Thanks everyone for joining us at Ramada Number One in Veteran's Memorial Park for Sierra Vista's first Geocaching Event on Saturday, August 21st.
Here are some highlights of the day:
Micro-cache Rally: Thirteen teams competed in the Rally, which required them to find sneaky microcaches hidden along a 1/2-mile course in and around the park. Each team had one hour to find five caches and sprint (or saunter) back to home base. Top finishers were:
- 1st Place- Team Piggin' Out, team of four, found all caches and returned in 31 minutes. They won a ready-to-go ammo-can cache filled with deluxe Geocaching-trademark goodies.
- 2nd Place- Team ShadowAce, team of six, found all caches and returned in 31 minutes. Their tie with Team Piggin' Out was broken by the smaller-party-wins rule.
- 3rd Place- Coyote Dave/Windego, team of two, found all caches in 46 minutes.
Honorable mention to the AZKiteflyers. The pair arrrived too late to participate in the race, but ran the course for fun. Now they weren't formally timed, didn't have to dodge other teams, and probably got some clues from trails left by previous teams--but they smoked through the course in what would have been a winning time. Next event, we'll issue these folks lead boots to keep it competitive.
The rally course and superbly cammoed microcaches were created by Nick of the Furnas Hooligans. Thanks, Nick, for your hard work and willingness to reveal some of your trade secrets.
Travel-Bug Exchange: It started as a Travel Bug infestation, and ended as a mass-migration of the lovable bugs. You helped more than 60 TBs on their way! We had a squadron of yellow jeeps, a bunch of VW Bugs, a lizard, lobster, and some fish. Several bugs wanted to accompany you on vacation, while others were racing cross-country or across the oceans.
We had prepared mission tags for most of the bugs, but got overwhelmed trying to sort them out. To our delight, cachers took over the job and all of the bugs found rides. By the way, the log for the event is a TB, called Dayrunner (TBG99T), so you may see it again.
The prize drawings gave away lots of cool swag. There were three fully equipped ammo-can caches stocked with Groundspeak merchandise, including a Write-in-the-Rain logbook, LED keychain light, and Geocaching patches and pins. Other prizes included about a dozen of our custom event T-shirts and Geocaching shirts. Jalene of Team Dodge Podge created and donated custom-printed goodies including the wildly popular round mouse pads with the event logo, and a cool ditty bag.
Kids Events: Sarah of the Furnas Hooligans ran activities to keep the crumb-crunchers and ankle-biters busy and happy while the parents mingled. The Kids’ Cache Dash and squirt guns did the trick splendidly. Even the adults hunted by the squirt-gun commandos had fun.
Master and Mistress of Ceremonies: Josh and Michele of Team Taco Dust did an outstanding job shepherding you rambunctious geocachers from the log book to the activities, as well as running the prize drawings, locating lost kids, shilling for the snack table, organizing the X-marks-the-spot and myriad other details requiring quick thinking and a ready smile.
Celebrity Guests: Great excitement attended the arrival of The Beverly Hillbillies in their clattering pickup. Nah, it was Darren of Team Scrawlinn at the wheel of his topless Deuce-and-a-half truck, making an entrance with flashing lights, siren, and an earsplitting horn blast. He chauffeured much of the Tombstone contigent, as well as hosting out-of-town cachers at his Slither and Crawl Inn.
T-SHIRTS: Official Event Cache T-shirts are still available online! Visit our Cafe Press page.