1. The Mega
Firstly, the Mega event was great. Such an eye opener in terms of the shear size and organisation. I'm not even going to try and go into the thanks and superlatives that others have heaped upon it. Let us just say Thank You. It was great to see so many geocachers in one place, and to run into so many geocachers out in the field - this was perhaps the coolest thing even. Never, ever, run into that many cachers in the field, even when running around town at 11pm on Friday night. Serious thank you to the Riverina committee that pulled it all together.
It has got us thinking about how we could run a Mega in New Zealand, and whilst the seed has been sown, I think it will be a few years before we can get the numbers, and we'd be pretty reliant upon having a lot of support from Aussie cachers to come across. That being said, we thought Christchurch would probably be the best centre to have it in - good caching, good infrastructure, international airport, and gateway to the South Island where you just _have_ to go caching and have a field trip. But it is nothing more that a thought at this point. Riverina have set a pretty solid bar to beat.
2. Thanks to the placers of caches we found.
As we tend to go a little cache crazy at times, we did again this trip. We found ~820 caches in 16 days. Our trip started in Sydney, south to Cronulla, Batemans Bay, through to Canberra, down to Cooma, some weird path up and around to Albury, up to Wagga Wagga, over to Bendigo, Ballarat, Geelong and Queenscliff, and finally some of the western suburbs of Melbourne before flying home. Took in NSW, ACT and VIC this trip. Clocked up 5.5k on Thrifty's poor rental Previa, that saw more dirt tracks that it will care to see again in its life time
How to thank all the placers? That's hard. According to my stats from the trip, we found caches by 269 usernames. I've listed the top ten below. Thanks to each and every one of the 269 of you for sharing a little bit of Australia with us.
1 (29) Roostaman
2 (24) vp4
3 (23) Fore!
4 (21) RedPaw64
5 (19) the farmers 5
6 (18) flyjabiru1
7 (17) Rescue-201
8 (17) TEAM DENMAR
9 (14) fozzy778
10 (14) Sol de lune
I've just been reading a couple of the logging threads, and I'd like to say a little from the perspective of a group undertaking a bit of a mission as we were. It can be quite difficult to remember each and every cache - even with field notes, tracklogs and the joy of Google Earth. Sometimes you just can't remember a cache and you have to resort to a generic and non-descript log. For me, that is a log of last resort - but one that I still had to use 20-30 times this trip. Given we were focusing on caching, we were out caching till 10-11 every night, and so were not logging each evening, and for most of us the logging didn't start till we were back home in NZ, a good 18 days after the first finds, and 800+ caches to try and remember. For me I think that was two solid days logging this past weekend. Our apologies if we couldn't write a good log for all of them. It is honestly very difficult for a trip like this to do that. You can suggest slowing down, but frankly, that ain't gonna happen - we're here to cache hard till we go home
I am going to single out Big Matt and Shell here for thanking me for taking the time to try and write distinct logs. It was actually nice as a finder, getting thanks from a hider, for understanding the difficulty on such a mission to actually write 800+ distinct logs. Thanks Matt
3. Milestones aplenty
We managed to chalk up a number of milestones on the trip. ADV found his 6000th cache. I found my 5000th. Tofska found his 4000th, and Pohutukawa his 2000th. Additionally, I know Moneydork and I clocked up our 2000th Australian finds, and ADV and tofska must have been close to doing the same. I think I've just passed 1000 NSW finds. We're starting to feel quite at home over here
Near the end of the trip, we figured we had about 27k combined finds sitting in the rental. Meaningless? Of course. But we still found that a quaint little factoid.4. Favourite caches
Yes we'll add some, but I need to prompt the others, and I need to go back through my logs and find my favourite 5-10 caches. There were some stunners out there. I was disappointed that we couldn't try any of the Rubik's series in Wagga, as it is likely to be a long time before we return there - disappointing giving the rave reviews we saw in some of the logs. Hope they manage to last till we get back to have a go at them.
5. An invite
Our cache is your cache. We'd love to see more Australians coming over to the Shakey Isles and doing some caching here. I know we've got a few Aussies coming over in the next couple of months - we're planning a couple of meet the Aussie cacher events in Christchurch. Make yourself at home. If you want to hook up with locals, come see us on http://forums.gps.org.nz/ - we're friendly and we won't bite (this is also one of the benefits of caching in NZ
). I also want to see an Australian team come over and do a raid in Christchurch and set a big record in NZ. Most of the cachers here in NZ that would do that have already cached hard in Christchurch, so we're looking to an Australian team to do it. FYI - Christchurch is very like Adelaide, sister cities and all - hint hint Give us subtle notice, and we might be able to make sure a few more trads are placed. And before someone asks the obvious, yes a return trip to Adelaide will occur at some point. We're just saving up the caches Anyway, thanks so much for the Mega, and thanks so much to all the cachers that placed caches we were able to find on our trip.
No thanks to those we couldn't.
heheCheers Gav aka rediguana
PS some trip stats from GSAK
PPS those that heard Moneydork on Geotalk a couple of months back will remember him suggesting 600-800 caches for the upcoming trip - we even got that number wrong...
