World Wide Flash Mob III, San Diego

Today was the day for WWFM III flash mob event on Coronado Island in San Diego, California. Sonny and Sandy of PodCacher were the hosts of this event. They had seen my previous posts stating that I was going to be attending and contacted me to ask if I'd like to volunteer to help at the event. I was happy to help out.

The event started at 10:00 am but we needed to meet the rest of the team working the event at 9:30 near the first waypoint. I found the group and after a few introductions and trading some geocoin discoveries, I was assigned the role of "Official event still photography technicial expert" OK, so I made up the cool sounding title but, I was the photographer. There's not very many situations where you can meet someone for the first time, hand them a very expensive camera and wait for it to be returned half an hour later. Geocachers are generally a good group of people. So, my job was to take pictures. Lots of pictures. That's what I did.

The first waypoint was right in front of the ferry landing that services Coronado. The signal for everyone to converge on the waypoint was an orange bucket, carried by Sonny, being placed on the ground. As soon as it hit the ground, people started coming from all directions. Log sheets were passed around for everyone to sign. There was a travel bug box and a swag box for people to trade things.

Soon the whistles blew, announcing the time to move to the second waypoint. This was a nearby grassy area that provided nice seating for the group photo. The San Diego Bay and the downtown San Diego Skyline were the perfect backdrop for our memory. I'm sure this will be a great photo. The sun had eaten through the marine layer and it was an unexpected 75 degrees right on the water. Several comments were made cursing the decision to wear jeans rather than shorts.

Again, whistles blew and the group broke apart to head to the third and final waypoint. We were headed to a giant compass rose that decorates the entrance to the park. The sign in sheets were used to hold a raffle where some lucky cachers won FTF rights, a tee shirt, an ammo can filled with swag and an official WWFIII Flash mob geoocoin. (Yours truly never wins anything but I am the first to discover this really cool geocoin.)

At 10:15 the event was over. We all were supposed to leave the area via the different directions identified by the compass rose. I took team Hick@Heart back to the prep area to return the camera and chat with some cachers. QDMan recognized me and introduced himself. We had a laugh about the baseball I found that boasted his signature. It was nice to finally get to meet him.

I grabbed a handful of travel bugs to take up to Mount San Jacinto on the weekend of May 30th. I also took some time to log a few more geocoins. My favorites were; ea6bflyr's SPUTNIK Geocoin, Fatboy's tanktop, and a cacher from Australia had his Australian Pioneer geocoin.

Since The Wife was busy chasing The Girl, and I was taking award winning photos with the event camera, I gave my camera to The Boy. He took some good photos but it seems he had the zoom all the way out and so I don't have a photo showing the entire mob very well. You can view the official Flickr photo set here. The Boy did capture a close up of himself that is pretty funny so I'll put it here!

After the event we walked about a half mile down a small beach to grab a cache that someone said may contain a travel bug that wants to reach mountain peaks. That bug wasn't there but we enjoyed the walk and enjoyed finding the cache. One of the houses was for sale and for a cool 11 million dollars you could have your own piece of heaven right on the water in Coronado. 11 million is slightly out of my budget so I can only enjoy the view from the pictures The Boy took.

The temperatures were warm and The Girl was ready to relax so we had a gourmet meal at Burger King and then headed over to REI to drool on all the cool stuff that's on sale. The event was a blast and appeared to be a success. I believe the final tally of events participating in the World Wide Flash Mob is 167 events. They were scheduled to happen in 15 countries, including 45 US States and 11 Canadian Provinces. Be sure to check in with PodCacher to see details on all the events. Sandy said they would be very busy with hundreds of emails documenting them all. PodCacher plans to cover the details in a few posts. You'll definitely want to go check out the high quality photographs. If you go look at them it would be funny for a bunch of people to comment on the great job Hick@Heart did on the pictures!

Here's a bunch of pictures from today.

The team

Downtown San Diego seen from the Coronado Bridge

Part of the mob

Setting up the group shot. (Sandy reacts to The Boy taking pictures)

I'm sporting the demo flash mob geocoin

The event filmer films The Boy taking pictures

The Girl finds a flower

The Boy with the event coin

Fattboy shows off his threads

The San Diego Bay

Nice little stretch of beach. Perfect for a walk.

The Kiddies under a really cool tree.Mean streets of Coronado

The Boy with USS Midway in the background

Nice little house right on the beach with a vanishing edge pool/waterfall.

A Perfect lawn with a flagpole from a ship.

Bugs I picked up to take to the mountain

Official event schedule

My First Geocaching Event

Today I attended my first event geocache. It was the "It's been a year since our last event, event" The event was held at Bob's Murrieta Pizza and was a meet and greet type event. (You may have already guessed that Bob's is in Murrieta, California)

We got there about 10 minutes after it started so there weren't too many people there yet. The cachers that were there gave us a nice welcome and we ordered some food. You know how we goecachers are always talking about how geocaching takes us to cool places that we never knew existed? The Event was no exception. I had no clue this pizza place was here. It turns out the food is excellent. We will definitely be back to this little joint. I have to come back anyway because there are a few caches nearby that I didn't have time to grab.

The first person I spent any real time talking to was Pogz76. I knew him from reading logs and it was nice to get to talk and swap stories. It was kind of funny because he reads my blog so when I would tell a geocaching story, he had already read about it. We laughed about that and he let me discover some of his personal geocoins. He has a milestone geocoin for 500 finds.(Or you could call it a Geo-Achievement geocoin) It was really nice and is kept in a nice little jewelry box. He had some other custom geocoins that were very nice as well. You may remember from a previous post that Pogz76 was the goecacher that made his own cache out of one of the film containers I had in my cache.

As the night continued, I got to meet more geocachers and swap more stories. I would guess that there were about 20 geocachers there. There was no shortage of trash talking amongst old friends. There were Temecula valley legends and there were newbies like me along with everything in between. Snake, of Snake & Rooster was able to get my brain going the right direction and I think I may be able to solve another of their fun puzzles. (The people in the photos are; yours truly, Pogz76, Team Geo-Rangers, Troviamo, Snake and Czechboy)

I also got to log a bunch of Jeep Travel Bugs. Team Geo-Rangers has a handful that are being gathered for a top secret mission. I was able to discover 7 Jeep Travel Bugs, including my first White Jeep and my first Red Jeep. I gave him the Green Jeep Travel Bug I was holding on to so it could join the mission. I discovered 16 trackables all together.

I ended up chatting with a bunch of fun people. We were there for about two and a half hours. I didn't get to meet everyone so I hope it's not a year until the next one. The Wife was cool enough to chase after The Kids (aka The Boy and The Girl) so that I could hang out. We had some good pizza, saw some nice custom geocoins and finally put some faces with the names I see in the logs all the time. I will definitely do an event geocache again.