B.C.G.A. Bingo

Well the past couple of weeks have been busy for me in terms of geocaching. The British Columbia Geocaching Association (BCGA) launched the first ever Bingo game in which each member was able to download their own personal bingo card but instead of numbers being shown there was nothing but question marks.

Throughout the week the BCGA web team pressed the “magic button” and depending on what your bingo card numbers would have been behind the question marks, specific geocaching task would be revealed. The goal was simple….complete a single line and declare BINGO on the BCGA forums.

So on Tuesday I downloaded my card and right off the bat I had two squares revealing tasks and that got me excited. Just before bedtime another two squares showed themselves on my card so I thought what the heck lets give it a try. I completed some search queries on geocaching.com and located geocaches near my home location that I haven’t found before and that met the requirements.

Before I went to bed near midnight, I had strategically made a route that I would search the following morning at daybreak.The next morning the rains had stopped and out the door I went at 07:00 on my quest to find 1) Discover a BCGA coin in a cache, 2) a Regular cache, 3) a cache with the word “Cache” in the listing name and 4) a cache with a difficulty / terrain ratings of 2/2. By doing my homework the night before I was able to find the four caches I needed for the bingo game as well as another along the way and still be back at home by 08:30 in time for work.

On Wednesday night another cache revealed it’s self so once again I searched for a cache that met the requirements and out the door I went again the following morning. This time it was find a cache that was a “Traditional cache” which I found on the way to work. After dinner that night another square revealed itself and this time I took RVTraveller with me as my taxi driver and found a cache that began with the letter “F”. This is funny because the cache I found earlier in the day also began with the letter “F” but you couldn’t use one cache find more than once.

Now it’s Thursday night and I’ve had about 8 hours sleep over two days because all I could think about was this stupid game of bingo. I am also now full of cold and have a bad cough but the cool thing was that I now only needed one square to complete a full line. Then next morning I wake up real early and to my surprise the last square that I need to complete a line has revealed itself and it’s a doozy of a task. Find a Multi-Cache with 3 or more stages!

So I pull out my geocaching folder, which has puzzles and mutli-caches that are in various stages of completion and staring me in the face is one called Venus Rising. This is a 5 stage, multi-cache that I started over a year and a half ago slowly building locations of each stage until I could find the final. I actually had tried to find the final two weeks earlier in a torrential downpour and gave up and now as my luck would have it there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

I woke RVTraveller and off we went with both GPS’rs smoking the trail. At 07:45 I located the final of the multi-cache and having a bit of fun with the logbook I signed and dabbed it with a bingo dabber! Now the question was…would I be the first to post BINGO. On the way back home I logged the cache at geocaching.com on my Blackberry but couldn’t access the BCGA forum with it.

It was a anxious 10 minute drive home where I posted the cache find on my bingo card and then went to the BINGO forum. Nobody had posted anything so at about 08:05 on Friday November 27 Gecko Cacher became the winner of the BCGA Bingo game #1.

For my efforts the BGCA sent me a pair of rare 2008 BCGA Geocoins, which are amazing along with a BCGA pin. Game #2 is now underway and even though I am not getting the luck of the bingo draw this time around it still is a lot of fun to check your card and head out the door geocaching at all hours of the day!