The Sketch
AT last, the day of the actual Kings and Queens event. But before any of that, I had another event to attend. Oh yes indeedy! Saturday is parkrun day. And Assen has the distinct advantage of being close to a parkrun whose name begins with a Z. There aren’t any of those in the UK, so it’s a rare beast indeed. Well, there’s shed loads in Poland and three in the Netherlands, but whatever.
So anyway, Zuiderpark (literally “South Park”) in Hoogeveen is a twee little event that hasn’t been going for very long. Just over a year, in fact. The event I ran was their 67th. It’s not a massively busy one either. I understand many in the Netherlands are like that. The Zuiderpark in The Hague is well attended, because it’s a Z and everyone on the planet has heard of The Hague, but Hoogeveen is a bit off the beaten track. So it wasn’t busy. I finished 13th overall (out of just 31 finishers). And I was 2nd in my age category. So I was happy with that. It was also the fastest I’d run this year by a couple of minutes. The guy who won my age category was 6 minutes in front of me though, so I have some way to go for an age-category win.
Another Lap
I was in no rush to get back to Assen for the mega event. It was on for the whole day, and I know what I’m like at events. So there was plenty of time really to walk back around Zuiderpark to collect a set of lab caches. They proved pretty easy to do and I was rewarded with a bonus puzzle. The labs made me go most of the way round again though, so I actually covered nearly 9km there, what with the running and the walking.
So after all this it was time to return to the hotel and get myself cleaned up. I couldn’t really procrastinate. At some point I was going to have to give in and attend the Kings and Queens event. I know that sounds like I didn’t really want to be there. I really did want to be there, but equally I really don’t like massive rooms full of people I don’t know.
Event Time
The event was held in a massive room. And I didn’t really know anyone there. Nor did I see anyone I’d spent random amounts of time with over the week. So it was a solo job of bumping around and into people. Ho hum! Let’s try to make it as painless as possible. The room was also rather dark, which I never like.
Inside the event space they’d set up lots of lab caches (two sets of ten each). They proved quite difficult. First of all it was difficult to tell what was what. All of the activities were labelled, but the labels didn’t match the titles of the lab stages, so for a few of them you had to get the answer and scroll through both sets trying that answer until it worked.
Labbing
A few of the others were puzzles to be solved, and a number of those (especially those in the upstairs area) were taking most people about 10 minutes to solve. That meant a lot of standing around and waiting. And this, in turn, led to the inevitable sharing of solutions whenever some of the people queueing managed to catch sight of one of the answers. And then there was the phone signal. I had a 5G signal in the room, but because we were inside there was no GPS signal. The labs had been set up with quite a small radius. So using 5G I could answer the questions, but couldn’t always get to a point where I could open the questions. The hotel had wi-fi, which allowed better spatial positioning. However, it was so busy in the building that everything kept timing out.
So doing the labs took ages, and was a fight trying to get somewhere where I could open the answer, and then getting somewhere else where I could type in the answer, and then having to guess which answer. I won’t say I had a sense of humour crisis, but I was on the edge.
A Bit of Fresh Air
The Event Crew had released another set of labs up in the Asserbos, so I decided that should be my focus for the afternoon. I needed a break from the busy wi-fi and darkness in the event space anyway. So I plodded of on my own. The new set of labs was supposedly about Kings and Queens, but it turned out to be mainly about knights. They were clearly temporary in nature. They consisted just of laminated pieces of paper that were pinned to trees (mainly) and hidden in artificial turf or moss. So they took a bit of finding, but thankfully there were one or two other people out there too.
Back at the plot, I also had another pop at one I’d failed on Thursday. This time round I had a heads up that I needed to look for a metal stud in the path. I found it, and it contained a simple “walk 50m on a bearing of 150o” instruction. I rapidly converted that into “over there, where those people are” and all was good.
The caches I did in the woods this day were generally better than the ones I’d done on Thursday. I bumped into lots of other people but didn’t really tag along with anyone for more than a couple of minutes, but I was happy with that.
And then just as I was walking past one high-terrain cache, I noticed a group were there and were just packing up their hooky pole. So I asked if I could borrow it for a couple of minutes. They obliged.
Evening
The evening event was in the same event space as the main one. They’d cleared it all out and set it up for what looked like a night of loud music and dancing. I like one of those but not the other. And, if I’m honest, I’m not a massive fan of much of the music that’s used for the dancing anyway. So I walked in, signed a log, and walked out again. Anyway, I still had a bunch of the carpool lab caches to do, and I had to pack all my bags for the following morning.
I didn’t bother with dinner. Somehow I wasn’t really hungry, even though I’d really not eaten much all day.
Still, a Dutch parkrun completed, and a “Z”, plus a handful of “proper” caches, a Mega Event, a regular event and several hundred labs. Not too bad a day.
The next day was spent mainly exploring the niceties of the Dutch and Belgian motorway network. I arrived at the tunnel terminal well early, but somehow they couldn’t book me on an earlier train. However, they did call me early. And the drive back through England, including a brief stop at the old house in Milton Keynes, was completed fairly quickly.
