The Quest (For the Crest)

Ellen, Blair, Sophia, Adam, Jisela and Steve arrive in the middle of the Sahara Desert for Road Rules Season 10: The Quest. Their goal is to recover an ancient crest that has been broken up into 10 pieces. Each piece represents a virtue that other Road Rulers have struggled to attain. If they fail any of the missions, they have one opportunity to redeem themselves. If they fail again, they must vote off one of their team members. It quickly becomes clear who the weaker links are during the first mission. Each Road Ruler must climb 200 feet down a rope ladder from a helicopter. Jisela talks a big game, but ends up becoming the first to fail a mission for the team. During a grueling ride across the desert on uncooperative camels, Jisela falls off her camel, freaks out, and threatens to go home. In Morocco, Ellen gets upset when the locals throw rocks at her. Her teammates theorize that the locals feel disrespected by

With the mission failed, the roadies find themselves in "Default Recovery Mode."

It has only been a few days and the Road Rulers are already at each other's throats. The fire erupts when Jisela insists on driving the Winnie, and Adam criticizes her driving. Jisela screams to Adam, ""You're not my dad and you're not going to tell me how to drive!"" Adam decides to push Jisela's buttons further by honking the horn while Jisela is trying to talk on her cell phone. Jisela completely loses it and explodes when her teammates try to calm her down. Meanwhile, the Road Rulers face their ultimate fears in the next challenge.They must try to get a cobra snake to strike at them by using their fingers, a drum or a flute. Adam is particularly scared of snakes and is worried that his teammates will think he's ""the weakest link."" But he pulls through for his team and wins the mission. Back on the drama front, Adam confides in his teammates that he has ADD--Attention Deficit Disorder--which explains his unpredictable behavior.

Most important news first: Adam and Ellen finally hook up after days of flirting. Nobody is suprised. Meanwhile, the Road Rulers run out of cash and must work to earn more. They head north to a small town called Fes, which has over 20,000 narrow streets. They must make seven deliveries in five hours on foot or by donkey. The items include stuff such as chickens, eggs and yarn. Needless to say, delivering items on donkeys is not their strength. After causing a major traffic jam, pissing off the locals, breaking eggs, losing two of the donkeys, and almost crushing Steve, the Road Rulers manage to make the last delivery in the nick of time. But Adam ends up in the doghouse when he doesn't take his ADD medication and makes a fool of himself and his team during the mission. Ellen begins to wonder if she made a huge mistake.

Ellen continues to have doubts about Adam and their roller coaster relationship. She is no longer buying the excuse that ""he hasn't taken his medicine that day."" Meanwhile, the cast is stoked to find out that they will be leaving Morocco and entering Spain for their next mission. Sophia is particularly excited and proclaims to her fellow teammates that she ""loves Spanish women"" and the fact that they ""are going to the land where they are created is a very good thing."" Which leads us to the situation between Sophia and Jisela. Jisela is feeling more and more uncomfortable with the increasing level of affection that Sophia is sending her way. Jisela decides to confront Sophia, who explains that their friendship is very important and that she will never jeopardize it. The next mission involves rock climbing on a vertical rock formation. Freaked out, Jisela ends up yelling at the instructors and refuses to complete the practice run. If the team fails this mission.

The Road Rulers prepare to test their endurance in a 2.5 hour adventure race mission that includes swimming, biking, running, and climbing. The guys are worried that the growing tension between Ellen and the other two girls may affect their performances. But when Ellen struggles on two segments of the mission, Jisela overlooks their differences and goes out of her way to help Ellen finish the segments. This causes Ellen to break down and see things in a different light. After all the bickering, it was a strange sight to see all three girls hugging each other and being nice to each other. The team successfully finishes four out of five segments of the mission before bad weather forces them to quit for the day. When the team prepares for the rock climbing portion of the mission the following morning, Jisela loses her stamina from the day before and is overcome with fear. As she gets all geared up and stands at the edge of the rock, she begins sobbing and screams over and over.

We left off last week in an extremely tense moment when Jisela tells her teammates that she will not complete the rock climbing portion of the mission because of her intense fear. Her teammates beg her to change her mind, but she stands firm. As a result, the Road Rulers fail their second mission and must vote off one of their own. Now the big question is...who will be sent packing, Jisela or Ellen? The team seems really divided on this issue. Ellen, Adam and Steve plan to vote Jisela off because she refused to even try to complete the mission. Sophia and Jisela want to vote Ellen off because they think her attitude makes her the weakest link. So the deciding vote lies with Blair. It is clear that Blair is struggling with this responsibility. On one hand, he has a tight relationship with Jisela, and prefers her personality to Ellen's. But on the other hand, he is worried that if Jisela stays, they may run into this situation again and fail another mission. After a tense afternoon, Ji

With Jisela gone, the Road Rulers prepare to meet her replacement. Sophia and Adam are having a particularly hard time dealing with the prospect of welcoming a new bubbly female team member that has no clue what they have been through over the past several weeks. Adam even creates a pretty harsh initiation for this team member, including trials such as ""spending the night sleeping under the stars by herself."" He justifies this by saying, ""I'm not going to let this person into the group until they earn their spot."" Well, ""this person"" ends up being Katie. First impressions indicate that her positive upbeat attitude will be a refreshing change for the group. Before Katie even has time to adjust to her new environment, she and her teammates face the scariest mission to date: base diving headfirst at 65 miles per hour into a wall of fire. Katie faces her fears and proves to her teammates that she will be a strong member.

So it's back to the Adam and Ellen saga. Apparently, there has been more than just talking occurring in the bunk bed of the RV. Adam continues to play with Ellen's emotions, and the other Road Rulers can't quite understand their odd relationship. Katie is particularly shocked when Ellen tells her that ""Adam is taken."" In the next mission, the Road Rulers must spend the day in a Spanish bakery making meringues for the ""Meringue Festival"" in the city of Vilanova. Their mission is to make a giant meringue cake and deliver it to the town square the next morning. They have no idea that the point of the festival is for the children of the town to get in a huge meringue fight. By the time the Road Rulers reach the town square, everyone is covered from head to toe in meringue. This seems to be their favorite mission so far.

Ellen is in the doghouse again after Blair overhears a phone conversation where she rips apart her teammates. And to make matters worse, Ellen leaves a similarly negative e-mail open on the computer screen for all to see. Her teammates have had it with her and her deceptive behavior and decide to confront her. She gets defensive and doesn't understand why everyone is picking on her. Meanwhile on the next mission, the Road Rulers must exhibit trust during a human tower competition in front of thousands of Spanish locals. Ironically, the team must depend on Ellen to climb to the top and lift a little boy onto her shoulders in order to complete the mission. The team gets frustrated during practice when Ellen predictably shows off, causing the tower to fall. Suddenly, things turn around for Ellen. After a few days of soul searching, Ellen changes her attitude and manages to pull through for the team, completing the mission without falling. She reacts by saying,

There is another romance blossoming in the RV. It seems that Katie and Steve have taken a liking to one another, even though Katie has a boyfriend at home. Katie insists that she and Steve are ""just friends,"" but the rest of the Road Rules team would probably beg to differ

Things lighten up a bit for the next mission. The Road Rulers must each go out on a blind dates with an individual chosen through MTV.com with a chance to win money on their dates. Everyone is stoked except for Sophia, who is terrified of dating. Katie and Ellen get all glammed up and Ellen vows to ""get wasted"" while on her date. Oddly enough, Sophia has the most successful date of the group. She and her blind date enjoy a romantic Italian dinner and spend the evening talking and laughing. Her date even buys her a gift the following day as a remembrance of their evening together. Katie informs her date early on that she has a boyfriend, which kills any chance of romance. Ellen gets the reward for the most entertaining date. It starts off pretty well, until Ellen fulfills her promise of ""getting wasted."" After one too many ""vinos,"" Ellen starts tripping and giggling. On to the guys...Adam doesn't take long to turn into his goofy self.

Ellen attempts to bond with Sophia, but Sophia isn't into it. She tells Ellen that she has to trust someone to be close to them. The other Road Rulers think that Sophia and Ellen have more in common than anyone else on the team, but the two girls don't see that. Meanwhile, the Road Rulers are faced with one of their most difficult missions to date. They must each convince a stranger to bungee jump with them in tandem within six hours. The tricky part is that the total age of the six strangers much be at least 300, which means the average age of each stranger must be 50. On top of that, they are looking for these strangers in a quaint village town in rural Spain. Ellen takes control and really pulls through for the team on this mission. She is the first to find a bungee partner and also tries to help her teammates find partners. The funny thing is that the guys all find 50ish women to jump with and the girls find older men. Sophia is the last to find a partner.

The Road Rulers are bummed to find out that they must leave Spain to head back into Morocco. However, Katie insists that she is excited because she has never been to Morocco before. Her team is amused by the prospect of seeing Katie's face when she sees a ""Moroccan Toilet."" Once in Morocco, problems arise involving Adam and his insistence on being a back-seat driver to all of his teammates. During their first dinner back in Morocco, the team confronts Adam on his unwillingness to get along with the group. He puts up his usual defense, resulting in an ineffective team meeting. Meanwhile, the girls are not happy to learn that their next mission involves the process of making leather goods. They are even less excited when they get to the mission site and smell the disgusting aroma of dead animals and pigeon feces. Katie almost hurls several times and tells the mission leader more than once, ""I don't live like this.""

The Road Rulers are shocked to learn that there are actually some beautiful estates in Morocco. They are even more shocked to find out that the Real Worlders get to stay in one of them. The Road Rules team is anxious to prove to these ""wimpy New Yorker Real Worlders"" that being on Road Rules is much more challenging than living in a ""phat pad"" in NYC. This brings us to ""The Dual in the Desert,"" which involves several competitions between the two teams for a grand prize of $1000 per person. The Real World team gets pumped up after winning the first event, a sheep-herding contest. The Road Rulers hold a team meeting in the bus and agree that they ""WILL NOT"" lose to The Real World team. They exit their RV with the Road Rules flag and a new sense of unity and determination.

The gang knows the end is near as they prepare to depart from Spain and Morocco and head back to the States. And, boy, are they glad. Eleven weeks on the road in close quarters has left them all a little tired of each other's annoying habits. So they pack their bags and head to Fort Dix for their final mission. As Ellen says, ""This is the Big Dog. This is it."" While Steve worries about whether or not he can cut it in the military like his father, Ellen worries about which shade of green eye shadow goes best with camouflage. The mission involves them being trained as a Military Medical Unit, and if they succeed, they will receive the crest of perseverance. During their tactics training, they learn how to ""rush & roll"" and the importance of team effort. Since they hate the smell of each other at this point, teamwork is a little difficult. Steve gets to be the leader during the practice mission. Rather than lead, however, Steve chooses to go Rambo and do it on his own.

The final episode starts on a somber note as the Road Rulers realize that it's all over. Steve says his military upbringing will make him less emotional about saying goodbye. It's a really touching moment...until Ellen and Adam interrupt his interview by throwing mud at each other. Ah, love. Adam begins the last episode tradition by crying as he crouches in his sleeping bag. The next day, the cast puts all pieces of the crest together and reminisces about what each piece meant. They eat their last meal and toast each other and the memories they've made over the past 10 weeks.In order to receive their handsome reward, the Roadies have to take the crest to McGuire Air Force base at the crack of dawn. They take a 5-hour flight over the U.S. in a KC-10, a military refueling plane. They assist in refueling a few planes and then they get to do what few ever have...see a B-2 Stealth Bomber in flight. The captain of the bomber tells them that they have to deliver the crest to General Williams