Great West 2009

For pictures go here and here.

It was phenomenal.

phenomenal
adjective

remarkable, exceptional, extraordinary, amazing, astonishing, astounding, sensational, stunning, incredible, unbelievable; marvelous, magnificent, wonderful, outstanding, singular, out of the ordinary, unusual, unprecedented; informal fantastic, terrific, tremendous, stupendous, awesome, out of this world; literary wondrous.

Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

This year, Great West was located at Camp Chamisall (a semi-acronym for Christian and Missionary Alliance), in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It is reached, in the last few kilometers, by a 'road' (and calling it a road is like calling a lizard a dinosaur) that is so full of hills and ruts and mud and hairpin bends that my dad said, a little ways in, "If anyone had told me it was this bad, I would have called them a liar."

So that was fun. Unless you're prone to carsickness, but I'm not.

Also, about half an hour out, we completely lost all cell phone coverage. They had warned us about this, but being city folk, we said, "No cell phone coverage? Pfft." Well, they were right. We later learned that if you walked out into the middle of the moraine (new word! Look it up) that hosted the creek, there was a certain spot where there was coverage, but I didn't miss it. The lack of technology was refreshing.

In addition to this, we slept in cabins - ten bunks in each - that boasted qualities such as power outlets that buckled under the strain of a hair straightener (we girls ended up putting one of the bathroom ones out of commission even after they warned us not to use the outlets in the cabin) and heating that made the top bunks sweltering and the bottom ones frigid. I slept like a rock, though. Quizzing is tiring. That was roughing it, all right - nowhere to plug in your hair straightener and fifty feet from your door to the bathroom! (I revel in my city-girl-ness.)

One of the most exciting moments about Great West is finding out the teams. Everyone goes very silent. The coaches all stand in pairs, trying to suppress their grins, and Sandy makes announcements beforehand just to prolong the suspense, ending with, "And if you don't like your team...keep it to yourself" and a grin.

As it happened, I did like my team, which turned out to be an accurate impression because Western Canada Team 2 came home with gold in the championship final. I wore mine all of Saturday evening.

The building they had slated for quizzing was supposed to be done in October 2007. It wasn't. It wasn't done in April 2009, either. But they moved the pallets of drywall and swept the plywood floors and added a couple pairs of floodlights, and really, as long as you can sit at a table and say, "Question number one," who cares? One of the rooms also boasted the location of a furnace directly behind the quizmaster, resulting in many instances of, "Okay, you need to come closer to the table" and "I can't hear you when you look at the floor and talk" and "Enunciate, please!"

Do I sound negative so far? Because I loved it, all of it, and the addition of a trampoline (I'm the one whose head and shoulders are missing. You needed four spotters to be allowed to jump, and that's why) and foosball and many epic games of Dutch Blitz completed the awesomeness.

Oh yeah, and then there was the quizzing.





Listen for the clickers in the first one! That's everyone finding the triggers in their seats and clicking them off juuuust barely so that they can click on again to jump, for those of you who are uneducated.

There were four districts that participated in the meet - Canada Midwest (CMD), Western Canada (us - WCD), Pacific Northwest (PNW) and Rocky Mountain - and sixteen teams (of four or five people each) and seventy quizzers. After the five preliminary quizzes, the top six teams got a bye into the Championship round, the nine below them quizzed off with each other in an XYZ round to see which three of them also went into Championship, and the rest were bumped down into Consolation. After those quizzes, my team (WCD 2) was fourth. All but one of the five WCD teams made it into in the Championship round, and in addition, the three teams that made it into the Championship final were WCD 1, WCD 2, and WCD 3. How's that for being hospitable? We host the meet and crush the competition. Bwaha. As previously mentioned, WCD 2 won, and I answered an interrogative in the final. "We are un-" Unworthy servants. (Luke 17:10.) I was really proud of that question.

As for individual scores, 5 of the top 10 quizzers were from WCD. I placed 20th - in fact, I was one of four people who tied for 19th place, tie broken by errors. That's a huge improvement on last year, when I was 62nd out of 66 quizzers.

Basically, I want to go back and do everything again. Quizzing = awesomeness.


"My name is Grace Ajele, and I live for boys and quizzing. That is all."