I'll admit, in spite of my perpetual cynicism towards reality TV over the course of this decade, when my g/f started watching this a couple episodes into Season 3, I was slightly intrigued, first by the international locales, then by aspects of the race itself
...then Flo won, and that reignited my cynicism due to the fact that it seems most of the winners of these long-run game shows (ne: reality TV) are always the most controversial (i.e. annoying or stupid) characters. I stuck with season 4 for the hell of it and told myself if the redhead bitch and her man won then I would not watch anymore. Thankfully the gay couple won... but I didn't watch Season 5 anyway because the first episode just plain failed to capture my interest (even if it did have a midget).
What's funny, looking at the family edition, is that only two teams have preteen kids and maybe one or two others have young teenagers, otherwise they're all adults. So you're an adult and you get your adult family members to sign up for this thing, expecting to go to the same exotic locations you've seen on previous episodes... then you find out because a couple of kids are involved that you're not going outside of NA... how gyped would you feel? Just goes to show that kids ruin everything
They were probably afraid if they went to someplace like Asia the kids would get kidnapped and wind up working in a sweatshop... or worse