Discovered on a sad occasion. Farewell Big Smoke and thank you for all your contributions to geocaching over the years. As people said at the funeral, it was exactly nine years since Big Smoke started geocaching, on 25 August 2009. A fine clear day and her family there to say goodbye in the way she would have wanted. Such a blessing that Bronwen held her first grandchild before she went away.
The first I heard of Big Smoke was this gossip that went around the Dunedin geocaching community, about this bunch of Palmerston cachers who had somehow found one of Bitsprayer's caches BEFORE it had been published. How on earth did they do that? And the OTHER rumour was that they were caching NAKED! well, that took some explaining - that it meant they weren't using a GPS. Oh. But still pretty impressive!
When I asked Big Smoke later at an event about finding Euphoria she made it sound easy - they had been looking for Janet's Peak and as they drove along there was this cabbage tree with a view that looked like it should have a cache there, so they stopped and sure enough there was the cache. Apparently the puzzling part was later, when they couldn't find the cache online to log it. But a couple of days later there it was, problem solved. Not Big Smoke's only pre-publication find either - there was the Red-beaked oyster catcher down at Taieri Mouth which got found when Big Smoke was searching for another cache and widened her search to other likely spots nearish GZ. Oh yeah! Name in logbook, a solid FTF!
And then suddenly Palmerston became a place to go geocaching. We've now spent probably a couple of days in total exploring odd corners of Palmerston we'd never have seen otherwise... starting with the Old Smithy, an interesting place to know about. All the churches in town. Sir John, from the cemetery to where he lived, an excellent history lesson. The series along the Makareao railway branch line. The Rainbow series, ending up being shown where the town dump is - a surprisingly attractive spot that, yes, we would never have known about if it weren't for geocaching! And last but definitely not least, The Fruit Tree, OMG, that was such an adventure. So, remembering lots of smiles we got from Big Smoke's hides over the years.
And we especially remember Big Smoke at events, always cheerful and able to chat to anybody about geocaching and anything else. That was a real gift she had!
So this is Big Smoke's special trackable discovered at her funeral. It was lovely to have the opportunity to say goodbye.