The Esquire Interview, Part Two

When we left our heroine, Rob and Brennan had just told her that they actually spent some QT with Frank and Margarita. Now, back to the interview, where the loathing of lids begins apace�

Miss Alli: Hmmm. Okay, wait...I've lost my place in my notes.

Rob: That's not good.

Miss Alli: No, that's okay. We'll just go to our "fashion" section.

Rob: Ohhhh, boy.

Miss Alli: All right. What. Is. With. The. Hats?

Rob: The hats are awesome.

Miss Alli: The hats are... [groan of pain]

Rob: I don't understand this entire debate. Those are our Tilly hats, and they keep us safe and dry and warm and we love them.

Miss Alli: Those are your WHAT hats?

Brennan: The brand, they're Tilly. T-I-L-L-Y is the brand. [Note: I think it's actually "Tilley." Look here for a peek. You'll notice that once you get past the intro, the first page says, "Prepare your family for the unimaginable." No kidding. These hats float and come with a four-page owner's manual.] You know, what happened with those, we went shopping beforehand for all the stuff we needed, and we needed an all-weather hat. We needed a hat that was, when we're in the desert or someplace like that, it'll keep the sun off our necks, and off our faces, a brim that goes all around; we needed a hat that when we were someplace where it was raining, was waterproof and was going to keep the rain off our heads, and we needed a hat that was going to fold up really easily and fit in our backpack. And those things crumple up into nothingness, and then they come right back, too. And that's what the guy at the store recommended to us for kind of the all-purpose hat.

Miss Alli: And little did you know...

Rob: And little did we know what would become of that choice.

Brennan: I think I told you before, I had every intention, because I love the Indiana Jones movies, I had an Indiana Jones hat with me. But he got so crumpled in my backpack that I threw him away in Paris.

Miss Alli: A tragic, tragic decision.

Brennan: It was a tragic decision.

Rob: But I truly don't understand the debate, because every hat we ever wore, every piece of headgear was just perfect.

Miss Alli: Mm-hmm. [Rob laughs.] Well, my personal favorite -- I did enjoy -- in New York, I think it was at dinner on Friday night, I was sitting talking to you and Sars, and she said, "I don't understand what's with you and the hats." And I said, "Yeah, me neither, what IS with you and the hats?" And she goes [to me], "No, no -- what's with YOU and the hats?" [much laughing]

Brennan: I'll say the only one that I thought was really bad was Rob's orange hat in Alaska.

Rob: I love my red hat.

Brennan: I even said, "What the heck is that? Where did that come from?" I don't even remember him wearing it.

Rob: I love that red hat. It went with my red scarf.

Brennan: Where did you get it from?

Rob: That was one of the production hats.

Miss Alli: Production hats? Production gave you hats?

Rob: Well, they gave us cold-weather gear in Alaska.

Miss Alli: Ohhhh. I see. And they gave you that hat?

Rob: [low growl] Shut up. [lots of laughing] Yes, they did.

Miss Alli: I don't think they liked you.

Rob: Look here. My hats are impeccable.

Miss Alli: Your hats are impeccable? I don't know. I could go along with the -- the black knit hat, I could keep my breakfast down.

Rob: You know, I say all that tongue-in-cheek. Seriously, a lot of the hats, yeah, we know they don't look good every now and then, but they're functional, and that was more important to us during the course of the race.

Miss Alli: Hey, a girl's gotta have a gimmick, you know? Okay. So...talk to me about India.

Brennan: What about it?

Miss Alli: Hard?

Rob: Yeah, well...it's funny, we had one of our favorite moments of the race in India, but overall, it was just...it was just really, really, REALLY hard to deal with, considering the poverty, and you try and concentrate and play a game, and you want to win, and you're trying to win money, and it all kind of becomes a petty concern in the face of what you're seeing.

Miss Alli: Uh-huh...

Rob: And Brennan can tell you about -- we had just a, we did have a 48-hour layover at the palace, you know, the palace where we stayed after I did my angry bag-grabbing? We were there a couple extra days, and we got to hang out with the teams, and it was just great.

Brennan: They had problems with visas for the location, and that kept us there for an extra two days. And we just, you know, at that point, we were down to five teams, and everybody got to hang out and have fun, so that in particular was when we became very close with Kevin and Drew and Nancy and Emily. Those three teams kind of, we hung out a lot. [Here, Brennan asks Rob what noisy thing he's doing in the background, and Rob reports that he's putting the garbage out. No, really.] Anyway, that was when we really became close with those two teams. Because there's nothing you can do. You're staying there, you can't leave the pit stop -- that's one of the rules -- all you can do is hang out. We played cards, Kevin and I ate about thirty cheese omelets between the two of us...

Rob: Oh, yeah, you guys had omelets all the time...that's right.

Brennan: And it was just, it was a good time.

Miss Alli: So that was a good bonding moment.

Brennan: Good bonding moment. But at the same time, India was really hard. You know, because it's just culture shock. It's completely different than America. We always say that the scariest part of the trip was driving on the roads in India, because there's just -- it's just so crowded. It really is unbelievable, and even as much as they showed it on TV, it's still -- you just can't show it. You can't show that you've got people, bicycles, camels, elephants, cows, rickshaws, trucks, you know, cars, all kinds of stuff all over the roads, and you're trying to navigate through these, and at the same time, you want to go as fast as possible, you're always yelling at your cab driver to go faster, because you're trying to beat the other teams. And so you add that stress to the fact that, especially in the ride down to Agra at the Taj Mahal, you think you're going to be eliminated. You put those two things together, and I just remember thinking to myself, I just want to get out of here.

Miss Alli: So does it occur to you now, when you see yourselves on TV, that you spent a lot of time talking about being eliminated, for guys who won?

Brennan: [over a chuckle from Rob] I think that was another thing that they probably showed more for us, because it wasn't going to happen. I'm sure other teams said the same thing, but they just showed it for us, to make it almost -- so that people would be nervous, "maybe they're going to be eliminated," and then we never were.

Rob: They really did overplay that with us.

Brennan: There were a couple times -- there were three times when we thought there was a possibility that we might be eliminated.

Rob: A good possibility.

Brennan: The time that was the most was in Episode 7, when we were driving down to Agra. We really did think we were eliminated at that point. The other time was after our walkie-talkie incident. [In the fifth episode, charged with doing a task involving a walkie-talkie, Esquire got hosed by the fact that the walkie-talkie batteries had gone dead by the time they got there.]

Rob: [laughing] Walkie-talkie "incident."

Brennan: We knew we were in last place at that point, so when we got to the pit stop, we weren't sure if we were going to be last or not. We had a good idea that we weren't by the time we got to the camel Roadblock, because there were other route markers left, or...info packets. But then the last time was, believe it or not, in leg nine, when we finally won another leg. Such a long drive down there that we had no idea whether other teams had passed us, you know, what they had done to go from the tigers down there, and we thought -- we didn't think there was a great possibility, but we thought there was a slight possibility that we might be eliminated. So that's why, I remember when we walked into the temple, I say, "Well, there's no one here telling us we're eliminated," and we were so surprised that we were first.

Rob: That one...that one, not as much as the others. [Another discussion about something they're not sure whether they should talk about. They elect not to. Don't worry -- it doesn't sound like anything you would knock yourself out to hear.]

Miss Alli: Hmm. Oh, boy, this is a good question I have here. Do you think you would have moved even faster if you had had matching outfits? [they laugh] I shoulda cut that one out, huh?

Rob: I'll tell you, I don't know how the Guidos got all that stuff in those backpacks, it's just really amazing.

Miss Alli: What...the...

Brennan: It was just the bottomless...what did we call it? The Pocket Universe.

Rob: Yeah. They've got a Pocket Universe in their backpacks.

Miss Alli: [laughing] Well, that's -- and everything was always so clean! And ironed, and it looked...

Rob: Rolled and pressed!

Miss Alli: They were so...they were so clean! Remarkable! At least I thought it was remarkable. 'Cause a lot of the time with a lot of the rest of y'all, no offense, but it looked like you probably stunk.

Brennan: Yeah, right. Believe me, by the end of the race? It was when we were in Alaska -- that was the one place where we stayed where there was no place to shower, and I mean, you know, the musher's cabin, and that little bed and breakfast place, and...so you've got -- I had a thermal shirt on as the bottom layer, and so at times when we're running, like when we ran out to do the blanket-toss, you get sweaty at those points, and so you take all those clothes off, and you've got this sweaty shirt on underneath. By the time we got that thing to New York...you know, sometimes you smell people that have such bad B.O. that you're like, "How could you possibly get to that point?" It was at that point. I was embarrassed to be on the flight to Newark, because I was afraid the person sitting to me was gonna think, "Who the hell is this guy, and why does he smell so bad?"

Miss Alli: [laughing] Excellent. That turned out to be a better question than I thought. And actually, speaking of packing, if you had it to do all over again, would you take anything with you that you didn't take?

Rob: We would leave things behind that we originally took. We had this fantastic all-weather tent, we had these sleeping bags...

Miss Alli: You did?

Rob: And some family in Zambia right now is enjoying our tent. [chuckle] We ditched a lot of stuff along the way just to lighten the load after we saw how the game was working and that we weren't going to need it.

Miss Alli: So you ditched that stuff pretty early.

Rob: Yeah, very early.

Brennan: Yeah, you know, we've been asked that question before, and I have never thought of anything that I would take that we didn't take. I would take more SwainBrain shirts [Shameless! Plug! Alert!], because we got all this advice from the mountain man at the local sporting goods store that we should be taking synthetic clothes and not cotton, just because you don't know what situations you're going to be in, and in the end it didn't matter. I should have taken more cotton shirts.

Rob: There's Kevin and Drew with jeans and baseball caps, and here we are with all our tight Lycra and synthetic pants and shirts, and...[trails off laughing] But hey, I wouldn't change anything. We ended up winnin' the bitch.

Miss Alli: People who had a bad day that day were hosed for good. And people who had a good day that day were running up the last 500 feet.

Rob: Very true.

Miss Alli: And I think that goes with the other thing that sort of developed as my theory of the entire [race], which was that it wasn't so much that people won, as it was that people lost. And in order to win, you had to avoid losing.

Rob: Yeah. That's one of the things that the story editors and producers said all along was that up until the final couple legs, it's not a race to win, it's a race not to lose. All of a sudden, you switch gears at the end and it's a race to win among the final teams.

Brennan: And the truth is, if you look back at all the eliminations, you can pinpoint what happened for those teams to lose.

Miss Alli: Absolutely. Well, see, I was manipulated perfectly. Just as they intended. So, okay, this is -- I just wrote myself a note here that said, "How cool was that y'all caught up with Bill and Joe in Paris right before you ran through the sewer?"

Rob: Oh, right, that was Brennan's -- that was a great moment.

Miss Alli: I adored that.

Brennan: Well, that was really the first time -- besides them breaking the alliance, that was the first underhanded, dirty thing they had done to us, and that was the stupid little thing of going into the Pantheon, where they kind of slipped ahead of us.

Miss Alli: [dubiously] Oh, but now, see...well, I don't want to fight with you.

Brennan: But the truth is, a lot of people would say, "Hey, you guys walked past it, they had every right to do it." But the fact is, it saved them all of thirty seconds, and it pissed us off.

Miss Alli: Well, right, yes.

Brennan: So why would you do that? Why burn bridges when all you had to do was go, "Hey, guys, the entrance is over here." You know, to say, "Instead of saving our thirty seconds, we're going to not piss these other teams off." So when we got down there, and we ran, and we knew that they thought they knew Paris, and we just wanted to beat them so badly in there, that when we got there and I saw them standing there, and they're kind of looking...and at first I stood to them, and I'm like, "They don't even see me standing here," so that's why when they turned and looked at me, I just went..."Hello."

Miss Alli: Oh, no, they totally didn't see you. That was what made it such a wonderful shot. So, what moments do you love from the show? Not necessarily things that were enjoyable at the time, but what made great TV?

Brennan: Ah, that's a good question.

Miss Alli: Ha!

Rob: Yeah, that's one that requires a little bit of thought. Moments that made great TV...

Miss Alli: 'Cause I personally...you couldn't have written that Guido/Momily episode.

Rob: Right. I agree with that. I mean, that's definitely -- that's not a moment that we liked, because it saw the end of Nancy and Emily, but you're right about that, it did make for good dramatic television.

Miss Alli: And on my birthday, too.

Brennan: Oh, yeah?

Miss Alli: Broke my heart.

Brennan: Oh, man.

Rob: I mean, and obviously the whole Lenny and Karyn debacle was good television. But it was certainly ugly to witness.

Miss Alli: Hee hee hee..."ugly to witness," huh?

Rob: Yes, indeed.

Brennan: And, you know, I think for us, I really think the last episode was absolutely amazing. You know, it made for good television, but they did such a great job of putting it together, that -- I mean, we knew, obviously, we knew what was going to happen, we knew it was going to be close, we knew it was going to be a good episode, but I think both of us were really surprised at just how good it actually was.

Rob: Aw, the music...

Miss Alli: At the end, you mean?

Rob: The music just made it. The music was just great.

Miss Alli: Yeah. It was a nice touch. It was a good episode. We enjoyed it in the bar!

Rob: Yes, indeed. And what a fun time we had at TARcon!

Miss Alli: Lots of yelling.

Brennan: Yeah, from what you could hear, right, in the bar?

Miss Alli: Oh, my gosh, I couldn't tell at all. I really did not see any of that episode at the time. I mean, I saw, like I said in the recap, I saw little pieces of things, I saw you throwing the batteries on the ground, which I had no idea what that was, I was like, "What the heck? What are they doing?" And then people were talking about, when you had the cell phone, people were saying, "Oh, they're going to get in trouble for that, can't do that, cell phone, it's illegal..." And I was like, "What? What? What?"

Rob: That's funny that people picked up on that so much.

Brennan: The only thing you couldn't do was call people you know...we probably used a cell phone four or five times throughout the whole race. But they only showed it that once. That was kind of our M.O. with when we'd get on trains and stuff, we'd find people whose cell phone we could borrow, and then call ahead for a cab.

Rob: Yeah, we were always trying to talk to people during the course of the race. That was a huge benefit to us.