A 'lil HooHaa

Messing with the blogging world since 2005

geowoodstock xiii

GeoWoodstock: A wrap!

What a weekend GeoWoodstock was!

This will be the final in my series about the event and the weekend full of geocaching. I’m going to do a wrap of sorts here to talk about some numbers and such. I’m still looking back and enjoying the weekend that we had down there and can’t wait for the Geocaching Block Party in Seattle in August.

The log at this year's GeoWoodstock!

The log at this year’s GeoWoodstock!

But, I wanted to do a tally of some things we did this weekend:

  • 5 states (New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia)
  • 150 caches found
  • 11 events (including one mega)
  • 3 Earthcaches
  • 3 Mystery caches
  • 2 Virtuals
  • 2 Lab caches
  • 1 Letterbox
  • Of all those found caches, a combined 9,445 favorite points!

I also reached the 4,000 finds mark, and set a new record by finding 85 caches in one day!

In the end, it was one heck of a great time. Two of us are tentatively planning a weeklong road trip to GeoWoodstock XIV next year in Denver. It will include many states, lots of caching fun and a trip to remember.

It's always fun to meet up with old caching friends at big events!

It’s always fun to meet up with old caching friends at big events!

I haven’t done many road trips like the one I’ll eventually start to plan, but I’m hoping for an epic week full of fun and crazy geocaching, maybe a baseball game or three, and maybe even a disc golf round or two.

This GeoWoodstock was great in that I got to catch up with some people I met at my first GW, as well as others I’ve met through the years. Geocaching is a cool community full of people from different backgrounds and lives. It makes for a diverse and fun crowd. My hope is to make GeoWoodstock an annual trip to catch up with friends and utilize it as an event that becomes one I can’t miss.

This year was a fantastic event. Maybe the 2016 event can be find No. 5,000!

Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail P.J. at hoohaablog@gmail.com. Also, please “Like” HooHaa Blog on Facebook!

GeoWoodstock: A stellar weekend all around

My first GeoWoodstock was in Warren, Pa., in 2011.

What an experience it was. I had known about GeoWoodstock since I started geocaching, but I had never been because it had been in places not too close to me.

So with it being in western Pennsylvania, I knew I had to go to it.

Several years passed and it was coming back closer to the Northeast in Boonsboro, Maryland. I made reservations early and waited. When pre-registration opened, I signed up and ordered the items I wanted. Then I waited some more.

This year's GeoWoodstock was an amazing event!

This year’s GeoWoodstock was an amazing event!

Memorial Day weekend was the culmination of that wait.

One thing I found out and realized with this one is how into it the whole community seemed to be. Businesses welcomed people with no issues. People seemed to know about and embrace the thousands of people coming into the area for this event.

That’s a positive thing.

More than that, the committee behind this GeoWoodstock was stellar.

From the early arrival event on Friday to the main event on Saturday, things ran smooth. There were so many solid vendors. The food offerings were really good. I didn’t see many seminars, but the ones I peeked in on seemed to be solid and well-done. There were also a bunch of people at each one.

The weather didn’t hurt, either.

With sunny skies, it was a fine weekend to be outside. People chatted and swapped stories. Pathtag trading was being done all over. For my little group, we spent some time at the event, went and cached some, then came back for the end of the event. We then cached more before coming back for the Midnight Madness event (more on that in a future post).

This truly was one of the best geocaching experiences I’ve ever had.

The whole weekend was awesome. There were many satellite events, loads of geocaches to be found, and friendly people everywhere you went.

I also loved the amount of vendors and, as noted earlier, they were all solid. There were different geocaching items for sale, which was nice to see.

This event also got me back into the geocaching mood. From December to about early April, I kind of wasn’t into it. Part of it was the weather, but another part was I was a little stale with things. I needed a small break. A weekend like this was perfect because I got to remember all the good things about geocaching.

It also made me realize I want to start making plans for the next one, which is during July 4 weekend next year just outside of Denver. I’ve never been to Colorado, so this seems like a good reason. The cool part is two of us got talking about it and are thinking about making it a road trip – driving out and back – to get a bunch of states and great caches. So we’ll see how it goes. It doesn’t hurt to plan. The worst-case scenario is I don’t go and have to cancel any reservations I make. In a perfect world, I’ll make this a yearly trip.

It was a fantastic time though and if you are a geocacher and have never been to GeoWoodstock, I’d highly encourage you to attend one at some point!

Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail P.J. at hoohaablog@gmail.com. Also, please “Like” HooHaa Blog on Facebook!

GeoWoodstock: The creative geocaches of WVTim

When heading to GeoWoodstock, I did some serious research to make the caching routes as efficient as possible. Sometimes, it’s harder than others to do that.

While doing a “way down” list, I came across one cache created by WVTim and it had hundreds of favorite points. More digging showed even more caches with hundreds of favorite points.

Creativity made WVTim's caches amazingly fun.

Creativity made WVTim’s caches amazingly fun.

Gadget caches seemed to be his specialty – in other words, you needed to use a gadget of some sort to get the cache out.

These caches – or at least many of them – had to be done.

The plan was on the Friday of the long weekend to go hit many of these caches and see all about them. Needless to say, we weren’t disappointed. The sad part is, we should have taken down codes and such as I think we might have been able to land the free geocoin offered for a couple of the trails that Tim has caches on. Oh well, the caches by themselves were way worth it.

I also had a chance to speak a little with Tim at GeoWoodstock and am going to talk to him at some point for a story on the blog I really want to dig in and see where he comes up with all of these amazing ideas.

Without giving everything away (though there are YouTube videos out about many of his caches), check out a few of these caches and what was needed/used:

  • Jumper cables
  • Batteries
  • Motion sensors
  • Solar panels
  • Electricity
  • Magnets
  • Sense of smell
  • An Etch-a-Sketch (it was in the cache’s first part)

And how they are all used is pretty amazing all by itself. It seemed like every one that we went to made us smile or look at it in amazement. The caches were all well-done, all locked so they couldn’t be stolen, and all had permission to be placed. That’s something in this day and age.

Bring you sense of smell to be able to get to the log in this cache!

Bring you sense of smell to be able to get to the log in this cache!

The best part, though, was it was rare for us to have to worry about being around others. For the most part, we had the opportunity to go cache to cache without lines of people, which is often the case when you are at mega events. The ones where we did see people, we made sure to wait from a distance so we had the chance to do it ourselves.

Now, the cool part is caches like this give me inspiration to come up with some clever and fun hides. The issue, though, is being able to pull them off. I’m not the handiest person in the world, so I’ll have to think about things a bit to see what I can come up with.

Not all of his caches required gadgets, though. Some were just plain creative or fun. Such as the human-sized mouse trap with an ammo can painted as a block of cheese. The reality is he is just one creative hider and the caches were fun to do.

Either way, it made the weekend that much  better with these caches. It’s good to know people put a lot of thought and such into their ideas. In the few minutes I got to speak with him, I got some pretty good insight about the process and hopefully, when I get the chance to talk with him more in-depth, I’ll get a bit more.

I always wonder when I see caches with a lot of favorites if it’s totally well-earned, or if it’s just cool and people click that favorite box. But when you are talking hundreds of favorites, you know something has to be good and these caches weren’t just good—they were great. I hope to make a trip back down there to do the ones I didn’t finish as I am highly curious to see what they have to offer!

Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail P.J. at hoohaablog@gmail.com. Also, please “Like” HooHaa Blog on Facebook!

GeoWoodstock: An experience

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.

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.

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!

Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail P.J. at hoohaablog@gmail.com. Also, please “Like” HooHaa Blog on Facebook!