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My Journey to the End of the Night

A mob of 600 costumed crazed raced onto the streets of San Francisco. The Journey begins…

Journey to the End of the Night started out at Herman Plaza near the Embarcadero. After getting the manifest, our red and yellow arms bands and hearing the official give the instructions of how to play the game and where the safe zones are we had only a few minutes before the game began. I tied my yellow arm band around my left bicep while I chatted with my five friends; none of us had ever done anything like this. My heart was pounding. Is this what it’s like to be a participant in High Trek Adventure?

The horn sounds. 600 people storm the streets of the City by the Bay. All of them rushing to South Park in SOMA. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. Journey is a road race that combines the ultimate game of tag! It’s an incredible rush.

The Halloween Journey took its non-chasers (people avoiding getting tagged) and chasers (the taggers) from the Embarcadero to SOMA to Union Square back to SOMA to Hayes Valley to the Haight to the Mission. I only made it as far as checkpoint five (Hayes Valley) before I retired at quarter past midnight.

I would have finished but all my friends got tagged before reaching the first checkpoint. They quit and got Thai. I continued and ate a Clif Bar. I wish I had the former.

I got chased a few times. I felt that I could out run most chasers despite being in jeans and dresses as a ghost from Ms. Pac-Man. I made some daring dashes. One in particular where I ran in the direction of oncoming traffic up Mason (between Ellis and O’Farrell). I waited for the light at Ellis to turn red before I took my life into my hands…VICTORY. Checkpoint three accomplished!

After Chkpt 3 I was sweaty, tired, hungry, but I pushed on. It seemed like by this hour most chasers quit and went to home or to the party they had RSVP. The Journey increasingly became easier. None easier than when my newly found friend Eric, Marcus and Kim strolled into the park at Hayes Valley to discover we had 15 mintues to complete a live game of the famous board game Clue. If we got all 12 answers right we got a shot of whiskey. We tasted victory, but it didn’t taste that good; Jameson would have been better.

This concluded my Journey. I would do it again in a heartbeat!

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