If the temperatures hit triple digits, it is front page top-o-the-hour news…Inevitably, the marine layer moves in within 3 days and it gets back to 70s and 80s.  "Freezing" also isn't in the vocabulary.

Anyhow, the weather got a little bit better today, which meant mostly cloudy with periods of rain. I got a picture of actual sunbeams shooting down out of the clouds and into the ocean (unbeknownst to me, it was 6am…I found out later after sitting around outside for a long time before anybody got up).

By this time, Sabrina had revealed her inspiringly positive personality by not complaining about the camp conditions or the weather…even though she had NEVER been camping or backpacking before!!

SIDEBAR: Discontinuities

You see them in movies all the time. In one scene, a car crushes its fender against a pole, and in the next scene, the fender is fine. There was lots of that for this show too, regarding our clothing, footwear, weather, time of day, tools we were using in competition, etc.

Were woken up early as usual, but this time we actually got moving by 9am or so! We shuttled over to Loch Ogmabac, where we tried to do some setup shots with the host. 50 mph gusts of wind were wreaking havoc on Steve’s hair, which normally had the tremendously full-bodied look that you only find in shampoo commercials, but today just served to catch the wind.

For the actual competition, we had to pump up a deflated innertube that was 4 feet underwater and 30 feet away (connected by a long plastic tube). As we inflated it, it would raise a "key piece of equipment" to the surface. We were warned several times by Graham and Jan to wait for the item to breach the surface, then pull it in to shore carefully else the fill tube might detach from the innertube.

Our pump worked as expected, and our innertube floated to the surface in 15 seconds. I carefully began pulling it in, very slowly. Then we noticed that Red Team was hauling their innertube in like there was no tomorrow! I reacted and started pulling hard, but they beat us and had the item (a bicycle) on shore before we did by a few seconds. We were very frustrated because we had been told several times to not pull hard or the tube might come off, and thus lost the competition--despite having a faster pump--because we were being (overly) careful. Later we found out that the Red Team had been told the same thing about being careful, but they just figured they’d take the risk of pulling hard. Their strategy worked and didn’t break the rules, so what could we really say?

Due to sound problems with our camera, we re-enacted our side of the competition…leaving out some of the profanity so they’d actually be able to use our ‘reaction-to-losing’ footage ; )

4pm We began the propulsion mechanism challenge. As usual, they told us very little beforehand. I think this is generally to keep us from pre-designing things…they want us to design and build at the same time, on-camera. We were shown what materials we’d get to use just minutes before beginning to design/build. We designed a propulsion mechanism that was modular and used dual paddlewheels (one on each side of the hull). Stephen took the job of cutting wood to make paddlewheels. Christy fired up the Mig welder. Kareem ripped and cut apart the bike frame. I started out with some designing, then helped where needed. We started off happily singing America the Beautiful. Pretty soon, tensions flared between Stephen and I because I kept delaying giving him a paddlewheel diameter--he was revved up to keep building and I was slowing him down. The problem was, we didn’t know our final hull weight, and could only roughly estimate the displaced volume...thus we just didn’t know our waterline height. I tried to explain this to Stephen, but he was well beyond listening and just felt that I was trying to come up with a "perfect" design. Christy was hungry and headachey and fed up by Stephen’s impatience. Thankfully, the producers stopped the building at 2-1/2 hours and we had some dinner.

At 8pm we finally got to do a float test and determine our waterline exactly. Everyone was happy to see that our boat floated high and stable. I have to say, good thing we hadn’t built the paddlewheels yet…my initial waterline estimates would have resulted in a paddlewheel with paddles that didn’t dip fully into the water. After the test, we painted our boat hull blue and were in high spirits again. We had our data and Stephen and I didn’t have to butt heads anymore.

We did a Team video diary outside in lantern light. We realized that this could be anybody’s race but were confident of putting on a good showing.

SIDEBAR: "Good TV" vs. WINNING

A lot of things were done to make "Good TV". There is no doubt that we really had to design, build, and think/work/improvise quickly with our minds/hands. But the science experts were there, off camera, to help insure we didn’t head down an obviously bad path that would result in something that didn’t work at all. Also, though each daily competition’s rules were meant to be fair, they weren’t always. And, unlike us contestants, the crew ultimately didn’t care which team won, as long as they got "Good TV" footage.

Got started building early this morning…about 8am. Though we knew we had a long day ahead, the general feeling was much less frantic and anxious. I was actually excited and relieved that today was the final building and the final competition.

We were given time to finish our propulsion mechanisms. We sawed, welded, bolted, drilled, and pretended to play Stomp! on our half-finished metal frame. When we thought that we were ready to test fit the propulsion mechanism onto our hull, we blew our horn, thinking we won that segment of competition. Immediately we were told that our mechanism was not ready because the chain wasn’t installed and the paddlewheels were not bolted on. While we scrambled to put those on, the Red Team blew their horn and were declared winners…we protested because their propulsion ‘unit’ was in five+ pieces & chainless, but were told that their design was indeed complete and could not be put together into a single working unit in the workshop because it was a non-modular design, whereas our modular design was, by their definition, only complete when fully functional.

The whole business seemed unfair since Red Team eventually took an additional 3 hours to install their propulsion integrally into their boat, and were out on the beach making wooden bushings and such, whereas we just trimmed the ribs in our hull and bolted on our modular unit. It was all good, though…we took the opportunity to add a chain tensioner and some pins to reduce sideways wandering of the drive shaft.

7pm After much stress, we were treated to a great helicopter ride! Because the chopper was only available *before* we did our final race, both teams got to be filmed ‘winning’—ie: running to the chopper, boarding, and taking off. We then flew nose-down and low over the water and did a tremendously cool nearly-90-degree banked turn to turn around and come back for a landing. Our team got to do the scene/flight twice, because Kareem buckled up too slowly the first time, ‘ruining’ the shot! Good job, Kareem! All 8 contestants were happy that we all got to have this great fun…we all agreed that it took some of the pressure off the final race, and made it so nobody would feel bad that the losing team didn’t get to fly.

9pm The bets were placed. Graham, the science advisor, and Steve, show host, were betting on our boat because they felt the Red Team’s boat was going to capsize. Vanessa, the science host, bet against our boat because she was sure our propulsion unit was going to come off of the mounting points. Many votes were cast for many varied reasons, some technical, some ‘feeling’.

We were hoping to have time to test the boat. Steering was to be via leaning right or left, thereby varying how much each paddlewheel dipped into the water, thus varying the amount of thrust from each wheel, thus steering the boat.

Because we were ‘losing light’, there would be NO practice time…Stephen (propulsion), and Christy (steering) were just going to have to wing it!

WHO WON?! Sorry, I’m not allowed to tell. You’ll have to wait until January when the show airs. I can say that each team had a functional boat. Would we be able to control our boat? Would they have enough propulsion (they hadn’t checked waterline height)? Would our boat hull crack in half? Would their boat capsize? Would the welds & bolts hold under the high stresses? Would the chain stay on?

After the race, they gave us some good food and drinks, and let us take a shower (after 3 days). There was a big party at the island’s community center that went from 11pm to 4am. The live and in-effect fiddlin’ folk band was GREAT, but I was so tired! Andrew, the Series Producer, asked me at length about my experiences that week, then I headed off to bed!

SIDEBAR: "Spin"

The crew ended up with 20+ hours of footage on the 2 main cameras, and many hours on the DVcams (behind the scenes & video diary) as well. They felt there might be enough exciting footage to create a special episode (2 hours), but this probably won’t happen.

Given the amount of footage that they will try to compress into 44 minutes, who knows what kind of ‘spin’ they will put on things? Although I did some design work, and sawing, concrete mixing, welding, painting, etc. etc., I suspect I’ll get ‘cast’ as the engineer guy who just did the design. Christy might get spun as the welding babe. Kareem’s rabid humor might be emphasized. Stephen’s rapid-building skills will be emphasized. For Red Team, maybe Scott will be the designer, Sam the analyst and builder, Shawn the builder, and Sabrina the always-enthusiastic-no-matter-what-happens teammate. They’ll also spin it to make the competition look very close and tight…which it was... Also, they may emphasize strife between team members, or rivalry between the teams. Who knows?

SIDEBAR: Why’d they pick US?

Many of us contestants were wondering why we had been chosen and were wondering if we were just guinea pigs for a practice run of filming.

By the end of the week, it was clear that the executive producer and the US producer had felt we were the strongest of the contestant pool...they had made the final casting selections. After all, they weren’t going to be present at any of the other 5 weeks of filming, so they wanted a good group while they were there. We felt pretty good about that.

After an hour to shower and freshen up at the Glasgow hotel, we went to dinner at a nice Italian restaurant in town with Amanda and Steve (show host).

Christy & Shawn stayed behind to tour around.

Sabrina, Stephen, and Kareem got themselves bumped, twice! $700x2 and two more days to check out Glasgow & surrounds.

Scott, Sam, and I went home! The $700 was just not enough to entice me! This was the longest I had been away from Linda in 8 years, and I just wanted to go home.

The whole experience was just intense! So much crammed into one week.

• Meeting dozens of interesting and talented contestants and crew members.

• Whirlwind sightseeing the beautiful countrysides of Scotland.

• Observing/experience how a (semi) reality show was made.

• Building with concrete.

• Building things under time pressure.

• Welding and building steel structures.

• Enduring rugged weather and sleeping conditions.

As I eagerly tell my friends and family of the week’s events, I realize one thing. There is no way of really conveying the experience, even with the help of some pictures. The show itself will not tell about the whole of the experience.

I had a really good time getting to know the contestants and crew. They made the slack-times fun and interesting. I could have written a couple more pages about ‘people I met’, but it would probably end up being boring…you really just had to be there for that!

I have been having nightly dreams. They started out as fairly realistic dreams about the crew wanting me to re-enact some scenes and talk about the various competitions… Each day, they become less realistic. The film crew and contestants are at my house…scenes are being refilmed in our backyard as a backdrop. Being shirtless, I have been compelled to actually get up and walk downstairs to the garage to get my blue team t-shirt! The dreams ended, thankfully, after two weeks…

8 days after returning home, all of us contestants have been in email contact. Christy admitted that she has had a few dreams of racing hovercraft on the "wrong" side of the road. Scott admitted to having daily dreams (such as myself). In one dream, he apparently was arguing out loud (says his wife) with me. Us engineers had defected and were building our own boat, but we were in disagreement.

Would I do it again, if they had a ‘top-teams face-off’? No. A 2^nd week of filming would not have all of the interesting new experiences attached to it…It would be too much about the competition itself, and less about new experiences.  Did I regret going?  Not for a second!