Pilgrimage to Seattle Part I: The Preparation

In less than a month, I’ll be heading to Seattle, WA to attend GeoWoodstock VIII. This years annual mega event is being held in Washinton state to celebrate the 10 years of geocaching. This year many cachers are excited as having the mega in Seattle will allow many cachers to visit three very key geocaches: Groundspeak’s Headquarters (they run geocaching.com and are located in Seattle), the last Project APE cache in North America (special icon), and the Original Stash Tribute plaque which was placed on the site of the very first ever geocache location. Both GSP HQ and their Lost & Found event being held that Sunday give you a special icon.

Having never attended a Geowoodstock event before, I thought I would chronicle my entire journey from start to finish. My plan is to do some live coverage while out in the wild, as well as document some of the bigger parts of the journey.  For this part, I’m going to focus on the preparation for the trip.

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In order to insure that a geocaching trip of this magnitude goes over well, you need to do one big thing: PREPARE! There’s a lot of stuff that needs to be done before you go on a trip like this so here’s what I have been working on thus far.

Travel Arrangements

Driving to Seattle was not going to happen so the only way to get there really is to fly. Plus, while there, you need a place to stay, and a means to get around. Knowing that this year it’s all happening on the 4th of July long weekend, I knew if I was going to make plans, I needed to do them well ahead of time.

October of last year, I booked a return flight from Moncton to Seattle departing at 6am on July 1st, and returning me to Moncton on July 6th at 12:30am. I used my Aeroplan points to fly and thusly saved myself a big chunk of coin. I also used the official GW8 website to get a discount code for a Hilton hotel located within 30 minutes of GW8. Lastly, I booked a rental car for the time I would be in town, insuring to get one with unlimited mileage as I knew I would be doing a lot of driving.

Once the hotel, car, and air travel were taken care of, then I could focus on the specifics tied to my caching activities while in the area.

Schedule of Events

Knowing that GW8 was on Saturday, I gave myself two days before and a day after to serve for full caching days. But like many GW8 events, there were going to be a pile of other caching related events while in town. It was necessary to sit down and figure out which ones I wanted to attend, and how I would work them into my time.

There are several events that I want to go to:

• On The Road to GW8 – Meet & Greet for GW8 attendees – Thursday
• Going APE – Oragnized hike to the Project APE cache (with bus ticket included) – Friday
• COWWS Meet & Greet – GW8 sponsors having their own event – Friday
• Geowoodstock VIII – The mega event – Saturday
• Geocoin Madness – coin trading – Saturday
• GSP Lost & Found – HQ’s own event – Sunday

Along with those events, there were some very specific caches I wanted to get while here:

• Groundspeak Headquarters
• Project APE
• The Original Stash Plaque (where the 1st geocache was hidden)

With all of those events and caches that I want to get, I had to make up a schedule that would allow me to hit all of them, plus fit time in between to do some regular old caching. I managed to fill my days pretty full but with lots of time to cache between each location, and with some time to just relax as well. The idea is to make your schedule flexible. Pick one or two major things you want to do each day and then try to cache in the areas between each of those locations, that way you can make sure you can still make it to each event/cache within your schedule.

The Pocket Queries

Have you ever looked at the cache saturation in Washington state? Wow. Knowing that I wanted to have as many caches as possible on hand, I knew that I would need to run multiple PQ’s to get as many as I can. See, even though you know you are supposed to be in certain areas, you never know where you might end up and you don’t want to be in an area and have no caches loaded. You want to maximize the amount of caches you have on hand as much as possible.

I basically had two options:

1. Run PQ’s that include everything for both the state of Washington and Oregon giving me every possible cache there could be.
2. Run PQ’s in the main areas I will be, along with route PQ’s that give me caches along my long road trips.

The advantage to #1 is that no cache would be left out. The problem is that both Washington & Oregon are large states, so it took 17 PQ’s to get just Washington state alone. That didn’t include Oregon where some of the caches I want are. Plus, I was excluding multis and puzzles and I still had more than 12,000 caches for Washington state alone.

The other problem was that a large portion of the caches that were in those queries were for parts of the state I would not be in, such as the eastern part. It’s nice to have everything, but you also need to be reasonable about what you are doing.

So, I went with option #2. Using this, I did PQ’s from each of the events I was travelling to, plus route PQ’s from one location to another (depending on where I was starting at). I also did PQ’s at each of the major geocache locations knowing that I would be in that area. I knew that there would be some overlap but the idea was to try and cover all of the areas I knew I would be in.

When all was said and done, I had 15 PQ’s which covered all of the areas of Seattle & Portland, and pretty much everything in between. It generated just over 7600 geocaches and that excluded puzzles and multis. Everything else was included.

My plan is to use GSAK to do some filtering to make my life a bit easier and to maximize the chances of getting finds vs DNFs. For starters, all caches that are disabled will be filtered out. I also filter out any caches where the last four logs contain two DNF’s/Needs Archived/Needs Maintenance logs on them. I know that some difficult caches might fit into that realm but I want to maximize my finds. Plus, I’ll have the master PQ on my laptop so I can always reload if I need to. The last filter will be by state. As long as I am in Washington state, I’ll filter out the Oregon caches, and vice versa. This will reduce the 7600 caches to under 5000 which is the maximum amount supported on my GPS.

The Route

Inspired by paulandstacey, I decided to work on a “route” while out on my trip. Now mind you I can’t get as granular as his route’s, but I thought it might be a good idea to load the PQ into Google Earth and start mapping out good cache areas to hit while travelling from one area to another.

For example, I arrive at the Seattle airport on Thursday around 11:30am and I have my appointment at Groundspeak HQ for 2:00pm. That means I should probably make my way to HQ directly from the airport. From HQ, I can then snag a pile of the caches in that immediate area, and to the south. There’s an event in Everett that evening so really what I should do is cache in a northerly direction towards the event. So, looking on Google Earth, I found good areas where there are caches and made note of the GC #’s in a certain order that makes sense. I follow the directions from one point to the next event and make note of caches along the way that look like they might be interesting or easy to get.

This doesn’t mean I HAVE to get every one of those caches, but it is a good way to prevent just driving around aimlessly. As anyone who has cached in larger cities can tell you, sometimes it’s hellish trying to get to one cache. If you have an idea of each area, it can make it vastly easier to find caches. Ultimately, aside from the “big” ones I want to get, I’ll take and find I can get.

So for each day, I plotted out various areas between events and major caches and made note of GC codes (which I prefer instead of names) for caches that I think I could get. I leave lots of room to get other caches while on the road but at least I have a few tagged as ones I should try and pick up. Now that I have this master list of GC codes, my next step is to reference them in geographic areas to make it a bit easier to know where I will be finding them. Plus, I might include the cache names as sometimes that can be useful as well. We’ll see.

The Bugs

The last thing I have been working on is collecting travel bugs and coins to bring with me. I currently have 31 trackables and need to decide where I want to drop them. GW8 has a very specific set of guidelines for TBs and coins and I don’t want to sit down and do it for every bug so I suspect I will only drop a small amount there. The rest will likely get dropped in the APE cache, GSP HQ, or possible the Sunday event.

I currently have all of my bugs dropped in an old archived cache of mine. Sometime before now and when I leave, my plan is to split them into groups. Each group will get “dropped” at a specific location/event before I leave and I’ll just have them grouped together in my luggage so I know which bugs go where.

If you have any bugs/coins you want moved out west, send them my way.

Stayed tuned! Part II of this series of articles will focus on the day of travel, GSP HQ, and the start of the GW8 adventure.