"Amazing Race:" It's a Blast
"Amazing Race" brought back one of the most difficult challenges of previous seasons Sunday night- finding a flag in a hay bale - and it almost cost father and son team Matt and Gary the game.
Fortunately for them, it wasn't an elimination leg and they can continue the race, though their penalty for coming last will be an extra task that only they have to perform next week.
The two fell behind early in the game, having missed the first flight from the Netherlands to Sweden and a train from the airport to a waterside amusment park, where the next task took place. By the time they got to the hay field and the final task, they were last. Their fate was sealed when the other four teams all found their flags, but the two gamely continued their hunt, with Gary rolling out hay bales and Matt shouting encouragement until they found success.
Photos: "Amazing Race" Season 15
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Back in Season 6, one team spent eight hours searching hay bales for flags and never did find one. This time, it was seven large, brightly colored flags eams were looking for in more than 150 human-sized hay bales. It was also a roadblock - a task just one team member had to perform.
The leaders, brother Sam and Dan, with dating couple Meghan and Cheyne just behind, blew their early leads when they spent hours unrolling and searching through the bales. Dan, who had seen the task in the previous race, kept urging Sam, who was doing the hefty unrolling, not to search so closely, but rather keep unrolling. His message: the needle would be obvious as bales unrolled.
But Sam wasm't talking any advice from the sidelines and the two got into several heated exchanges. In the end they were fourth to arrive at the pit stop.
It was there that Dan broke down in tears, expressing remorse over the way he had shouted at his brother while Sam was working so hard.
Cheyne also let his partner do the heavy lifting - literally - and she finally broke down in tears after more than hour of unrolling hay bales.
Luck smiled on the Harlem Globetrotters this episode, perhaps because it was Flight Time's birthday. Big Easy did the unrolling and after what seemed like just a few hay bales, found the first flag and two skipped off to the pit stop. They won a trip to Turks and Caicos for coming in first.
Married couple Brian and Erika also had some luck in finding the flag relatively quickly, coming in third, just behind Meghan and Cheyne.
In addition to the dreaded hay stack task, the teams had to ride the Frit Fall, a fairly tall drop tower in an amusement park, while searching for an arrow that would lead them to the next clue, win a Travelocity gnome in a ring toss and, in a salute to Alfred Nobel, build a bunker so they could safely explode dynamite.