The 12th season of reality show The Amazing Race premieres Sunday with the show's first-ever visit to Ireland. The teams fly from California to Shannon, Ireland, where it rains a lot and everyone gives bad directions.

The Amazing Race, in the words of one contestant (a lesbian Episcopal priest), is "a love letter to the planet." Teams of two—brother and sister, father and daughter, best friends, and so on—travel the world, competing in challenges and racing to be the first team to finish that leg of the journey. The last team to arrive is usually sent home.

So we asked our resident Ireland expert, magazine researcher David O'Connor, how well the show represented his homeland. "I feel their pain on the directions," he writes. Off the main roads, there aren't very many signs, and roads seem to stop at random.

In the funniest part of this week's show, each team has to load bricks of peat into baskets on a donkey and convince it to walk back to the entrance of the farm. Peat—partly decayed plant matter found in wetlands—was traditionally burned as fuel in Ireland. I don't know if you've heard, but donkeys have a reputation for being stubborn. Some donkeys strolled happily with their loads of peat; others had their own feelings about helping the teams.

Most people have more efficient ways to heat their houses now, and those who do use peat don't necessarily move it around on donkeys. If the show was really going for accuracy, O'Connor says, the teams would have "hit a hurley ball or herded sheep." (The hurley ball or sliotar is the ball used in hurling.) And he points out a cultural mistake: The challenges involve no alcohol.

—Helen Fields

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