“Event”ful Weekend

Well, it’s Wednesday now.

The event cache is over, whether that is greeted with “Good bye” or “Good Riddance” remains to be seen.
The event went ahead as planned on Saturday, even as the weather forecasts were calling for lousy weather. Friday night was spent running around checking the final cache, one that had over 20 cacheFall Back to Night Caching - In the Pub components to it. The cache took four of us about 3 hours to setup, and another 2 1/2 hours to check over on Friday night. Did I mention we got 25mm of rain Friday night? My clothes were quite soggy by the time I got home.

Saturday went off reasonably well. I’ve got mixed emotions on the whole concept. We invested well over 80 hours of work getting everything setup (over the month of October). The pub portion went well, with a capacity crowd enjoying good food, and good camaraderie. That part was fun. While we were eating, Mother Nature rolled up her sleeves and prepared to sucker punch the intrepid night cachers – all 50 of them. Not good, considering we already had that in mind.

I thought we had a pretty good program, complete with seven caches. The event counted for one find, and we had two relatively easy caches for two more finds. A third cache was only moderately difficult, but the presence of non-related reflectors nearby made it harder than it had to be. An awful lot of people didn’t even look at the instructions on that cache – which made it harder than the two ‘difficult’ caches we placed.

We figured we had something for everyone, and because the final was particularly brutal, we setup our hot chocolate ‘tent’ at the parking for the cache — cachers could walk right past us, or just hang out and have some hot chocolate.

As usual, I had a simple math error on the final page, which got magnified tremendously by default assumptions people make. The good news is, we had a phone number that the cachers could call at anytime, so the math was almost optional.

Nature brought cold temperatures, rain, snow and gale force winds to the table, knocking trees down and blocking the road when we all went to leave. In hindsight, I should have probably just aborted the entire night caching part of the event for people’s safety. Instead we went ahead with it, and I’m pretty sure there are a few cachers that are a little more than annoyed at how the night went.

Fortunately, there are enough positive comments from the night that I’ll host another event sometime, or perhaps assist others with their event cache. The problem with event caches, is you get 50-90 beta testers instead of 1-2.

I have a new respect for the cachers that put on the big event caches – including Spring Fling/GHAGAFAP, Harvestfest and TOMTEC’s Excellent Midnight Adventure. I never realized just how much effort these people put into the events before trying on their shoes.

Thanks to everyone that came out Saturday, and thanks to everyone that’s hosted an event cache.

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