The Maritime Geobash – Forestfauna’s Perspective
I attended the event with my entire family in tow, plus a few semi-active caching friends from Centreville. We crashed at their place this past weekend, and got to the event early afternoon in order to make GCBBA beforehand. Although I thought the event was great, and the organizers did a good job given the scope/number of people, I was a bit disappointed in a few things:
1. There were no (or very few) signs along the road leading to the event location. This was a big deal considering the MARC site was useless and had no street address.
2. There were no signs indicating where anything was. We had to wander blindly around to find the registration tent, vendors, and trackables.
3. Door prize tickets and the give out was poorly thought-out. IF you found the trackables tent, you found the sign which had coordinates to two caches with number chips. You then took the numbered chips to the registration tent to get your name in the door prize. Isn’t the idea of a door prize that anyone who registers gets a shot at a prize, just for coming to the event, whether they do anything or not?
As for the prizes, my daughter got a Delorme 60 car mount, which is completely useless for anyone NOT having one of those GPSs. Another guy got the map software for the unit; I saw him wander around afterwards wondering if anyone wanted it. The big grand prize was an actual DeLorme 60. Why not bundle all three into one single big prize?
4. There was no posting of the event schedule with location and times ANYWHERE. No signs, nothing. There should have at least been a sheet put in the registration pack.
5. My biggest gripe has to be the “event” and “attendee” geocoins. I purchased both, as I read either on the ACGA forums or the event forums that the attendee coin would look “really different” and have a “nice feature”. The difference? One of them has “I Attended” with some squiggly lines that look like a cloud or a seagull or something. I refer to that as my “magic marker geocoin”, as I could have done that myself to my event geocoin using a Sharpie and saved the extra ten bucks!
Overall, it was a great event, and there are obviously some growing pains when trying to pull off something this big.
Me and Rev Slippery did a real fast trip down and back that morning. We were only there from 10-10:30 so we got there quite early before any real crowds started to hit. My personal opinion on it…
For starters, no one in this area has ever tried to do a mega event before, so regardless of what was done right or wrong, SOMEONE had to try and do it first which meant they had to manage the expectations of people and try to their best with no real frame of reference for this area. Someone had to try it first so whatever worked and didn’t work, it had to be done to figure that out so that future events could be even better.
I think they had great intentions. The ACGA (and I know it wasn’t an ACGA event but a lot of ACGA folks were involved), and hell, any of the regional groups, have never tried to organize an event on the scale of a mega, and so this being the first time, there were bound to be some bumps in the road. I cannot comment on the door prizes as I didn’t participate in that, but as far as registration was concerned, we were directed by someone in the parking area where to go and start so we didn’t have any trouble finding the registration tent. The TB tent was just getting set up when we were there.
We did find the location relatively easy but we did not see any actual signs to the event until we turned around and came back the other direction. Seems the only signs they had were for the main road, and not the side one which we came in. We knew where it was based on our GPS’s so we ultimately had no real issues finding the place, just trying to figure out how to get in.
I only got the regular coin and I got it because I was there. Personally, and this is just my opinion, I think the mascot was kind of cheezy and thusly the coin’s look is affected by that. However, a coin is still a coin. The folks behind the bash could have passed on the coin entirely because it is the most expensive thing to produce, so the fact that they went through with getting one done is still a nice touch. Not keen on the design but at least they did something.
I can’t comment on any of the prizes stuff as I did not participate but I’m guessing Delorme was a big sponsor so perhaps that is the reason why the prizes were all Delorme based.
Personally, I think location played a big role in the lack of attendees. Don’t get me wrong, they’ve already logged almost 200 attendees for this event which is great amount of people for a regular event, just not for a mega. I understand the reasoning behind why they chose that location, I just don’t think it was the best choice in terms of attracting the most cachers. But once again, they had to pick a spot and they chose that one for what I am assuming was a valid and logical reason. We’ve seen the result and now we’ve learned more because of it.
So for me, I see this event as an incredible effort put on by a good group of people who had a giant task in front of them. They did their best and they learned from this event, and hopefully this will help make any future attempts at a mega even better.
Like Zor I didn’t stay long enough to make any judgments about how it was run, I say kudos for doing it. They had to almost beg to get people to help so I cannot say anything negative about those who did.
The only thing that I will say is the distance from any larger city and the extra distance everyone had to drive to get to nowhere held some people back for going. The property was big, the building the vendors was in was small, it was nice to have wifi and there were plenty of caches nearby. Many said they wanted to have the event near the first cache, Halifax would have been close enough if someone really wanted to get it. Like everything else you live and hopefully learn.
We enjoyed the event and met a lot of old friends from Ottawa and from Quebec, as will as many maritime geocaching friends.
We dropped in first around 11 and again at the end. I agree that signs on the tents and pointing the way to things would have been helpful. Also a posted schedule would have been great as there were demonstrations we might have liked. However I must admit thatlike lots of people we spent most of the day geocaching (3 hours hiking puzzle street early in the morning and all afternoon with Belladan and Jake & Ben)
But like I said, we had a great time and we think the organizers and volunteers did a great job. Next time will be even better
All good comments. I would have liked to attend, but something else came up. If this event was in Lower Sackville or even Halifax, I probably would have been able to make it there. As it was, Bridgewater was just a touch too far with what I had on my schedule.
I agree with Zor, it was an imortant event, and lots of lessons were learned, I’m sure.
Maybe it’s time to ratchet up the scope/scale of some of the events here in NB. With our geographic location, and our short drive time from many high population locations, I’m sure that we can pull in attendees. Thoughts?