Parking is adjacent to event location. : N 29° 10.047 W 082° 05.354 Access to the parking area is from SE 36th Avenue entrance to the park.
The event coordinates shown are the meeting place where we all will gather for a meet and greet which will begin at 8 am. At about 11 AM the meet and greet will conclude and everyone will begin their trek in pursuit of the hundreds of new caches. There will be a sign-in for those participating asking your caching name and number of guests without geocaching names. During sign in everyone will get a name tag and a ticket for the drawing. Guest and children will also receive these. Animals will not. We will also have a 50/50 drawing. There will be a TB Hotel available. Donuts, coffee and iced bottled water and a couple other snacks will be available during the meet and greet.
This event is being co hosted by gregen, Acachingcat, smithj9 and Badbrad34480. The pavilion has a capacity of 100 with ten picnic tables under cover but there is plenty of uncovered area to set up canopies if anyone wants to set one up. You may want to bring your own chairs in case it gets crowded. There are two small restroom facilities near the site and four fast food restaurants and a couple sit down restaurants within a mile of the site. Bring your own food and drink for the rest of the day and take plenty of water which is available at the pavilion. Parking is in a large paved lot and in a grassy area adjacent to the paved lot. To ease any confusion in finding the event area please approach and park from the east. There are enough parking spots for several hundred vehicles. Please do not park along the sides of the driveway as noted by signs. If anyone wants to donate items to be given as drawing prizes please bring them and drop them at the prize table. If you plan on attending or think you might attend please post a note. There will be lots of new caches available again. At 10 am a sheet preprinted with ALL the FTF caches and their coordinates will be handed out to those that want them. If you are new to the area then this is an opportunity to grab many more established caches in this area and if you are lucky or good maybe some FTF's. PLEASE READ THE LOGS BELOW FOR UPDATES!!!!!
This year Marion County Parks and Recreation has agree to be a sponsor of the event .
Also this year The Spacecoast Geocaching Store with Dale and Barb has agreed with the co-hosts to be an exclusive sponsor.
And an additional sponsor is Pam's Place who is donating free haircuts for the prize drawing.
In addition to the sponsors the current list of donors of prizes to the event are:
CoinsAndPins.com
Drives Cache Closet
Geocaching SuperCenter
This years event will feature some caches that are accessible by means of watercraft only. In addition there will be a power run(s) with p and g difficulty ratings and a larger number of caches for those who prefer hiking, biking or horseback along parts of the Florida Trail,The Greenway, and in Marion County Parks. Not all trails will be accessible for horses though.
"Note: We are going to try to load the data onto your GPS device at the event, but you will need to bring your USB cord so we can connect your device to a laptop. We managed to get all the gps's loaded successfully last year, but had trouble with a few cacher's Smartphones. If you own a Smartphone, you may want to bring a back-up gps just in case we can't get it loaded."