Happy 15th Birthday Geocaching! Part Two...

medals and various other prizes
just waiting to be won

After several successful hours of geocaching in the woods, it was finally time for the main event- a picnic and geotrivia!

As previously stated, this Event cache was to celebrate the 15th birthday of the greatest game ever played: Geocaching!


On May 2, 2000, President Bill Clinton had Selective Availability lifted and geeks around the world rejoiced.

But what to do with this new found freedom of accuracy from billion dollar satellites? Light bulb! Let's hide Tupperware in the woods and challenge others to find it. It's what happens when you tell nerds to "go outside and play".

Dave Ulmer ultimately started the GeoCaching phenomenon. He hid a bunch of trinkets out in the woods of Portland, Oregon. He then went to the USENET group sci.geo.satellite-nav and stated “If you take something, leave something”.

One of the items Ulmer hid in the first "stash" was a can of beans.  So to honor this first cache, and just because it was a really cool idea, debaere chose the logbook for our event to be a giant can of beans.

 this is what "Catholic school girl"
handwriting looks like

When asked which of us should write the event name on the can, it was decided that Linda should be the one, as she had (and I quote) " Catholic school girl handwriting".

GroundsKeeperWillie signing a log
and capturing the smilie

There were many memorable questions during the quiz, one of which went something like this:
15 years ago, which celebrity who often appeared on Star Trek became a charter member of Geocaching and goes be the  geo-handle of "GroundsKeeperWillie"?

Have you guessed the correct answer yet?

If you guessed William Shatner....sorry, you get no points.

If you guessed Wil Wheaton...Congrats! You know your geotrivia!




Congrats to Team "55" and Happy Birthday
to WimseyGuy

 Our team, consisting of ncbiscuit, debaere, The Alethiometers (Ken and Jen) and myself, won the prize for Most Creative Team Name with "I Would Do Anything For Trivia, But I Won't Do That". Or just "Meatloaf" for short. And for the record, I still have yet to figure out what "that" is, but apparently it was unanimous that we would not do it.  


As the afternoon progressed, Team Meatloaf walked away with many wins and many delightful prizes! Though we did not end up winning, we did at least come in second place to team "I Can't Drive 55" who were there celebrating the birthday of fellow team member Matt who was turning 55. Congrats on the win!




If you have never attended one of the "It's All Just Trivial" events, then you truly do not know what you are missing out on. Hoosiersunshine and FailedApparatus put in unimaginable hours and effort into these contests to make sure everyone has an amazing time and the results are an hour and a half of nail-biting, breath-holding fun. All the questions are geocaching themed and there are prizes for winning each round and lots of prizes thrown in between rounds for random reasons as well.  You can walk away with a free unactivated geocoin or an entire ready-to-hide cache just for showing up! 

A huge "Thank You" to hoosiersunshine and FailedApp for all the effort they put in to organizing the trivia part of our Event cache. These two have single handedly (well, technically double handed I guess, but you get it) been responsible for educating and entertaining fellow cachers all over the Eastern side of the USA for over a year and I really feel they are the epitome of what passion for this game is all about. You guys rock!

Just a note that they are up for Geocacher of the Month and if you agree with how much they have both contributed to the geocaching community then it would be awesome if you would follow this link and vote for them simply by adding their names to the comment section of the article! http://www.geocaching.com/blog/2015/04/nominate-the-april-2015-geocacher-of-the-month/?utm_source=facebookhq&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Social
(Alright... shameless, yet well deserved, plug done now)