I am going to be doing a series of posts about my GeoWoodstock experience, starting with this one.
For those who don’t know, GeoWoodstock is one of the biggest annual geocaching events in the world and it’s attended by people from many countries and states. It’s a blast, for sure. There are events leading in, and some after. The “main event” has many vendors and things to do.
Needless to say, it’s not just an event that one throws together and runs. It takes time and planning. They don’t announce where the next one is until after the current one ends. It’s a pretty big deal, for sure.
The group from the event I hosted a few days before GeoWoodstock.
We arrived on Thursday night ready to hit up three events and find some geocaches. This would be the start of a crazy weekend with more than 100 finds, 11 events, countless pathtags traded, an a milestone I had been waiting a long time to get to.
In my area, I’ve done a couple of events called “Attention shoppers … is someone sleeping?” The idea of the event is to see how crazy geocachers can be. Why are they crazy? Well, I have the events in the middle of the night!
The first three were held in a parking lot of a 24-hour big-box store. The first was on a cold November night in 2012 and drew 14 people. That one was at 1 a.m., too! That time turned out to even be too late for me, so I had to change that.
The following year, we went in early October and I shifted it to 11:30 p.m. and we drew 18 people. It seemed like the earlier time helped things a bit.
Then in 2014, I went with a July event and made it at 11:45 p.m., hoping maybe we’d draw some tourists. Alas, this one didn’t go so well and we dropped down to seven people.
I decided I wanted in on the GeoWoodstock activities to see what the heck we could do down there. So, on a nice May evening on the first night of events at GeoWoodstock, I held an event in a big-box parking lot at 11:55 p.m. With 33 people saying they’d come, I figured we’d break the record… but oh my!
The event log.
As of this writing, we have 77 logged attendees. I have a feeling a few more will likely log as well, considering people are probably still trying to catch up with logging of weekend events.
Turns out geocachers are crazy!
It was a fun way to start off the weekend, one in which I found a way to relax and forget about many things for several days.
In future stories as part of this series, I’m going to write about some incredible caches we found during the weekend, the big event, a milestone for me, and finally a full weekend review. It was a weekend I won’t forget for quite a while.
In the coming days, I’ll have several posts about the weekend and different things in regard to it, so keep an eye out!
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