(by Silyngufy)
June 11, 2016 marked the 3rd bi-annual Road Rally Event (GC6AMQ3) hosted by Chevyole and family. With the addition of a new Ole in March, Ranger Boy and I offered to help plan the event. A new venue was found in Hartland at Nixon Park, which offered a shelter, restrooms and a nearby splash pad for kids. Chevy, RB and I spent months planning new caches and tasks to perform. The cache page was created and soon we had 13 teams from around the state and Illinois committed to race!
Then the fun really began. The Goldie Diggers alter ego, Geffie, made a few appearances on You Tube trash talking the other teams. Team Rambo was ready to race!!!! Death Race 3000, Team Epic, Team from BCCC, Cache-Me-If-You-Can, Team Free Radicals, and all the other teams were ready for the challenge.
At the beginning of the Rally, each team was given a packet with instructions. There were 17 caches and 20 optional tasks from which to choose and had a 4 hour time limit. Some teams opted to find only the caches, other teams opted to perform only the tasks, and some teams chose to try to incorporate both. That’s the beauty of the Road Rally. Each team could invent their own adventure.
What a great day it turned out to be. The weather was beautiful and everyone was in good spirits. The teams took off between 8:00 and 8:20 and it wasn’t long before we had our first PAF call. Several teams were having trouble locating one of the hardest caches on the rally and decided to play rock/paper/scissors to decide who had to call for a hint. DR3K lost the game and incurred a penalty.
Team Rambo came back to the shelter and reported that Goldie had taken his infamous digger, not once but twice! Racing his way to a cache called “Race to the Finish (GC6EPKE)” he tripped and did a forward roll, got up and proceeded to face-plant. I wonder when he will learn to follow the paths to the cache and not try to bushwhack through the overgrowth.
Ranger Boy attempted something new this year. He burned music CDs to accompany the caches he created. The idea was to listen to the songs and identify various landmarks noted in the songs and find the related caches. There were two caches that involved getting into the water and one running up a hill. This was a new twist and brought an interesting aspect to the rally.
At 11:00 Chevy, GrillMaster BJ, and I decided to (what else) walk down to Beer Snobs and watch the racers come in for their flight of beer. We decided as long as we were there, we might as well order some beer too. Why should the racers get all the fun? As the teams entered they were required to announce to the bartender “Hey, Bartender, we’re Beer Snobs” and order a flight. Imagine our surprise as three teams showed up simultaneously. Then, it was back to the shelter to fire up the grills for the picnic.
The teams were instructed that Chevy, RB, and I wanted “to share” a cache with them at the shelter so they should look for clues. I was wearing a shirt emblazoned with “Diet Coke”, had a Coca-Cola key chain and a Diet-Coke bracelet. Team Rambo came up with the ultra-super secret cache that was hidden at the shelter in a Diet Coke can. Justin (one half of Waggentails) made the lucky grab for the can.
Right on time, the teams started arriving in high spirits with their score cards in hand. This year, each team was responsible for keeping their own score. And in the end it was Team Death Race 3000 crossing the finish line in first place.
As I mentioned above, Chevyole, Ranger Boy and I spent months organizing the event, planning the tasks, gathering supplies, searching for the proper venue, and eventually hiding the caches. We had many “meetings” and there were a lot of emails sent back and forth organizing all of the paper work. As a joke, I quickly placed one more cache the night before called Trash Talking (GC6KBM5) as a tribute to Geffie. [SPOILER ALERT!] I literally picked up a piece of trash and slapped a log on it! So, imagine my surprise when a few geocachers told me that was their favorite cache (each with their own reason). Sigh, Geocachers! You can never predict what they are going to do or like. But, I wouldn’t trade this experience for anything. Thank you to everyone who participated and for making the day so much more fun.
See you in 2018!