BIG BEAR’S BIG BIRTHDAY BASH Event

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BIG BEAR!

GC3B571 BIG BEARS BIG BIRTHDAY BASH by Tru2Cntry.

BIG BEAR’s birthday is no small event, at least it isn’t anymore! I thought it would be fun to celebrate BIG BEAR’s Birthday with all of our Geocaching Family. Neither BIG BEAR or I have family close by, and we love being with our Geocaching Family and Friends so we invited everybody to celebrate his birthday with us.

We published the Event and found out that there were 7 other birthday’s all within a month of BIG BEAR’s birthday. Well Geocaching friends are such great people, that’s one of the reason’s Geocaching is fun to do. Shampoodles and Ponytails, painted some great Geocaching rocks for the Gift Bags. We had a lot of Geocaches on the raffle table thanks to: OlCowboy, Georooks, Shampoodles, Ponytails, Dakotachix, Jeeperjones and Rat&Mushroom brought their signature Ammo Cans! Whoo Hoo… the raffle table was filling up!

I rented the Round Table Pizza Party room for 2 hours: 7-9 pm, I arrived at 6 to decorate and found out that they didn’t have my reservation for that day and time… so we just started filling up the tables and booths out in the Pizza restauraant area. And there was a birthday party already using the Party room that wasn’t scheduled to leave for another 2 hours… good thing we are flexible. The Manager at Round Table was awesome, “Penny” took over the sitution and the group with the birthday party left and hour earlier than they had planned. Thank you for that!

Geocachers were showing up left and right, no time to decorate, or so I thought. Lets just pick up our stuff and move to the Party room. Once in the room, Shampoodles, Ponytails and so many others started helping me decorate, I think Tink1914 team was putting up Party Zone banners, Shampoodles and I were putting down the table cloths. It was starting to look like a birthday party!!

RAT & MUSHROOM, Mushroom has a "Mush" stach!

While everybody ordered their pizza‘s and salads, we started things off with a Geocaching Bingo game mixer which I got here: Geocaching Online Resource Directory: Printables. For those who got a BINGO I had made custom Key Chain Lanyards with their Geocaching name on them to get as a prize, they were a hit!

After everybody had gotten their fill of Pizza I grabbed BIG BEAR and asked him to Emcee the Raffle. BIG BEAR is a natural at Emceeing! He had a great time calling out the numbers and having fun with everyone.

BIG BEAR emcees the raffleCantseem helps BIG BEAR with the raflleBIG BEAR and OlCowboy

BIG BEAR & T2C with the CakeBIG BEAR's Cake!

BIG BEAR blowing out the candles

Now it’s time for the Birthday cake and Ice Cream. BIG BEAR didn’t know about the cake. Dakotachix and I were putting the candles on and lighting them while the raffle was winding down. As soon as the candles were lit we broke into the “Happy Birthday to You” song and brought the cake in. It was a Bear cake made out of Cupcakes, with a Garmin 60csx in one hand and a blue iPhone in the other hand with a T-Shirt that read: FTF on it! The cupcakes went fast, and then I forgot to bring out the ice cream. I took it home and BIG BEAR had some later, so all is good there.

Overall there were over 45 people that came, 2 hours was a little to short, I think next time I will do a 4 hour Event and I will get there 2 hours early to set up. I am not sure but it seemed like everybody got there an hour early, so if I want to decorate I need to be there way ahead of time to do it.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BIG BEAR!

Cantseem & BIG BEAR running the raffle

BIG BEAR the Emcee

RAT & MUSHROOM, Mushroom has a “Mush” stach!

Birthday Party

Birthday Party

Birthday Party

Birthday Party

Birthday Party

BIG BEAR & T2C with the Cake

BIG BEAR blowing out the candles

BIG BEAR blowing out the candles

BIG BEAR blowing out the candles

BIG BEAR’s Cake!

Cantseem helps BIG BEAR with the raflle

BIG BEAR emcees the raffle

BIG BEAR and OlCowboy

But what a great time we had, Thank you to all our Geocaching family for coming and honoring BIG BEAR and for contributing to the fun. We are going to make this an annual Event and have already started planning next year’s event!!

2010 – NOV 24th – NOV 26th – ET Trail

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

ET Trail – November 25-28th

WOW!  What can be said about the ET Trail that hasn’t already been said?  A LOT!! This was an amazing experience. So much that I couldn’t say on a Geocache Log page so I thought I would Blog our experience.

I had heard about the ET Trail from a fellow Geocacher – BIG BEAR.

I had listened to others talk about the ET Trail too, but I never thought that I would get the opportunity to go. Ok…. I have a few days around Thanksgiving, and no plans so could that possibly be enough time to put plans together for this run?  Yes it was, we read previous posts which were really helpful and our plans started to materialize.  I was going!!

Big Bear and I (Tru2Cntry or T2C) set out on November 25th to drive  the 610 miles that night, we got to Alamo Nevada just before 3 a.m. Sean had already flown into Las Vegas and rented a car, drove up to Alamo to the Windmill Ridge Restaurant & Lodging (best accommodations around) earlier in the day.  He had rented a room so we knocked on the door and quickly grabbed pillows and blankets and tried to get some sleep, all agreeing to get up at 6 a.m. and get out to the Trail and get started.  It was hard to fall asleep, we had driven in from the North West end of the trail and saw that they were just flying by us as we drove, well… we did stop to check out one of them, we couldn’t help it.  Then back in the van to find Sean and get a few hours of sleep.

Our day started at 5:59, grabbing GPSr, we were out the door and headed down the road!  We did an incredible 700 caches on the ET Trail itself that first day!  It was getting dark so we decided to turn around and head back to Windmill Ridge for the night. Had dinner at the restaurant there and reflected back on that incredible day. Tired but eager to start the next day early again we all headed back to our lodges to get a good nights rest.  It was hard to fall asleep!  Morning arrived and we were back on the road, no time for breakfast, we headed down the road to start back at ET 701.

We hadn’t planned it but we each took an hour at running and it ended up that we each had our own personal best, Sean had the first hour where he did an amazing 101 finds.  I took the 2nd hour and grabbed my 82 just as we were counting down the seconds on the hour.  And Big Bear blew us away with an amazing 124 caches grabbed in the last hour!!  Amazing!!  We all jumped out on the last cache, signed it, signed the pole, took pictures and reflected back on what an amazing experience this was.   Thank you to the COs’ of this incredible run: Clay4&whtwolfden!!

After finishing the ET Trail we headed back to do the Alien Head. We walked it, it was 29 degrees and there was a strong wind, we had to hang on to the logs to keep them from blowing away!  We did the Alien Head in about 2.5 hours. Jumped into the Geovan and headed back to the Ale-Inn for our Ale-Inn Burger to celebrate!!  Met up with a few of the colorful locals there, finished dinner and headed back to the Windmill Ridge Lodge for a hot shower and a good nights sleep.

Got up the next morning, to SNOW!!  It was beautiful, went up and had breakfast and reflected on one of the most amazing weekends and journeys that I know I will never forget!!

So… we definitely broke some records this weekend, how many caches in one day, how many miles to drive for a cache, the numbers went on and on… one of the biggest records we achieved on this trip was that BIG BEAR. reached his 10,000 cache!!  I also got to my 2000th!  Not only did we break records it was a weekend I lost a ring, and we almost lost a GPS out the window!  Whew….  backed up and grabbed it and it was ok, and Big Bear replaced the ring with one that commemorates the ET Trail, with the dates we did the trail and our Teams initials… BB T2C SS, very cool.

After saying Good Bye to Sean, and promising to meet up with him soon to do more Geocaching, and off Big Bear and I went back to Redding, California.

Big Bear, Tru2Cntry, SeanStafford

ET Trail # E.T. 1021