Community Celebration Event: Honor your mentor Community Celebration Event

Due to Covid, the Community Celebration Events have been extended to the end of 2022, so I am pleased to be able to host this event after the original expiration date.  Let's use this opportunity to celebrate a geocaching friend or mentor. We will gather at the picnic shelter in Hidden Rock Park in Goochland County from 1:00 - 3:00 on Thursday, October 28.  I will provide pizza and cookies; bring your own drinks.  There will be a donation box to contribute to the pizza fund; contributions will be gratefully accepted, but NOT expected!  I will need a firm number of attendees, though, in order to know how much pizza to order, so please indicate your intention to attend no later than 5:00 p.m. on Monday, October 25.  If you log a "will attend" and then find you cannot, please let me know!

Parking is available right next to the picnic shelter.

When you log your attendance, you are encouraged (but not required) to tell us a story about your geocaching mentor or a good friend who caches with you and helps to make the game fun.  Here's my story:

I am hosting in honor of my brother, OR85OR450 (David Powell) who died in June of 2020 after a long battle with a particularly nasty cancer.  I decided I would do something special in geocaching for his birthday every year:  he would have turned 60 this week.  David, who lived in Texas, is the person who introduced me to caching and taught me many of its tricks.  He was an avid cacher, who racked up more than 6000 finds in the seven years he was caching.  He loved a serious challenge, and he went after some big ones:  he once completed a challenge to find 81 caches to fill the D/T grid in one 24-hour period.  The last cache he found completed his quest to cache in all 254 of the Texas counties. He never met a tree or a rock face he wouldn't climb in pursuit of a cache, and he was known in his area for being a great PAF, and he would often go out to meet up with cachers to help them complete very difficult caches which he had himself already logged.

The last caching trip we took together was to Martinsburg, WV (our third visit there), where we completed both WVTim's Berkeley Gadget Cache trail and his Berkeley Gadgets GeoTour (GT96).  We always got a lot of laughs out of WVTim caches--usually when we realized how badly we had been fooled!  Possibly the most fun we had caching was when we completed The Bard (GC36B5R) and Druid Hunters (GC31101).  These are mega-multis:  they took us two days each (and some cachers have had to spend much longer!).  Totally worth it, though, as every stage provides another, different, challenge, so each day spent was filled with fun and a sense of accomplishment (eventually--often after a sense of abject failure!)  As with WVTim caches, CO Zosimos has a gift for anticipating the way your mind will work and then catching you making wrong assumptions!  

We are having pizza from Bella Sicilia in Goochland, because it was David's favorite place to eat when he was visiting.  He had a lot of surgery, radiation, and chemo, and he lost almost completely his sense of taste and smell.  For whatever reason, though, he could still taste and enjoy Bella Sicilia pizza, despite all the treatments.  The last thing I sent him before he died was an express cooler of frozen Bella Sicilia pepperoni pizza! We will eat it in memory of him!