The Amazing Geocaper

We had a great time this weekend. On Saturday we were able to participate in The Amazing Geocaper which is an annual event put on by locals in the geocaching community.

It isn’t just a gathering to geocache however, it is really a contest in solving mental puzzles and then to a lesser extent geocaching. This year, the theme was based on the television show, The Amazing Race.

The Start of the Race

It is very difficult to explain and any explanation I could provide wouldn’t do it justice but basically you receive the coordinates of a cache, go to that cache receive a clue and solve a very difficult puzzle that provides a keyword that you have to give to a person manning that stop. Once you correctly provide that keyword, you are given another envelope with coordinates and so on until you reach a finishing point.

Yeah, I knew I couldn’t describe it very well. It isn’t too unlike the Great Urban Race that we participated in a few weeks back but this contest relied far more heavily on mental challenges which played a bit more into our hands in all humility. Suffice to say that the event was just awesome and was VERY well done and the puzzles were extraordinarily difficult.

You are provided a certain number of dollars to complete stages of the race and can purchase hints for the various puzzles with the dollars. The team that finishes with the most dollars wins. Mixed in with that there were roadblock challenges and things like that that you might see on The Amazing Race.

This challenge took place in Tacoma’s gorgeous Pt. Defiance Park which happens to be one of my very favorite places in one of my very favorite cities in the world.

Our team consisted on Valerie, my sister Pam Sirrine and her son Jacob as well as Judy and Jack Walsh and of course me. Not officially on our team but also of great help were Chris and Cat Sirrine who took Benjamin off our hands for the day to allow us to focus and showed him a great time and also Dave Button who from Yakima provided phone support to us and proved to be a big help as well on several of the puzzles.

We had a great team with diverse abilities and backgrounds and did well in the race. We actually managed to complete the entire course 1st of the entire group there in just under seven hours. there to earn a nice bonus.

Once the points were tallied up, we finished in 3rd place overall. WOO HOO! I was very happy with this finish considering the competition and the challenges we overcame.

We even earned a trophy. I don’t think I’ve won a trophy since like… elementary school!? Very cool. Last year with a slightly different team we had finished in 4th so we are heading in the right direction. I’m already excited about next year.