Geonord Air

Saturday Morning

The day of the main event, the Geonord Air event. We agreed to meet in the hotel restaurant (in the loosest sense of the word) for our pre-paid continental breakfast at 8 am. We were staying at the Ibis Budget Saint Omer. If you’ve been to one of these then I don’t need to explain. If you haven’t, I would summarise that they are basic, not very expensive, but generally clean and with rooms that are big enough.

Anyway, on a caching weekend in the summer all we do in the room is sleep (and wash, I guess). We’re not there to enjoy a lavishly furnished room, massive swimming pool or Michelin starred restaurant. A decent bed, and some coffees and pastries in the morning are just fine thank you. The bed in question was the usual Ibis configuration of a double bed with a bunk single running crossways over the head of the double, so the rooms technically sleep 3 people.

Strangely, almost everyone else in the breakfast room seemed to be a geocacher. Some of them were British and some of those were people I recognised from previous events. Anyone would be thinking there was a geocaching event on.

Eventing

Speaking of which, we were out of the hotel at a very respectable 8:45 am. We made the short drive to Saint Omer Wizernes Airfield via a wherigo cache that I’d solved prior to the event. Yes, I have a way of extracting the final coordinates from a wherigo cartridge without playing the cartridge. Cheating, technically, but at Mega events loads of people cheat. They sponge puzzle coordinates or lab cache answers off other people. Or they cache in large groups when they don’t really go to every cache location individually.

It often takes as much time to decompile and process a wherigo cartridge as it would to play it. But it means you can spend that time in your pyjamas at home late at night rather than using valuable outdoor time on event day. I pretty much always try to pre-solve all puzzles and multis before travelling, which is fair game. So why not also pre-solve the wherigos?

Back at the plot, we reached the event site quite early and queued up for our event packs. I’d bought one “Premiere Class” entry (which allowed all the event activities) and one “Supporter Pack”, which was much the same, but also included a special geocoin and a whole ammo can. Rather than carry a big metal can around all morning we put it in the back of my car. Whilst there I picked up my sunglasses. That proved to be a wise move.

Lab Caches

At this event, they had gone over the usual levels with the lab caches. The going rate is to do 10 of them for a mega event. Brugse Beer this year did 19 lab caches (why not 20, I’ll never know). GeoNord this year did 20. All of them involved actual activities too. They were either physical things to find or to do. Some of the Brugse Beer ones just involved reading the event book or taking a photo of something. We did all 20 of them. Although as is often the case, we “did” some of them by swapping answers with others in the queue. All the ones that looked like fun physical activities (like the chuck-a-duck, chuck-a-frisbee, hopscotch, archery and laser-maze-using-string) were done properly by at least one of us anyway.

Of the 20 available, 16 were outdoors on the tarmac. Another three were in the big hangar where the bar was. The last one involved spotting a specific aeroplane on a fly-by, which no-one seemed actually to understand. However we did find someone who had acquired the answer by some foul means. I was logging them all onto my own account as we went around, just to make sure the “acquired” answers were actually correct.

By the time we’d done all this lot it was getting on towards drink o’clock, so we grabbed a seat at the trestle tables and Minimus dived into a sugar and cream topped waffle while the Happy Hunter and myself contented ourselves with a cold and fizzy one from the bar.

Real Caches Too

From here we decided to take a little walk to look for a few caches near to the event site. They’d placed a power trail of over 100 letterbox caches, and they’d also placed another 5 wherigos which had endpoints quite close. We targeted 2 of the wherigos and the first letterbox for a visit via Shanks’ Pony. The first letterbox was well off the given coordinates but was an absolutely huge (and practically unmissable) ammo can.

The first wherigo was exactly where I’d decoded and we found it quickly. The second proved more of a challenge. We only found it when a couple of other guys arrived and started looking for it too. There was supposedly another wherigo in the woods here but we couldn’t figure out how to get to it from where we were, so we went back to the event site and jumped into the car.

The rest of the afternoon was spent driving to other wherigos and then around the letterboxes. We did a couple of short out-and-back walks, but mainly it was a process of me driving and HHHP20 jumping out to do the business. Of the 104 letterboxes, a good 50 of them could be reached from the roadside. And, thankfully, all of those ones were placed in locations where there was actually somewhere to get the car off the road. Lazy caching, I know, but it was a warm day, the caches were too far apart to walk all the way around (30 km total) and we didn’t have bikes.

While we were in the middle of doing this, we took the opportunity also to have a break at a cafe in Helfaut to grab some cold drinks and rather tasty pizzas.

Nuffski – Time for a Break

Eventually, we all hit the “meh!” point and decided to head for home. It was getting a bit late in the afternoon (probably “evening”, to be honest), so we did a quick turn around and headed out for a beer.

We were at the same bar as the previous night but they didn’t do ice creams, so they suggested we walk to the other end of the square to get an ice cream for Minimus, and then bring it back to their bar and grab ourselves a beer. That worked for me. Minimus picked a mint-choc-chip ice cream that tasted like actual real mint leaves. I’ve never tasted one like that before.

After the beer we took a walk through central Saint-Omer to collect 7 wherigo caches and then returned back to the hotel.

Once back at the hotel we did a very quick turnaround and then went out once again to get dinner. By this time it was 9:30 pm, so well past Minimus’ normal bedtime, but she was coping well and we were a bit hungry. We found a decent looking restaurant close to our favourite bar and had a light dinner. Those lunchtime pizzas were still weighing us down a bit. It was nice though.