Well I had been looking forward to the 2009 Midwest Geobash (GC1HKTM) at the Fulton County Fairgrounds in Wauseon Ohio since March of this year. The Bash is my first Mega-Event.
I decided to camp at the fairgrounds, mostly because I could not find a better price than $30.00 for four days and three nights. So I headed out, bought a text and sleeping pad and all the other small creature comforts I would need.
As the day approached I started to feel like I was back on active duty preparing for a major field exercise. Keep in mind when I retired from the Army I swore I would never sleep in a tent, on a sleeping pad again, unless hell had frozen over.
I left out on the morning of the 23rd at 0700 to set up camp and check in by 1000 when the event officially started. I would be there thru Sunday the 26th. I took off an additional day from work to pack up the car.
The morning of the Bash it was raining in Cleveland, and it rained all the way to the Bash. As I set up the tent it was raining and this task took about 10 minutes. The finishing touch to my camp site was the flag pole with the MIA-POW Flag proudly flying in the breeze. Finally the rain stopped and the sun came out.
I had the honor of watching good friends Michael and Maggie of TeamDotOne sign the event logbook . This was a special time as the event was their 5,000 found cache. Then I spent the day caching in the local area with them and enjoying good times. Later we attended all of the event activities as well having a great time sitting around campfires just enjoying everyone’s company. All in all there were about 30 of us from the local area all with our tents clustered in the same area. All in all there were about 1,300 people from all over the country and from Canada there for this great event.
The weather Friday was gorgeous and we spent time swapping PathTags, doing the Poker Run, and making new friends. I headed of to bed around 2300 on Friday night after spending some quality time around the campfire. Friends told me that as I slept soundly in my tent around 0600 on Saturday Mother Nature decided to test everyone’s tent pitching skills. They told me many people were up in the rain trying to put their tents back up. People were heading for cover in their cars as their tents collapsed. May pop-up campers were leaking. All the while I slept thru all of the excitement. At 0700 I awoke to the sound of a light rain on the tent. I thought to my self what a great way to wake up! I had never slept better. As I emerged from my text I stood up and stretched. I filled my lungs with the smell of a fresh rain on the grass. Then I looked around and saw many tents flat on the ground. As I looked around all I could think of was, thank god for Army training in how to properly pitch a tent. Your tax dollars at work! People looked at me and asked - “Didn’t your hear the storm?” “How the heck did you sleep thru all the noise?” and the one I liked the most “How the heck did your tent stay up when the others didn’t make it?”
I looked at them, smiled and replied, “Army Training”.
I spent the rest of the day with friends just enjoying being with everyone. And on Saturday night we watched the space station pass over head. This was the best vacation I have had in over 10 years.
I got up early on Sunday morning, broke camp and headed home. I had a mission to complete. I had to do the cache page write up and hide a very special geocache. I had to hide the geocache honoring TeamDotOne reaching 5K at the 2009 Midwest Geobash. The cache was approved Monday morning and held from being released to the world wide Geocaching community until TeamDotOne were able to claim First to Find honors on their special cache. You can find their cache “TeamDotOne’s 5K Milestone (GC1WD9V)“ by following the link to the cache.
This year was an absolute blast. I fully intend to be at the 2010 bash!
