The Elk Grove Geocachers hosted a breakfast Monday morning at Elk Grove Park as a closing event to a great Geocaching weekend. Called ‘Thanks For The Memories’, it gave us a chance to say good-bye to all of the new friends that we met at GeoWoodstock VI and it also gave us a chance to make some new ones too!

The food was excellent and there was lots of it, with far more choices than any restaurant buffet! It was supplied by the members of the Elk Grove Geocachers and included homegrown apricots, delicious blackberries, a variety of other fresh fruit, bacon, eggs, pancakes, biscuits and gravy, a french toast casserole, sausages. chilaquilles and more. There was also a variety of drinks including coffee and juices.

After we all ate there were some announcements, a singing of Happy Birthday for ‘MamaCache’ who was celebrating her birthday and a raffle was held for variety of items including Geocoins and cache containers.

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GeoWoodstock VI was an obvious success as around 3000 Geocachers from all over the world converged on the small town of Wheatland, California. This was our first Mega-Event and our first GeoWoodstock. We had such a great time that you can be assured we’ll be at the next one!

We arrived at the event shortly after the 9:00 AM opening and we were quickly escorted to our parking spot on a very large field. The attendants did a great job bringing us ‘in for a landing’ with their cool little orange flags!

We were greeted at the entrance gate by a large banner welcoming us to the event:

Once inside we were met with a bevy of tents housing everything from first-aid to fire tacks! There were tents for the information booth, the Travel Bug center and quite a large series of tents for the raffle items. The largest area of tents was the Vendors area called Swag Alley. We never seen so much Geocaching swag in one place! As you can imagine, this was a VERY popular spot.

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We just got back from the GeoWoodstock Meet and Greet that was held tonight not too far from our hotel here to Roseville, California. It was estimated that there about a thousand Geocachers in attendance!

After picking up our registration package and rooting through it to see what cool and neat stuff we got we found what we were looking for - our Geo-Bingo card! This card was our ticket to escaping from the awkward icebreaker question you tend to default to when meeting people for the first time, “So, where are you from?”. With it we were able to ask such questions as, “Have you ever Geocached on a motorcycle?” or “Have you hid more than 50 caches?” and our favorite, “Have you ever been questioned by authorities while Geocaching?”.

Set up like a traditional bingo card but with questions about Geocaching the object was to find Geocachers that met the particular question and to have them sign the card. Not only does this get you to meet people but for every completed row on your card you get a raffle ticket plus 5 bonus tickets for a completed card! This led to a lot of conversation as you exchanged cards and signed the cards for others where you could and had yours filled likewise. It also led to a lot of fun!

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Woohoo! Our Geocaching signature cards were ready this morning and we just picked them up. These will come in really handy when we meet other Geocachers as well as dropping them off into caches to say that we were there.

Here is what the front of the cards looks like:

And here is what the back of the cards looks like:

They are 3 1/2″ X 2″, the size of a standard business card.

They arrived just in time too because we leave early tomorrow morning for GeoWoodstock VI where we’re looking at meeting a lots of other Geocachers. Last count we heard was that they are expecting 2700!

Keep on cachin’!

Well, it’s quite a spring! We were waiting for it for so long and when it came it really came! It has to be one of the best springs that we have had in this area for a long time. Unfortunately this meant trying to get things done around the house that we haven’t been able to get to for so many springtimes. I believe we got more done in the past month than we were able to do in the past 3 springs! We got the gardens cleaned up, a couple of new gardens put in, lots of dead trees cleaned up, tore down and replaced the driveway culvert ends and a whole lot more.

Now that this is all behind us we were finally able to get out for a bit of Geocaching this morning. We chose to do the trail around a small lake called Juniper Lake.

We found all six Geocaches that are on the trail. Each one was a pretty easy find. One in particular held a surprise for mrs_go. It was in the top of a hollowed out tree trunk and when she pulled it out she was greeted by a squirrel that popped it’s head up out of the trunk!

Here’s a photo of the squirrel near the cache. We tried to coax him back into the hole for a cool photo shot but he was a bit timid and stayed his distance. I guess we surprised him too!

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