Amazing Race Season 15 Episode 7 Recap

This episode starts off with Team Gay Brothers coming out of the closet to the rest of the teams.  Seriously did anybody think these two were straight? 

Team Father-Son makes me laugh saying "Now it's a good time to tell my son he's adopted" or something like that.  Way to break the gay tension.

The teams are all racing from the Middle East to the Netherlands.  The teams land and run to their fancy cars.  Team Interracial couple can't put their car in drive.  Beauty Contestant wife will not stop nagging her husband.  It ain't easy being married to a beauty contestant from the looks of it.  Team Globetrotters crack on her by saying "If there's one guy's name that I know in this race it's Brian".  The CBS crew cuts to a few shots of his wife pestering him by yelling his name "Briiiiian!"

The first road block has the teams counting bells in a bell tower.  It's loud, dark and it's cramped and you could see how it might be a little disorienting trying to count all the bells.  There are 62 of them in case you were wondering.  The girl from Team San Diego and one of the Gay Brothers team up to count bells together.  They get the right number and then Gay Brother for some reason tells the girl from Team Poker the number before she even enters.  I still don't understand his reasoning... something about them being "the team to beat".  So why make them harder to beat?

The Beauty Contestant on Team Interracial counts 41 bells.  How she missed 21 bells I don't know.  In any case, why not just start writing more numbers on your card, "42, 43, 44, 45..." until you get the right answer?  Is there a rule you can only guess once every few minutes?  She spent 2 hours counting the bells before she got the correct answer.  You could spend a minute and just write all the answers until you got it right.

The rest of the teams have to choose between two challenges.  Dance or Golf.  Instead of trying to explain this detour I'm going to let CBS do it for me.

In both Detour choices, teams had to don traditional Dutch costumes, one male and one female, and ride bicycles to the start of the Detour. In Farmer’s Game, teams had to find a creek, strip down to their farmer’s underwear, and swim across. Then, using a unique set of golf clubs shaped like wooden shoes, teams had to play three holes of golf. Taking turns, they had to finish each hole in eight strokes or less to receive their next clue. In Farmer’s Dance, teams had to find a country festival where one team member had to ring the bell on top of a high striker. Then, they had to learn a Dutch folk dance and perform the moves correctly in front of a crowd. After the performance, teams would receive a reward of salted herring with onions from their instructor. When they finished the herring, they would receive their next clue.

So here's what happened.  Team Poker player wasn't strong enough to hit the top of the high striker carnival game.  They were so weak.  They kept saying they didn't understand what they were doing wrong.  Here let me explain it to you.  You have to lift the hammer up over your head and hit that son of a bitch as hard as you possibly can.  You were trying to give it a little love tap.  It looked incredibly frustrating.  The Asian Poker player couldn't even get it a quarter of the way up.  The other one almost hit the top a few times.  They gave up after about 50 tries to go play golf.

When they went to play golf, they had to swim across a river in their underwears and play golf with these large but light golf balls.  The wind was really strong and the Poker girls were really weak.  They couldn't hit the ball far enough and kept having to star over.  This combined with the cold made them turn around and go back to try the high striker.

After about another 40 tries on the high striker they gave up again and went back to play golf.  If you're counting this is the third time they've been in the cold river.  Again they failed at playing golf.  Huddled together they decided to quit.

It was a good thing for Team Interracial though because they were 2 hours behind but were able to catch up even though they didn't use the bicycles on the detour and walked in wooden clogs forever.  They completed the challege but had a penalty of 30 minutes for not using the bikes.  When the team realized they should have been using the bikes, the Beauty Contestant bitched out her husband. Ugh.

I couldn't understand why they didn't just take off their shoes when they realized that they had to get back to the bikes.  Why torture yourself more?  They are going to have a ton of blisters on the next leg of the race.

As I said Team Poker quit and I wondered if maybe they should have just waited out the wind because maybe it was a non elimination stage.  Hard to say.