Snake River Classic, a regional tournament for Teen Bible Quiz. It is a yearly tournament hosted in Meridian, Idaho. Teams from Montana, Oregon, Washington, and, of course, Idaho get together and expand their quizzing experience. It’s an awesome place to fellowship with other outside the district level.

I had the opportunity to go as a quizzer not last year, but the year before and I really enjoyed the whole experience. Unfortunately the pressures of school and work didn’t allow me to attend the next year (last year) which I was rather disappointed with. This year I decided to put aside those lame reasons and just go!

  

This year I’ve taken upon more responsibilities as fitting of a coach and worked with Evan, our head coach, in getting all our details settled. It was a good experience that has helped opened my eyes moreso in the administrative side of things. Also, watching coaches from other teams I’ve found a lot that I can improve in. Time to further make the transition from a former quizzer reliving his "glory days" to a coach who helps other gain theirs. That’s actually been something that I’ve been thinking about for a while. Quiz is a ministry that I’ve been called to participate in and, as with everything else, is something that I need to work at to the best of my ability.

But I digress.

The preparation for Snake River was a long and tedious one wrought with many set backs and uncertainties. We weren’t sure of whether we’d get our vehicle request and even if we got it, the passes have been hectic. The Department of Transportation has been open and closing them doing avalanche control. We’ve received an abnormal amount of snow and blizzard watches have been running for a while now. Then there was the concern that even if the pass was open, it would be too unsafe to travel. Quizzers ended up canceling at the last moment due to sickness and other various reasons. The night before we were talking about calling the whole thing off but thankfully we decided to go along and make our vie to get there.

 

As I half-joked, we detoured through Astoria to get to Idaho instead of risking getting caught up in the passes. We actually didn’t go so far west as to go through Astoria but we did take I5 down to Portland and then I84 east into Boise traveling along the Columbia River. We saw some snow and ice as we traveled in the higher regions and the shuttle was frigid but the route was an excellent choice. I’m rather glad we went that way even if safety wasn’t an issue. It was a very beautiful way to travel.

 

Our first day of quizzing was a nice long one where we quizzed against every team there for a total of twelve rounds. We got to quiz against many cool teams that we hadn’t seen in a while but we definitely were tired at the end. There was decent amount of snow on the ground which led to epic snowball fights in between rounds. Having my glasses repeatedly launched from my face, I’m thinking that it may be time soon to acquire new. After the day’s quizzing, we went to Johnny Rocket’s for dinner. Johnny’s is a nice sit down burger joint that played oldies. They played several of our (and by our, I mean moreso Evan’s. My beloved Journey was too late for their music period) requests. It was pretty much awesome. Perhaps next year I’ll take their Eat Large or Go Home challenge…

The next day was a shorter one as the divisions were split in two. We ended up in the A2 division which was more then fine by me. The only disappointing part of that was that all the teams in that division were from Washington so we didn’t get to quiz against new faces then. Oh well. It was still really fun. In the end we took fifth and fourth place in our division. Julie’s team almost took second as it was a three-way tie for that spot. Anna took home a trophy for 5th place individual high which was pretty exciting as well. After the awards ceremony we immediately jetted off to make our way home. We made excellent time to arriving an hour or so ahead of our anticipated arrival time.

Snake River was a blast. It was full of many a memorable moment. It definitely justified my long anticipation for the event and was worth my mad dash and near collapse to get all my schoolwork accomplished after. Snake River is going to go down in the annals of awesomeness.

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