And some say in ice.

Of the two, it really doesn't matter which you pick, because both are nightmares, which will suffice.

So far, this has been the season of the HellTour, where one option will take you a really long time, the other will take you just as long but you'll also get to waste minutes switching to it, and sometimes you even get to do both. 'Get lucky and you'll be gone in five minutes' options seem to be scarce. At least on this last leg, local help wasn't really available, possibly because every single local was sitting at one branch having a good old-fashioned drunk-off. (Everyone wins, at least until the next morning.)

Mental tasks aren't incredibly common on the Detour legs right now. You can drag coffins or you can lift car shells. You can march the streets looking for plain English or you can have two tons of wood collapse across your shins. Next up, you can have a prison term in a stalag or a gulag, but at least it's your choice.

And that brings us to the placement of the U-Turn. Is it just a little bit possible that any team who got hit with it would have been out of the Race? Those who did the shutters seemed to universally struggle in finding the house: even if the wood stacking was completed quickly, the victimized team might have lost an hour in trying to locate their work site. And if you did the shutters first and lost time there -- well, we all saw the chaos with the wood walls: no guarantee of a fast finish, plus that's the sort of task which has an absolute minimum completion time attached to it. First interview question: 'How long was everyone there for?' I'm guessing no one got out in less than ninety minutes. Hit the teams with a combination of tasks like that, and a U-turn could take out anyone with a tightly-bunched group.

Kind of makes you wonder what's waiting up ahead...

Other than butt blurs. That's a Roadblock.

• RE: Some say the Detour will end in fire...,qwertypie, 03:04 PM, 03-10-09

I was surprised that they did not couple a blind U-turn with a non-elim round (just for the drama in the next few eps). I guess I should be pleased that they weren't that obvious