And We're Back!

The Iron Raven has lived in California for the past year.

Test, test... is this thing on?  Looks like it... OK...

Hello friends, family, and followers, welcome to the blog for Team Bloody, Smoking, and Burning in our quest to bring back the big prize again in the third Great America Race, now called the Quest for the Iron Raven!  This year's race will take us from Pittsburgh to Chicago, and it starts this Saturday, August 10.

Unfortunately, due to his involvement with some other thing, Todd isn't joining us this year (hence the removal of "Boneless" from the team name), but we've got the same group of four that finished the race last year (Rich, Jonathan, Dan, and Wei-Hwa).  Should be a great time and we're looking forward to sharing it with you.

One minor change this year to be aware of is that last year we kept the blog private until the race was over, in case there might be spoilers for the other teams, but this year, we are going public from the start!  This makes the access management much easier on us, and allows people to follow using their favorite RSS reader if they so desire.  It also means we need to avoid spoilers, which last year turned out to not be an issue anyway.

We've already solved the starter puzzle, which came out yesterday, but just in case the other teams haven't solved it yet, I'll leave that for another post in a couple days.

Finally, we'd love to know if you are planning on following along with us this year, so if you plan to be along for the ride, please sound off in the comments of this post!

That's all for now, bring on the race!

Edit:  A picture of the Raven on the scale, to address a question from the comments...

The Iron Raven weighs 3 lb, 12.56 oz