Saturday was the 6th annual Age of Discovery Geo-Event, held at Hager Park in Jenison. I headed over that way and arrived a bit after 9. The event was to start at 10, so I decided to get in some of the new caches in the park before the event started. Found four of them pre-event, two of them had stickers in them for Age of Discovery so decided I'd better take one. Good thing I did as they were part of a game we played later.
Headed for the event at the other side of the park, got to meet and greet quite a few of my geocaching friends both old and new. We played a scavenger hunt game where we had to get signatures of people that fit into different geocaching categories (like who has found a cache in a foreign country - that was my favorite line to sign!) A good way to get to know more about the people whose names you've only seen on logs before now.
We had a hot dog lunch with potluck additions. I had to stop at the Jenison Meijer and pick up a dessert since I had forgotten my stuff on the counter at home. Oh well. Good food, then several geocaching friends and I set off to find the other new caches in the park, and grab the stickers for the game we needed them for. Caching at this event is interesting, you're usually with 3-4 people and end up meeting one or more other groups of 3-4 at the cache site. So not much challenge there, but still a lot of fun.
Got back to the shelter area and one of my geocaching friends helped me figure out what wasn't right in my attempts to load cache info on my nuvi. He got everything working fine and now the cache info on my 300 closest not founds is on my nuvi and I don't have to bring the paper printouts anymore! Also, when I'm driving past a cache a signal will go off so I know it's there and I can then use the nuvi to get to the cache location. Sweet.
Then the door prize drawing. I've never won a door prize at a geocaching event. Surprisingly, my streak stopped today. I won a ready to hide geocache which was in a RED tupperware container! I'm thinking it was possibly a set-up but that's ok, I'll take it. Also won two other ready to hide containers, one had an event geo-coin in them. So a wonderful time was had at the event.
Even though it had started to drizzle by then, I decided I would try to grab a few caches on my way home. At the second cache I stopped at, ran into two geocaching teams that I knew. They helped me find the cache I was looking for (height was an issue, thankfully they were taller than me) and also another one in the same park. Then they invited me to go with them to find a new series of seven caches that had just been published that day. I didn't have any information but was able to slowly enter the coords at each stop and follow them in their cars to get to the area.
My find count at the end of the day is 1998....
Sunday - went to church, then over to Burger King where they have free wi-fi access. Had been there a little while, checked my e-mail to discover that a new cache had been hidden at the Lowell Meijer 15 minutes earlier. No problem EXCEPT that I had left my GPS at home. Saw it on the counter that morning and thought I wouldn't be caching so just left it there. So tried to find it based on the description and clues. No luck. So went home (just 3 miles) and got the GPS, went back and found it quickly. I was the first to find, my 15th FTF in 4 years of caching. So NOW I'm at 1999 finds. Have just made plans with a geofriend to go to a night cache tomorrow night to make it 2000.
No comments:
Post a Comment