OTAK 2011 GeoFest - Geocaching In Space Event Cache

Come to cities of Mankato and North Mankato for an opportunity to meet a few of your fellow geocachers for a day of new geoadventures, camaraderie, exercise, and some good old-fashioned fun. The caches will be placed in a few of our favorite city parks and along the biking/walking trails of Mankato and Lower North Mankato.

Caches
There will be 20 permanent and 4 temporary caches placed for this event. The permanent caches will be available on geocaching.com after 5:00PM on the day of the event.

We will be doing a space-themed event this year with an emphasis on our solar system.

You will be able to drive to and park near most of the cache locations along with biking and/or hiking to them. Since most of these caches are not P&Gs, a walk (longest will be approximately 2 miles round trip) will be required to retrieve them.

Door Prizes
Door prizes will be awarded at the social hour/dinner hour after the geofest concludes approximately 5:30. You must be present to win.

GPS Downloads
Bring your GPSr cable to the event. We will have a laptop available to enable downloading of the caches to your GPSr. We will be using Garmin Mapsource along with GSAK. If you have a different brand of GPSr, we will try to assist you in loading the way points, but we make no guarantees that we will be successful.

Travel Bugs
We will be having a temporary travel bug hotel set up at registration so trading of trackables can occur. The travel bug hotel will be at the restaurant later in the day to so any travel bugs place in the hotel can be picked up and moved along to a new cache. Any travel bugs left over will be moved along by the OTAK group.

Registration/Staging Area
Registration starts at 8:00 at the North Mankato City Hall/Police Station Community Room (1001 Belgrade Avenue, North Mankato, MN 56002) which are the coordinates provided for this GeoFest. The caching event will run from 9:00AM - 3:00PM. The rules, a cache log sheet, hard copies of the coordinates, and a map showing the general location of the cache placements will be provided to participants during registration. We will also have somebody at the registration area for most of the day to answer questions or to provide hints.

Twitter Updates / Call for help
This year we will be using Twitter to provide hints, updates, and coordinate corrections (if needed) during the event. On Twitter, Follow otak_geocaching.

Social/Dinner Hour
The Social/Dinner will be held at the Loose Moose Saloon and Conference Center located at:
119 S. Front Street
Mankato, MN 56001.
Coordinates: N44° 09.997 W094° 00.192

Here is their menu so you can check out their selections and prices.

Please leave a note if you plan on attending including the number in your party. We also ask that you log your visit after you attend our event.