Amazing Race - Season 34

Wednesday night, Sharon and I finished watching season thirty-four of the Amazing Race. With a passion for traveling, I have enjoyed watching the Amazing Race over the last few years. We finished season 32 in January of 2021 and season 33 in March of 2022.

Filming for season 34 began on May 25, 2022, in Munich, Germany, making it the first time the American version started outside the United States. Jordan was visited for the first time in the entire franchise. Filming concluded in Tennessee in mid-June.

This season originally planned to exclude non-elimination legs for the first time in franchise history. However, after one team received a positive COVID-19 test and was removed from the race, the last team to arrive in the leg received the final departure time as a penalty at the beginning of the next leg. The first leg featured "a game-changing element" called the Scramble, where teams were told the locations of all of the tasks that they had to complete at the start of the leg and could complete them in any order.

Dating couple Derek Xiao and Claire Rehfuss (from Big Brother 23) were the winners of this season, while long-lost twins Emily Bushnell and Molly Sinert finished in second place. I was rooting for the twins.

The legs of the race included:

• Leg 1 (Germany)
• Leg 2 (Germany → Austria)
• Leg 3 (Austria → Italy)
• Leg 4 (Italy → Jordan)
• Leg 5 (Jordan)
• Leg 6 (Jordan → France)
• Leg 7 (France)
• Leg 8 (France → Spain)
• Leg 9 (Spain → Iceland)
• Leg 10 (Iceland → United States)

I was fascinated by the two episodes in Jordan. Petra is a lot bigger than I expected. Our second big trip planned for 2023 includes Isreal, Eygpt and Jordan!