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How the hell did you two meet?
Amanda: Chris and I met at a bar called Guitars and Cadillacs in Lincoln, NE. It is closed down now, and it pretty much sucked then, but I was 20 and you had to be 18 to get in so I could go and dance. The first time I was there I met Mr. Garry and we started hanging since then. If I remember correctly he called me the very next day which is different then how they reccommend doing it in "Swingers". And just since you readers are confused, it is not just a country bar, they played booty music too.

Chris: On Thursday nights, Guitars had a deal where you like paid $3 bucks to get in and then you could get wines, wells, and draws for a quarter. It was good times. That particular night, me and the fellas got there pretty early and just started powering-down booze. Ordering 4 drinks each, per round. By the time I made it out to the dance floor, I was well under way. I got up on this stage thing and started shaking what my mama gave me. And the next thing I know, I'm sandwiched between two chicks. Eventually I focused all my attention on the cuter one. She was a goofy little chick with glasses and a bob haircut. But we had some kind of weird connection, so I had to get her number. After calling her the next day (yeah, not how Swingers says to do it) we were hardly ever apart for the next two months.


What do your parents' think of your potty mouths?
Amanda: Most people use the F-bomb sometimes, just not on CBS television. Some people still aren't excepting of my action of words, but most people think that it was funny. My parents thought it was silly.

Chris: I'm sure mom wasn't enthused about it, but I think she understood that's just kinda how we roll. She's heard us cuss a lot before. Just not on TV.


What was the best part of the entire AR experience?
Amanda: I loved going down the Olympic ski jump on the rubber raft with those crazy Italians steering on the back and I loved being on the canals in the gondolas. I loved meeting all of the racers also.

Chris: It's really hard to pick one thing. It's all so exciting and was a constant adrenaline rush. The people we met will be friends for life and the memories will always be special. Even getting axed on the 2nd leg and going to Lisbon didn't suck. The whole thing was very cool. But I'd have to agree with Amanda that the snow raft was the most fun thing we did. That shit was steep y'all.


Had you guys ever applied for TAR before?
Amanda: We applied for Season 4 and we were on Season 4. That is it.

Chris: I tried to get her to apply for season 2 (which they were taking applications for before season 1 even aired) but Amanda decided there was no way in hell she could do such an extreme thing. After watching a couple seasons, she was hooked and changed her mind about applying. We fought at like every point of the application process (getting passports, filling out the paperwork, making the tape, going to the semis in Chicago, etc) and came close to saying "fuck it" several times. But for some reason we kept moving along. Casting dug our shit and asked us to fly around the fucking world. As you well know, we accepted their offer.


How did Amanda manage to end up in the driver's seat at Dodger Stadium?
Amanda: I was the one that drove because I cannot read maps and that is just what we decided would happen as long as the car was not stick shift.

Chris: And while we were standing on the field at Dodger Stadium, I noticed where our bags were in the line-up and saw the cars waiting in the parking lot. I whispered to Amanda that she needed to haul ass to the bags, read the clue and then bust-it out to the car, jump into the driver's seat and get situated. I told her that I would carry all of our baggage so she'd be able to run faster. Since we had no idea what fucking area of LA we were in, we had to make sure to get out fast and into a pack of cars that knew what was up.

Unfortunately, even without the bags, Amanda's little legs weren't very fast and I got to the car, loaded the bags, and was in before she was ready to go. We ended up being the second to last team to leave the lot, only in front of Tian and Jaree (who had rear door troubles). But I had a lot of faith in Amanda's driving ability, she's aggressive and skillful. And after seeing production's helicopter, getting into the carpool lane, and catching a couple well-placed signs, we had passed a crapload of teams and were out towards the front of the pack. I mean shit, we got to the airport tied for second with two other teams. That rocks out. Even if the car was a stick, Amanda could have drove. We practiced a bit before leaving and she was pretty good. We thought having two aggressive drivers, who were pretty much interchangeable, would be an advantage. Amanda's map reading was not to our advantage, but only because she hates doing it. She can read a map better than Guido Bill can.


How come you guys just followed Millie and Chuck the whole time?
Amanda: Editing makes you believe things that the show wants you to believe.

Chris: Yeah, that was lame that the editors did us like that. We helped Chuck and Millie just as much as they helped us, but they didn't show any of it. They were lost in Milan (1st leg) and we took them straight to the clue box. You can see in the episode, Millie says "C'mon Chuck, they're waiting for us" at the cluebox. We're the "us". The plan after that was to break up and each team search a separate half of the Galleria for bus tickets. It just so happens that the 2am and 6am bus tickets were in the half they searched. And we had the 4am half. If the responsibilities had been flipped, we would have been showing them the 2am ticket.

On the mountain in Cortina, it showed Millie telling us that we needed to get a cab, when in fact that audio was of her telling Josh. When we came down off the ski lift, Chillie was still trying to figure out how to get back into Cortina. When we got there, we all collaborated on the plan and decided that waiting for a bus would take too long and I went to the ticket booth lady and had her call us cabs. While waiting for the cabs, Josh and Steve came down and we told them to get a taxi. On our way into town, our cab driver was much faster, kept making fun of the old guy Chillie had, and kept trying to lose him. But we insisted that he not lose their cab, so that the old guy didn't drop them off at the wrong place. Their guy drove so slow that we barely had to wait for Josh and Steve once we got to the Hotel LaJadira.

It really seemed like the whole plan was to make us not look so smart. Everything from the CBS web site bios to the footage they chose of us. The web site outlined just about every team's educational background and went to the trouble of mentioning that Kelly (or maybe it was Tian) took a few semesters of Community College. But they failed to mention that I had a Bachelors or that Amanda had spent several years at a major University. I guess that's all that goes into creating a couple from South Dakota for TV.


How'd it feel to come in first in that initial leg?
Amanda: Exhilerating. First place is always the bomb, and last place always sucks.

Chris: Uh yeah, first place barely sucked. We had planned on coming in first a bunch more times, but we didn't exactly have a shitload of chances at that little goal. At least we're able to say we finished in first. That's something a lot of TAR teams cannot claim.


Obviously you guys suck and lost, what would you have done differently?
Amanda: I would have gone into the masquerade ball. I may have been hallucinating hours earlier on the streets of Venice, but I wasn't not sleeping standing up with my head against the wall like Chris was. We were both everything deprived though and I am happy that neither of us died or killed each other.

Chris: As far as something that would have had an immediate, visible impact in our outcome, I agree with Amanda. Send her into the ball. I wasn't in good shape at that point. Leaving from the pit stop first (the night before) we were going on being awake for 18 hours by the time the Roadblock opened. I hadn't slept a whole lot (that entire week) and I was still getting over a case of food poisoning that I came down with a day before the starting line. So she likely would have been in better shape than me, but at the time she didn't want the pressure on her. Also if she would have gone in, I would have been plotting our route on the map while she did her thing. That's not how it went though. Shit, if I would have seen the staircase on my first trip into the Masked Ball, we wouldn't be talking about this right now. As far as an overall change, we'd have been a lot more aggressive. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with a $million bucks at the end. You gotta sell-it-out.


What the hell made you think a 5-team alliance was a good idea?
Amanda: We got into an alliance with the other teams because they all seemed (and turned out to be) cool people that were nice and wanted to have a good time and wanted to help each other. Plus it just made sense for we had been with each other for the first night in Milan and it just seemed to happen. Plus why the fuck not?

Chris: Yeah, it kinda got complicated. I had said something about working together to Steve & Dave and Josh & Steve and then really got along well with Chuck & Millie. So it was either work separately with each group and not tell the other, or bring them all together into one huge alliance. After realizing that many of the other teams considered themselves above talking to the rest of us, the "one big alliance" seemed like a better idea. Cuz really we were all teams who just wanted to have a good time and make it to the end of the race. And who wants to be on some long train ride with a bunch of assy people? We liked the Supremes too and wanted them on our side, but they seemed content to float. If we had to do it over we'd do an alliance with just one other team and be pricks to everyone else.


How did you manage to keep from thinking about how much of an absolute fucking loser you are, while in Lisbon, Portugal?
Amanda: I drank a beer called SuperBock often. It was yummy and also the shit. We went to the Columbo Mall a lot and there we went to a video game arcade where we spent a lot of money. We slept and ate and were merry. We shopped and I could never find pants besides ones that were made for a 6 foot tall woman that enjoyed having camel toe.

Chris: The Columbo Mall was the shit. We went and played this camel racing game all the time and ate a friggin' metric ton of gelato.. buffet-style. Shopping for clothes was good times too. They have an assload of cool and cheap stuff over there. But the pants thing (for guys) is much like Amanda said. Portuguese dudes must not have much in the "junk" department, because the crotches were like 1 inch deep. My stuff was all up in my throat. We also drank a whole lot, ate some kick-ass French toast, played Scrabble and did all sorts of touristy shit too. It was lots of fun and if I could live forever like that, I certainly would. And Sequester will always make better TV than the actual race. But I would have liked to have broken the rules a bit and ventured out more. I feel robbed that we were close to so many things and didn't have the opportunity to get out on our own and see them. We'd have had Eurail Passes and been in like freaking Greece.


Sequester couldn't have sucked all that much, what is your fondest recollection or is it all a drunken blur?
Amanda: Traveling around with our new racer friends was my favorite memory. We went to this beautiful little cafe on a river and we had yummy tomato soup with eggs in it on our way to the Castle George something another. I liked going to the flea market with Steve Cottingham and watching him look for antique pee pots and then finding them and trying to talk the local vendors down in cost. I liked walking and riding the metro to all of the places we went and I liked being somewhere that nobody knew where was. It was like we disappeared and that was enjoyable. Our family had no idea where we were and the people in Lisbon had no idea who we were for we had "secret identities" and it was all very surreal and relaxing and free and nothing was expected of us.

Chris: It was all really good times. There was one night where we went out after dinner and met up with a huge group of Danish students (a majority of them were very hot blonde chicks) at some random bar. The stories from that night are priceless. There was also one other time when Josh, Amanda, and I went to some happy hour thing the hotel put on. They'd bring you crazy-ass drinks and these foofy little appetizers. One of the appetizers was pretty freaking nasty so I dared Amanda to eat it and drink a cupful of this weird sauce as a chaser. She did it, but then I fucked her over because I played the "we didn't shake on it" card. But she obviously wanted my 5 Euros pretty bad because she did it again anyway, after we shook on it of course.

We also went to this crazy Casino a couple times and it was hard to figure out what the fucking buttons on the video poker machine said. Or how to get the bitch to pay out for that matter. And there's tons of stories we could tell about the lesbian bar we kept going to. I think we only found out it was such, after like the third time we went in there. And there are countless hotel lobby stories. Shit involving Scrabble, Cindy 1 through 6, glass upon glass of SuperBock, grilled cheese sandwiches, Josh and Geez's lame Race predictions, a failed game of Trivial Pursuit, the Spanish soccer team, random sightings of Russell, betting on Taxis, hacked-off old bartenders, and much more. It was three and a half weeks of nuttyness.


If by some miracle, or if all the other teams were maimed by penguins in a strange "TAR at the Zoo" PR stunt, would you do an ASTAR if they asked?
Amanda: Fuck Yeah.

Chris: Ummm...let me think about it. Nah. I really don't think I would. Err wait, you mean like do the race AGAIN? Oh shit-ch-yes. If they called right this second, they wouldn't be able to finish the phone call before I'd be at the airport waiting for the plane ticket.


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