May the Best Turtle Win

The annual turtle races. It sounded good when I first saw it advertised. We've watched them in the past, but never participated. I told my kids this year was the year. They could collect, keep, paint, and train turtles for the big annual turtle races.

What was I thinking???? 

We found turtles all right, but keeping them was a different story. We caught some pretty fast turtles, but they turned out to be regular Houdinis!!!! Escape artists they were. All of them. It's hard to race your really fast turtle if you can't keep it penned up until the race. We even tried to bribe them to stay with us by giving them fresh fruits and vegetables. No luck. 

We finally took ONE turtle to my sister who had a turtle proof cage. That seemed to do the trick. On the day of the race we took our ONE turtle and two borrowed ones to town in a box. The turtles really didn't like the small box and tried their Houdini moves to get out. This time we won. The turtles stayed in the box. Good thing because three turtles in a box stinks up a mini van pretty bad. I can't imagine what they would have done out of the box...

We got to the race sight to find that there were over 130 turtles to race. This was an event! I would have brought my lawn chair and my supper if I had known. Because there are so many turtles they do the race in heats. If your turtle comes in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd you move on to the next heat. Do you know how long it takes to race that MANY turtles in that MANY heats!!??? I do. We had one turtle that was exceptionally fast and kept WINNING!!! After almost an hour of watching turtles run in circles, I started hoping our turtle would SLOW DOWN and lose. (Don't tell my child I said that.) 

Then they brought it out. The cute little girl with the genormous (I made that word up.) water turtle. She was wearing gloves and desperately trying to hold the turtle as far away from her body as possible. Probably because the turtle was trying to desperately swim through the air with motions that looked like it might attack at any moment. The turtle was 4 times the size of any other turtle there and would barely fit in the starting box. As soon as they lifted the box, he was off to look for water. In a desperate," I don't like to be on land" fashion. The problem was there was no water to be found, so it went straight into the crowd. There were several hundred people there and I think they were almost all scared of the poor harmless (very large) water turtle swimming across land. People started backing up as he entered the crowd, and shrieking like maybe a bear was after them. Kinda reminded me of my bird days. I laughed. It was the most comical thing that happened at the whole SLOW race! 

The really large, scary water turtle ended up beating our turtle in the last heat. It was ok, except because I had been there so long, it would have been nice to have something to show for our time. 

The kids are already planning next year's race. I'm thinking it sounds like a great daddy/child date!