One of the things that people keep asking me as I prepare for my trip around Europe this June, is whether I’ll be holding or attending any Events. I do enjoy attending Events and, as my regular readers will know, I’ve made many friends this way. Last year I attended an Event in Helsinki and hosted one of my own; just before lockdown I travelled to Germany with a group of friends to attend the Beethoven Mega. I’ve also held Events in Hong Kong, Reykjavik, Belfast and Zambia, as well as dozens on my travels in the UK.
Attending Events allows me to put names (and geo-names) to faces and get a flavour of the local caching community. I’ve swapped trackables, hints and stories; I’ve sold copies of PinPoint too! And of course I’ve guaranteed that I’ll be able to claim at least one ‘find’ in a country and gain the relevent souvenir!
Planning Events for this trip, however, is slightly more complicated. Given that you need to give at least a fortnight’s notice of an Event, I will need to know exactly where I’m going to be in two weeks’ time. At the start of my month-long trip this won’t be a problem. I know where I’m starting from, and when, and have booked accomodation for the first four legs of the trip. After that, I’ve deliberately kept my options open to allow for some flexibility. Perhaps I’ll enjoy a city and want to stay there for longer; maybe I’ll have e xhasued the things I’m interested in and be keen to move on sooner than expected. There’s also the possibility that I might meet fellow travellers and choose to journey with them for a while. This is not conducive to organising a series of ongoing Events, however, and probably means I won’t host that many, at least not in the second half of the trip.
Just like at the start, I will also know when the trip will be over, and plan to return to the UK via Paris and the Eurostar, so that is also a fixed point when I may be able to list an Event. It has also crossed my mind that once you’ve had an Event published, you’re pretty much committed to being in a certain place at a certain time. This will also affect my flexibility and so any Events that I do host will probably be at the start or at the end of a day.
As well as holding my own gatherings, I’m also on the look-out for other Events that might be happening in the cities that I visit. An early possibility was the Checkpoint Zelle Mega Event in the west of Germany on 6th June. However, as my itinerary has developed, I started to realise that I was organising my trip to ensure I’d still be in the area at that time, rather than travelling as I’d intended and moving from city to city, so I probably won’t be attending after all. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of keeping an eye on the map over the next few weeks, and perhaps setting up notifications for the publication of any new Events. It’s possibly that some suitable Events won’t even be published by the time I leave the UK’s shores!
But at the end of the day, this isn’t intended to be solely a geocaching trip and, much as I enjoy meeting other cachers, I won’t be letting my extraverted tendencies dictate my plans. So far I have a gathering in London the night before I set off, and another in Brussels a few days later. I’ll probably do a quick meet-and-greet in Luxembourg, and again at the Gare du Nord before heading home, and if time allows maybe another one in the east of Europe too, while scouring each city for coincidental gatherings along the way! I won’t be carry my trusty Event log with me though, so a postcard will suffice and I’ll send each one home to insert on my return!
AFW 28/4/26
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