Pack your bags, because The Amazing Race is back for its 30th season! Every week, Parade’s Mike Bloom will bring you interviews with the team most recently eliminated from the race.

The U-Turn is an interesting component of The Amazing Race. Initially brought on in the show’s twelfth season, it gives teams an opportunity to stop focusing on just their performance and instead take a close look at their competition. Through the years, we’ve seen groups use a wide variety of strategies at the U-Turn mat, ranging from conspiring as a group to target one specific team to simply being left with the only team behind them to guarantee they’re not in last place. It was unfortunately the latter that befell Trevor Wadleigh and Chris Marchant. The violinists had, up to that point, been playing their race legato, but a U-Turn from Cody Nickson and Jessica Graf under the watchful eye of cherished composer Antonín Dvořák quickly turned their tune staccato, culminating in an impromptu ending of their unfinished Amazing Race symphony.

True to their musician nature, Trevor and Chris blended in with the rest of the ensemble when the race started its 30th iteration. They maintained their calm, but energetic demeanor throughout the first few legs; whether they were putting a Roadblock on ice in Iceland, making frites out of their opponents in the first Head-to-Head in Belgium, or getting into fishy situations in Morocco, they came in 4th place every single time. Consistency is hard to come by when the deck gets reshuffled every leg, but the bad hands started getting dealt their way when they made their way back to Europe. After navigating the choppy waters around Saint-Tropez, Trevor showed his craftiness when he effortlessly recreated a pair of Tropezienne sandals. But that finesse did not seem to carry over on the pétanque court, as they lost to two teams and landed their balls far from the jack of first place. Much like entering a song with your instrument out of tune can throw the entire song out of whack, so seemed to be the case with Team Well-Strung as they continued to race in France. Chris put out a trebuchet-assembling performance worthy of punishment in the stocks that Trevor occupied, having them leave the Roadblock in last place. Their troubles continued as their attempts to navigate to the Detour had them switching options, though judging how Joey Chestnut and Tim Janus got hung up on the Van Gogh painting puzzle, it may have been a game-saving choice. The started the sixth leg in their worst position yet, but they saw some hope in being bunched together with Cody and Jessica and Indy Car racers Alex Rossi and Conor Daly. Landing in Prague, they almost immediately got Czeched by the Big Brother couple, who hit the U-Turn board ahead of them and forced them to quite literally accomplish “this and that.” The disadvantage did not deter them, though, brewing up a speedy beer delivery and acing an oral quiz from a Copernican lecture in no time flat (Earth). By the time they reached the Roadblock, they had caught the tail end of the teams who they had not seen since the airport. Perhaps it was this motivation that allowed Trevor to push through a switchback to the maddening phone task from season 15, hoping his Kafka guesswork could let them off the hook. But, to paraphrase the famous author, “The meaning of the race is that it stops,” and Team Well-Strung was able to see that meaning when their race stopped at the picturesque Letenské Park.

Now out of the race, Trevor and Chris talk with me about whether they would have used the U-Turn in another situation, if their previous travel experience helped their racing, and how they’re aiming to win this season’s “Miss Congeniality” award.

So since your time on the race, has Well Strung played a Dvořák piece, or are there too many bad memories linked to him now?

Trevor Wadleigh: We have not performed it yet. Chris very much wants to, but I don’t know if I can handle it.

Chris Marchant: Okay, here’s the thing. I really want to because I think it makes for a cool way to talk about the race to our audiences in concerts. Also, the particular Dvořák piece we play in our quartet, Trevor and I start together. (Laughs.) I don’t know. I just want an experience on stage, the eye contact we make right before the piece starts, knowing everything the other person is thinking at that moment.

I like the idea! I don’t think we’ve ever had a musical piece dedicated to The Amazing Race before, so it would be a good opportunity for a first.

Chris: Right, I’m going to push for it.

So speaking towards your careers in Well Strung, I know that they require a lot of travel. In fact, you guys are on tour in Mexico right now. Did you feel that gave you any sense of a leg up in the race?

Trevor: No.

Chris: (Laughs.)

Trevor: We’ve been raised navigationally via GPS, or at least starting when we were 25 or whatever. It’s always been GPS-based navigation. The one time I got to use Spanish,–the only other kind of language I have any ability to use–there were three eight-year-old girls who could speak Spanish in France. Navigating in a foreign country and not speaking the language will get you! We’re well-traveled, but it didn’t hold.

Chris: I think the amount of traveling we’ve done together definitely helped on the race, just not with the “here to there” type of directions.

I believe you were also fans of the show going in, so much so that Trevor made an Easter egg reference in the first episode to the snowboarders from season 19. Is that accurate?

Trevor: Definitely, especially leading right up to us leaving. We were binge-watching seasons at that point. We both love the show, and we were both onboard right away as soon as we heard it was a possibility [that we would be on].

Did you feel like your knowledge was an advantage in the competition?

Chris: I don’t know that I would consider myself a super fan going in, so I can’t speak to whether or not being a super fan helps. I am a fan, and now I’m a super fan. (Laughs.) The thing I appreciate so much about the race is that it’s a test of everything you’ve learned so far in your life.

Trevor: And you lost at it. (Laughs.)

Chris: (Laughs.) And I lost at it!

Let’s jump forward to the U-Turn that did you in. You guys said that you would have done the same thing Cody and Jessica did if you were in their shoes. But if you were the first team to the mat on the second flight, Trevor, which of the two teams between Big Brother and Indy Car would you have U-Turned, if at all?

Trevor: Oooh, I like that you said Trevor on this one!

Chris: (Laughs.)

Trevor: I don’t know if we would have U-Turned either if they were both behind us.

Chris: I probably would have, but I don’t know if I could say what I would have done.

Trevor: They would have been upset about that. They both had different skill sets. Everyone had been swapping places, and people had been better at different things.

Chris: It would have been really hard to say what would have been the right choice. But I would have been a fan of doing it to somebody.

Who would you say you were closest with among the other teams?

Chris: Everyone?

Trevor: (Laughs.)

Chris: We were the social favorite for sure.

Trevor: Did you know that this season, they’re giving out a Miss Congeniality award?

Chris: And we won!

That’s very RuPaul’s Drag Race of them!

Chris: (Laughs.)

Trevor: “It’s not RuPaul’s Best Friend Race…”

(Laughs.) You would have won RuPaul’s Best Friend Race, though!

Trevor: I know. [Getting back to the initial question] it’s so hard to say. I would have liked to experience one of those reality shows where everybody hates each other. Not because I want to know what that nastiness feels like. But I was kind of anticipating any other people to be like that, and everyone wasn’t.

Chris: It was hard to dislike each other.

Trevor: It was awesome. Everyone was lovely, we got along so well with the group.

Do you think that contributed to that mentality of people being gun shy when it came to using the U-Turn?

Chris: Definitely. I don’t know their actual mentality, but it seemed like they knew that we were a little behind them, and that they had to either [U-Turn] or not. Other teams seemed like a little more reticent in talking with them about whether they were going to U-Turn. Like Trevor said, everyone really respected one another and what they brought to the race. It wasn’t really about gameplay, everyone just wanted to do their best.

On the show, it looked like you guys blazed through both sides of the Detour. How true was your experience to what we got shown?

Trevor: We were faster than what was being shown.

Chris: (Laughs.)

Trevor: It was a very competitive day for us. It’s a bummer that we were on the [second] flight. They said it was an hour later, but it was scheduled for an hour later. It was also delayed half an hour. So we had that disadvantage. Also, leaving the airport, we had to get our bags checked. And we had the U-Turn as well. So we were very speedy in both [sides]. If we had just done the lecture one, it would have been a very quick day. There were a couple of more steps in the beer [task] that you didn’t see. But it was a good, competitive day for us.

And I saw at the Roadblock, when you pulled up, you saw Indy Car leaving. Was that the only time you had seen other teams after the U-Turn?

Chris: We saw a couple of other teams briefly at the beer station. But [Indy Car] was the last point of the day that we saw other teams.

Did that put a pep in your step, Trevor, knowing there was a brief glimpse of hope that you could catch them?

Trevor: Yes. They showed how difficult it was to find a cab, but they didn’t show how far each challenge was from the next. At that point, we didn’t know how long [the Roadblock] would take, how long people would take to find a cab. So it was like, “Yeah, let’s get this done. Maybe we’re still in this. We’re not dead yet.” And we didn’t know how many more challenges there were after the Roadblock.

We didn’t see too much of you in the first few legs. Was there anything that you wished the viewers could have seen from your team?

Chris: There are some things that people didn’t see, and I’m sort of glad they didn’t see. I had one of my freakout moments getting lost in Morocco.

Trevor: They didn’t see me doing the splits.

Chris: Oh, yes!

Trevor: The one frustrating thing about last night’s episode was me running to the mat. I look ridiculous, like I’m bouncing. I tore my hamstring in Morocco doing the splits. I can barely run, so it looks so bizarre. It will never be explained.

Bouncing Trevor will live on in infamy in the rest of Amazing Race time.

Trevor: (Laughs.) Frollicking Trevor.

In the trebuchet Roadblock, I noticed you guys were encouraging each other by talking in vagueries and almost making fun of the other teams who were saying sweeter words to each other. Is that representative of your dynamics outside of the race?

Chris: 100%. Our dynamic on the race was just a continuation of the last six years we had known each other.

Trevor: Six years of hell!

Chris: Six years of hell! (Laughs.) I don’t know how to quit you. Neither Trevor nor I am the kind of people who want someone to be in our faces yelling, “Concentrate, come on! Do it, do it right now. You can do this right!” It’s not our style.

You just mentioned that you come from an environment where you already were a form of a team before coming onto the race. Did you learn anything new about each other during your time on the show?

Chris: No.

Trevor: No. (Laughs.)

Chris: I’d like to say, “Oh, I got know Trevor in this new specific way.” But it’s also kind of nice that we know each other so [expletive] well that we didn’t learn anything new. It’s just a continuation of our everyday life.

Trevor: We like the same bad television.

Chris: Storage Wars!

Trevor: Alaska State Troopers. Deadliest Catch. (Laughs.) We both like bad TV.