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The teams are now heading off to an Ice Hotel, where furniture and such is 100% made of ice. In the non-freezing cold months, said ice items are placed in a giant freezer/storage building. It’s in this building that the teams get their next clue, which is the name of a lodge etched in a 2’x 1’ block of ice that I will not even attempt to respell here with its umlauts and dozens of letters per word.

The doctors and Team HSN get there first and get their ice clues out of there. I feel like there are many, many Schwarzenegger-esque Mr. Freeze puns to use here but I will refrain. Overshooting the Ice Hotel and now a few minutes behind the leaders, Gary & Mallory are squarely in third and Michael & Kevin face their Speed Bump as the fourth team.

Not to quibble about the difficulty of the Speed Bumps the last couple of seasons but requiring the team to sit on a chair made of ice for only ten minutes seems pretty lame. Essentially, the Speed Bump is a ten-minute penalty because the father/son duo finishes it on the first attempt.

The penalty doesn’t mean squat, either, because the three leading teams get lost taking a dirt road looking for the clue. So, despite having to do a laughably easy Speed Bump, Michael & Kevin are back in first at the Roadblock. As Phil gives us another cultural lesson about the importance of dog sled teams the majority of the year in Sweden, we see that the teams will have to complete a pretty fun-looking task. They have to "drive" a dog sled team down a path using a training sled with wheels (since there is a lack of snow on the ground) and grab five flags. If they miss a flag, then they have to do an extra lap for each one missed.

Dad Michael steps up for his team and doesn’t encounter any problems with it other than the distracting, ridiculously pointless fake bear that looks like reject from Disney World’s animatronic workshop. The wandering three other teams show up and Mallory, Kat and Claire are the lead mushers for the Roadblock. Diminutive Mallory is the only person that misses a flag and dinged with an extra lap. I halfway expected the producers to cue up Randy Newman’s "Short People" at some point.

The second flight touches down and everyone is making a mad dash to the Ice Hotel in a caravan of Saabs. Once there, a couple of teams take their ice clue and others wisely just write down the message. Dating couple Jill and Thomas seem to have been shed from their caravan and are in last place with no one else around. In no particular order because it really doesn’t matter at this point, the second batch of teams, save for Jill & Thomas, consists of Team Glee Jonathan & Connor, volleyballers Rachel & Katie, and dating couples Chad & Stephanie and Team Inked Nick & Vicki. But still armed with the Express Pass, Jill & Thomas could easily leap frog them all.

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