The weekend of Journey Into the Night had to be the busiest weekend of the year for me so far, but I wasn't about to let this event pass me by. Chasing? Competitiveness? Running amok in the streets? Urban exploration? All up my alley. Heck, I even passed on attending the anarchist Black Flag, Black Tie event to do this.

Before the journey started, a large number of us from Team Foecakes gathered together for some food (carbs!) and drink to get us prepared. As the participants gathered for the journey in Wicker Park, our team had swelled to close to 20 people. When the maps were handed out, we quickly put together a plan to get to the first checkpoint. Many of us had lived in that neighborhood for years, and so we knew the best routes and shortcuts. We were excessively paranoid of chasers, so we planned an indirect route that could still get us there quickly. We figured going by foot would be faster and safer then taking the train, which might be guarded, though we timed the trains as Dax made his speeches just to make sure.

As soon as the game started, we were off, sprinting towards Milwaukee Ave., cutting through the defunct Burger King drive-thru, and recklessly running through traffic to cross the street. I was already worried about running into chasers (or "Reds," as we called them), so I took every turn widely, expecting them to be lurking around every corner. We tried to move fast as we cut through various side streets, alleys, and then Pulaski Park, but the size of our group was slowing us down. We knew that the Division St. viaduct was a chokepoint, a potential trap zone that smart Reds might be guarding, so we wisely opted to ease back and let another team take the underpass first. There were no Reds in sight, however, so we quickly darted across Division en masse, right behind an unmarked police car, entered the safe zone, and made the first checkpoint. Success! I was too eager to move on to really enjoy the costumes and the cupcakes, and before long we had our mob on its way down Elston.

Right at the edge of the Elston safe zone, we spotted our first Red -- the dreaded Caped Bicycle Girl. We could see her pursuing a team that was ahead of us, which was unfortunately the direction we wanted to go. Little Monk pointed out an alternate route on the map, but when we approached it looked like a possible dead end. We sent LM off to quickly scout it out, which seemed to take too long. The Bicycle Girl had disappeared from sight, so it looked like we had an opening, and some of us charged ahead, opting to take it. That was the first split in our group, knocking us down to a dozen or so, as the rest followed Little Monk instead.

Expecting the Bicycle Girl to descend on us at any moment, a sudden scream from behind us sent our whole group running in a panic. We regrouped, steeled our courage, and plodded onwards towards the second checkpoint. We opted to approach the Grand intersection -- another potential guarded chokepoint -- from Halsted rather than Milwaukee. As we approached the intersection, however, we spotted a suspicious group of people huddling on the corner, but were unable to make out if they had armbands. We snuck across to the east side of Halsted, creeping low behind parked cars, and they didn't seem to see us. Then two of them began walking north, passing us on the west side of the street, and we could clearly see they were Reds! We snuck ahead a bit more and realized that another Red was still waiting at the intersection -- a trap! He suddenly ran across the street, flushing us out. Some of our group ran towards the other two Reds and were caught. I ran straight on, with the lone Red right on my heels for a moment, before he veered off and pursued a slower teammate. I didn't stop running for two blocks, paranoid that I would be pursued at any moment. I was on my own. I didn't know it at the time, but at least 3 members of my team had been caught.

I started to work my way back towards Checkpoint 2, crossing Grand, when I spotted a survivor from my team -- with 3 Reds in hot pursuit! Even worse, 2 of them were former teammates. They spotted me, so I bolted, and they didn't pursue. I ran across another lone team member -- who nearly ran from me when he couldn't see my armband right away,and we hooked back up. My team had gone from 20 to 2. The game suddenly seemed much harder! I knew it was going to be a long challenge to get to the end without being caught.

We originally struck out for the first bonus checkpoint, but a high concentration of Reds sent us back towards Checkpoint 2. We checked in there, and headed south, since we knew there were many Reds to the north and east. Almost right away we stumbled across train tracks, which were the perfect isolated avenue to take downtown. We eventually worked our way across the river and approached checkpoint 3 from the south. Along the way, I started receiving taunting text message from my former teammates-turned-Reds, who informed me there was a message waiting for me at checkpoint 4.

We took the State St. bridge, on high alert for Reds, and shortly after spotted someone suspiciously loitering with an armband. On closer inspection, he was a Blue, so we decided to follow him, using him as bait to flush out any Reds. To our surprise, he entered the Trump Tower. We followed, only to find that we couldn't access the elevators -- but we met the Blue and gained a new companion, aka Motis. The three of us found an isolated construction walkway that took us to a Michigan avenue building, just south and above the third checkpoint. Unfortunately, Michigan Ave. was crawling with Reds -- we spotted at least 8. We waited it out, and eventually made a lunge for it, hitting the stairs and the safe zone. We took the opportunity to have a beer and red bull at the Billy Goat as we plotted our future path.

We knew there were Reds all around the area, so when we left we booked west and over to the river. We tried and failed to access the river walkway, so we just cut through until we reached the Clark & Lake el stop. From there it was a quick and safe ride to checkpoint 4, where we were greeted with a white tower, chanting, and the graffiti'd words "sprite jerkface." We added a "fuck yeah!" to the tower of babel, quickly jumped on the el again, and headed towards checkpoint 5.

Since the train tracks had worked so well for us before, we decided to try this route again, unfortunately forgetting that Roosevelt Road -- the safe zone we need to reach -- was elevated. So as we headed down, paralleling Wells St., we reached the underside of Roosevelt Road, with no way to climb up. We started the trek around to the east end of the bridge, but as we approached, we spotted a group of Reds loitering near the intersection. We realized that we had no way around them, so we turned to Plan B: breaking and entering.

There happens to be a large construction site next to Roosevelt Rd., with the framework of a multi-story building that seemed to be connected to the elevated road. So we crawled under a fence and scouted around the brightly-lit interior for a way to climb up, desperately hoping we didn't run across any guards or dogs. They probably wouldn't take well to three suspicious intruders dressed in black. We eventually found some scaffolding that got us to a second level, and from there it was a lot more work to find a wooden staircase to the third level -- all while we were lit and in view of the traffic on the road. From there it was a taller and scarier ladder to get the fourth level, which actually took us slightly above the road, but kept us more hidden from traffic. As we approached the area where the building construction connected to the road, it seemed like it would just be a simple matter of rolling under a guardrail and jumping down a foot or so to the bridge. As Motis rolled under the rail and onto the edge, however, he discovered just in time that there was actually a two-foot gap between the building and the bridge! Luckily he avoided the fall, and we all made the treacherous jump onto the bridge. Success! We had made it to the safe zone.

(Disclaimer: All of the above talk of illegal trespassing is pure fiction. I'm just embellishing my story to make it more interesting, of course. I would never, ever, ever do something so irresponsible and dangerous. Everyone here is an upstanding and law-abiding citizen. Honest, Officer!)

From there it was a short jaunt to the White palace and checkpoint 5, twittering updates along the way, where we encountered some people who unhappily had just been tagged. On our way out, we spotted another team of Blues on the run from a Red. The place was clearly dangerous. We zoomed back across the bridge and plotted our next move. The final checkpoint was directly east, but we were certain we'd encounter Reds if we took the straight shot down Roosevelt. So we sprinted from the safe zone down to 15th street, cut east to the drive, and made our way north again.

We expected the tunnel under LSD to be heavily guarded by Reds -- in fact, we suspected there might be an entire phalanx of them with locked arms, or at least the Caped Bicycle Girl lying in wait in the bushes to zoom down on us. We made our best ninja-like approach, determined to all-out sprint, dodge, and weave to the safe zone if we had too. We even contemplated trying to cross LSD itself, as dangerous as that might be. As it turned out, however, the tunnel was unguarded. We strolled in to an anticlimactic ending. By this time, we were exhausted and our legs were aching, so the trek up the stairs and around the aquarium seemed to take forever. But we were pleasantly surprised to find out that we were in the top dozen or so Blues to reach the finish. Even more exciting, we were eventually reunited with the half dozen plus other survivors from our original team, whom we mistakenly had thought were long ago tagged.

Now, three days later, my legs still make with the hurt in interesting and unexpected ways, but it was absolutely worth it!