Revenge of the Amazing Race Nerds?

She's his "hottie boombody with the naughty pilates" and he's her own personal music man. Meet Lori and Dave, aka the lovable nerds from Kansas who smooched their way around the world but didn't get to embrace victory on CBS' The Amazing Race (Wednesdays at 8 pm/ET).

TVGuide.com: So it wasn't your day in Siracusa.
Lori: No, it was not, but we ran a really good leg.
Dave: We just didn't get there fast enough.

TVGuide.com: A lot of teams got lost in Italy. How'd you do?
Dave: We weren't that lost.
Lori: We were just exhausted and had a hard time staying awake. We switched drivers three times on our way to Catania, so that put us behind. And it was such a short leg that there was no way for us to catch up.

TVGuide.com: Dave, you seemed a little bit freaked out during the statue challenge. You even got curt with Lori.
Lori: We were getting frustrated that I couldn't figure out how to put the damn statue together! [Laughs] Nobody could give me hints, and I just kept putting it together the same way because there was no other way to do it.
Dave: She didn't put it together wrong. At that point we had had very little to eat and very little sleep. We didn't have the mental energy to tell ourselves, "Hey, they could be fooling us here."

TVGuide.com: Why didn't you go look at the other completed statues?
Dave: I was confined to an area by [production] staff.
Lori: And by the time I had gotten it together the first time, it was getting dark. All you have is a light in your face from the cameras, so I couldn't even look at the other statues to see if there were extra pieces.

TVGuide.com: You mentioned you were hungry. What would you eat on any given race day?
Dave: You get up at 4 in the morning and rush to the airport to get a good ticket. Once you get on the airplane, you have the free Cinnabon and half a pop, and you just run your ass off the rest of the day.
Lori: Our strategy was to not waste money on food. [Plus] you don't have time, because it's a race. You eat whatever's available to you when you get a chance to sit.
Dave: You notice McDonald's a lot when your hungry.

TVGuide.com: You saw McDonald's?
Lori: In Russia, the cabdriver took us through the entire city and we saw every McDonald's. Although we didn't stop, we saw every McDonald's.

TVGuide.com: Not to sound like your grandmother or anything, but when are you two going to get married?
Dave: [Laughs]
Lori: "To be announced." We have no plans yet. I have not been proposed to, so I can't say.

TVGuide.com: Ah, pressure! So how did you meet?
Lori: Mutual friends. We were friends for about six months before I planted a kiss on him one night. It snowballed from there.

TVGuide.com: I think you said "I love you" more than any other couple. Are you always so openly affectionate?
Dave: It's important to be that way. That was one of our mechanisms to make things less stressful reminding ourselves that we do have a relationship and we are into each other.
Lori: It's funny to hear people talk about how they played us up as kissing our way through the first leg. Some [friends] said they've never seen us kiss; others said they've seen it a lot. In public, normally we aren't all over each other.
Dave: We weren't all over each other.

TVGuide.com: Which Amazing Race team are you rooting for?
Lori: Ray-Ray and Yo-Yo.
Dave: We're kind of paired with them. We're both couples getting ready to start a career and looking forward to getting married and living together. Ray's a musician, I'm a musician.... They're such sweethearts.

TVGuide.com: Dave, what kind of music do you play?
Lori: He plays the guitar, drums, organ, piano.... He likes a lot [of music styles].
Dave: I've been in a ska band for 10 years now, and an alt-country band for three years. I have a solo spacey-ambient rock project. Primarily I'm a songwriter, and I try to play as many instruments as I can to be as self-sufficient as I can.
Lori: He's the lead singer in a couple of the groups.

TVGuide.com: Aw, golden opportunity missed. When you sing, you've got to sing to your girl on camera.
Dave: Yeah. [Laughs] You don't know how many times they tried to get me to sing little songs about what was going on. Also, they tried to get us to say, "We're not in Kansas anymore." We're proud to be from Kansas, but if people always think it's Hicksville, it's never going to progress culturally.

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