Best of the Bad Mega Event

This weekend, we made the trek to Three Hills, Alberta to attend the Best of the Bad Mega Event, western Canada's first mega event!

This was our 2nd mega event, after attending GW VIII last year. We had been tasked with bringing Bernie's Traveling Geocache along with us to deliver to Landsharkz. In addition to the event, we also attended the first ever Canadian GPS Adventures Maze (woohoo!) which was actually a lot better than I had originally expected, and the obligatory event CITO, and a over 50 other geocaches in and around Three Hills. We also got to meet the fellow who put the maze together, which was an added bonus.

We also had the opportunity to introduce my uncle and aunt who live in Calgary to geocaching with this event, they also attended the GPS Adventures Maze with us, and also nabbed a CITO as well!

Not long before leaving we had the privilege of meeting and having our photo taken with Jeremy Irish, one of the founders of Groundspeak.

We also ended up with a bunch of cool trackables from the event; I was particularly impressed with the event geocoin, Landsharkz always does a great job on the coins they produce and this one was top notch. Jeremy also gifted us a couple of his personal trackable tags and we bought a few coins at the event as well.

All in all a great event and a fun adventure! We really enjoyed this opportunity to explore and geocache in an area that we normally couldn't.

Team rhondle with Jeremy Irish

Shuswap Mass Cache Dash - GC2JZN9 - July 9th, 2011

The Shuswap Mass Cache Dash event was a huge success!!

Event Schedule

7:30am - 8:00am - Setup and early birds! 

8:00am - 9:00am - Registration opens, coin view/swap, coffee, form teams, meet & greet, load GPX files, printed materials, etc.

9:00am - 6:00pm - Geocaching!!

6:00pm - 6:30pm - Claim FTF prizes

6:30pm - 7:30pm - CITO and wrap-up. Cold soft drinks, coin swap, socialize, clean up, relaxing!

Attendance

There were 60 teams that registered a 'will attend' log. Of those, we had 56 teams actually attend (who actually signed into the guest book). There were a total of 91 people who attended the event.

The CITO had 45 teams sign into the log book, 66 people in total.

There were 117 geocaches placed for the evnet, plus the event itself, the additional CITO event, and the traveling geocache that was present - a total of 120 geocaches!


Cache Size / Type Breakdown

Here is a breakdown of the geocaches placed for the event.

Cache Sizes micro 68 small 30 regular 13 large 1 unknown 5 Cache Types traditional 111 multi 4 mystery 2

FTF Prizes

There were a total of 20 FTF prizes handed out, as well as many additional donated prizes that were raffled off at the end. It is unfortunate that we were unable to have enough prizes for everyone, but at least we had a good number.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the sponsors of this event who donated prizes!

Landsharkz

Worldcaching

Groundspeak

Skifast (two geocoins)

Tulameen Turtles (two geocoins)

And eveyone else who donated prizes!

Cache Placers

Our hats go off to everyone who helped place geocaches for the event! In particular, I would like to acknowledge the following cachers who went above and beyond. Without their help this event would not have been the success that it was.

• Sadseagull
• Stampcoin
• Groundhog & Shadow
• KnightOrc & Catwoman
• Shuswap Ed
• Autotech

And last but not least, thanks to everyone who came to the event. We hope we can do this again next year!

Milestone: 1,000 finds!

That's right, on October 30th, 2010 we made B09: The Disappearing Golf Course our 1,000th find!

And to commemorate our milestone, we activated our newly arrived 2010 BCGA Geocoin.

Some statistics:

Duration since signup to reach 1000 finds:

• 1,574 days
• 4 years, 3 months, 21 days
• 135,993,600 seconds
• 2,266,560 minutes
• 37,776 hours
• 224 weeks (rounded down)

Of course, these numbers are possibly slightly impeded by our near-record "geoslump" of 477 days. (I wonder who holds the records for longest geoslump with >1000 finds?)

Number of FTFs: 50 (5%)

Non-traditional cache types
Multi: 60
Mystery: 34
Event: 12
Earthcache: 7
Virtuals: 6
Letterbox: 2
Benchmarks: 2
Webcam: 1
Project APE: 1
Whereigo: 1
HQ: Yes

So what's next for us? Well, we are going to focus a lot less on the numbers and instead focus on getting more non-traditional caches. It'll probably take us another three years before we get to our next major milestone, but that's okay with us!

Autumn Geocaching Trip

Well the year is winding down and we hadn't done much geocaching over the past few months, so we decided to embark on a weekend geocaching trip. Our three day trip took us to Revelstoke, down through Nakusp, Nelson, Castlegar, Trail and Osoyoos. We ended up with 50 geocaches exactly, and learned that with a toddler, it's pretty darn tough to get more than around 20 geocaches in a day.

As we are getting very close to our 1,000 geocache milestone, we're expecting to get that sometime in November if the weather holds. If not, well, we might have to wait until next year.

5 Years of Geocaching!

Today marks the five year anniversary of us signing up for our Geocaching account!

I still remember hearing about the sport long before actually signing up, and I wish now I had done so sooner. I found my very first geocache the very next day - July 11th, 2006 - on my lunch break about a block from the office where I worked in Vancouver.

However, as we didn't own a GPS, we never really got into the hobby; we relied on a GPS that we had borrowed and it wasn't really a very good one. We still succeeded in finding a few geocaches around where we lived, but we hadn't caught the bug at that point.

After a lengthy hiatus (477 days without a find!), we moved to Salmon Arm and I received a GPS for Christmas - a Garmin eTrex-H - and after a walk through the snow on a very cold day our geoslump was over!