I have often said that the only way I am going to fill the date grid for January is to hold events in a pub on every day because I so rarely go geocaching in January because of the bad weather. My posts for January every year seem to start that the caching year started like previous years with events in pubs… 2017 was no exception Continue reading
The last 10 caches of 2016… 3 Survey Monuments and 7 Events, no tupperware in sight – and though I did use a GPS to locate the more remote YOSM got out of the habit of keeping the caches on it up to date. I managed 225 smileys in 2016 which makes it by far the worst full year I’ve had for caching, only 22 caches more than the 203 I found in 2009, and I only started caching at the very end of May so that 203 was in 7 months.
Back in March last year (March 2015 that is) I was at an event in Harrogate talking to Robin (Harrogate Hunters) and Steve (Mad Yokel) – or rather I was listening to them discussing the first Mega Event (Harrogate 2008) and that it would be great if we had the 10th Anniversary Mega back in Harrogate or close by.
Fast forward a couple or three months and I was at another event in Ripon talking to Dave (EeBiGum) and Rich (Richlay) about caching, and we got around to the same subject – wouldn’t it beg great to hold the 10th Anniversary Mega in Harrogate.
A couple of days later I decided to take the bull by the horns and I did what anyone would do when faced with a new project – I started a Facebook Group for it !
From this we decided that the way forward was to hold an interest meeting, which got plenty people to it and a committee formed from them, then we applied for the 2018 Mega and we were successful in getting the 10th Anniversary Mega held by the Yorkshire Organising committee – of which I somehow ended up the Vice-Chairman (basically I didn’t want to be the figurehead in charge, I just wanted to be in a position of enough authority to be able to persuade people that they really wanted to do it my way….)
We then started out debating the important things – forget venues and fundraising, the important things were a) the logo and b) what colour shirts we were going to wear.
Once that was sorted out we moved on to venues and eventually contacted several, got their quotes, made a short list and visited them all to make a decision.
Now it’s just a case of raising the £000’s needed to hold the event – as we are individually liable for any shortfall in funding – not that that is at all likely to happen as we are being well supported by the local and National caching community.
The day following the Mega I woke up in my hotel and decided that I would spend the morning looking for caches around Corwen (the town I was staying in). The first of these, the Church Micro, took rather longer to find than expected as it was hidden behind the church on a track that was not obvious how you got onto it, so I ended up walking all round the roads around the church until I found the right track ! Continue reading
6th August 2016 – NORTH WALES 2016 UK MEGA EVENT GC5TQ6Q – cache #4127
Although I had all the 2018 Uk Mega promo stuff in my car and spent the first hour setting up our purple Yorkshire 2018 Stall. I spent all the rest of the day in the hall with Adam on the UKCacheMag stand… apart from between 12:22 and 12:24 – when for some reason the hall emptied, probably something to do with a flypast by the Red Arrows as they travelled from one display to another – Spectacular ! Continue reading
On the Friday afternoon at the Mega I went down to Llangollen and took a walk over the Pontycylte aqueduct and along the canal as far as cache LCT:070 and then walked back picking off the caches as I came to them.
No need to worry about being seen by others as although the towpath was busy every one on it was a cacher anyway !
I’m not going to write them up individually as the experience was pretty much the same for every cache – walk 0.1 of a mile and look for one of 2 types of hide, either under a stone or behind a fencepost. Continue reading