what the heck?

That’s what Delores kept telling us when we chatted with her on the bike path today. Today’s sweep challenge was to take the best picture with a local. I didn’t realize at the beginning of the morning how seriously I would take this challenge. We stopped Delores on the path as she was the first person we saw. Our photo was pretty standard and boring with her, but she had interesting things to tell us about divorce.

Shortly after, Kira and I broke off from the rest of the group and began to brainstorm the best possible photo situations with locals. Like what we would do if we found a local cop, mostly unrealistic things since we were on a bike path for 50 miles. As people approached us, we slowed and creeper stared at them, whispering if they were what we were looking for. Finally we realized that if we were going to be balers in this competition, we were going to have to let go of the shyness and just ask random people to do crazy weird things. And so it began. Below is the sequence of photos that we took today. We made it happen.

We only had 4 rejections, which were as follows:

1. young boy on a riding lawnmower – to his mother: be proud. He did not talk to strangers. In fact we made him so uncomfortable we felt that we were doing something wrong.
2. Truck driver who stopped near the bike path. He said he couldn’t stop since he was on the clock. We agreed that if we had been selling sex his answer would have been different.
3. I told a couple on the bike trail we were doing a ride for charity, and would they mind doing a pyramid with us. The woman told us she was not reliable in these kinds of situations. But he said he knew we could find someone. What?
4. Along the trail we also met what we think was a shirtless convict. He did not want “pictures of him all over the internet”. I wanted to tell him not to flatter himself, but we’re pretty sure he literally JUST escaped from the big house, so felt it was unnecessary.

But the major conclusion on the day is that a lot of people on bike paths in Minnesota will do pretty much anything you ask.

Kristen/Dolores/Kira before we started getting bold

Nick spraying me with a hose. He was very excited/weirded out by this request.

The man on the left actually said to Kira, "I'm just going to pretend you aren't here".

We found these 2 young men bikers on the path who actually got down on all 4's to be our "bikes" for this shot. This won us a prize in the competition. Giggles.

This is Jeff - he was rollerblading and stopped to smell the flowers. We got points because lots of peeps recognized him.

Kira just eating a cloud taco.

We call this jelly monster. The shop owner (forget his name) threw in the garlic for added effect. This was my favorite.

Outside above convenience store, this woman let me pretend to steal her car. She even put down her groceries so it would look "more real".

Getting run over by shirtless old biker man.

This man agreed to shut me in his trunk. This was when we realized we could get ourselves killed if we went too far.

Woman in the middle was not amused. But she had pretty flowers.

Mark and I boxing.

again and he is wearing Kira's gloves.

The guy on the right was art directing this one. not too sure, but he made me cross the street to take the pic.

ambulance men

I asked them to pretend to be my parents.

These equestrian women were stoked to partake, and even donated $35!

mail scan

the finale: pies in the face...though we had to help them...it was as if these kids were in walking comas. the man we asked to do it couldn't get permission from his wife.