Friday of Mingo Madness Weekend

 If you are not a geocacher or care about geocaching you may want to skip this post. Or you may want to try to figure out why we do what we do regarding geocaching. As much as anything, this post is for friends who are geocachers not able to attend Mingo Madness weekend.

Friday was the pre-day of events and activities to the BIG CELEBRATION in Colby KS which starts on Saturday. For us Friday was all about meeting up with some geocaching friends and finding geocaches. Both goals were accomplished. The morning was devoted to finding the caches that were the palm tree geo-art. Palm trees in the western KS? Why? Colby is known as the Oasis on the Plains, thus palm trees. We drove dusty roads (no gravel on these roads!) south of Colby in farming country. At times the dust being kicked up by the vehicles on the road was so thick, you could not see what was in front of you, including the vehicle you were following. The truck cab and box are covered in fine KS soil. We were after 128 preform tubes attached to electrical poles along the county/country roads.

Preform tubes become water and soda bottles. They make very good geocaching containers as they are a hard, thick plastic in this stage and do not disintegrate in the sun and withstand extreme temperature changes. 

Chasing after preform containers on dusty roads resulted in this picture of geocaches. To find the geocaches we drove on roads, not in the fields as displayed in its final format.

Once that was complete, we headed back into town to begin completing the Adventure Lab caches. Fourteen of them had been placed around the outskirts and in the town of Colby. These new cache types are intended to be in place for years to come, not just for the Mingo Madness event.

These are just 3 of the 14 we completed. We added 80 Adventure Labs to our total! AND there are a few more in the area we have on our list to do over the weekend.

And as if 208 caches were not enough for one day, we also found some creative gadget caches in the town of Colby.

some involved 9 volt batteries

a rare large container

most were made of wood and secured to a sturdy host

All of them were creative, involved time and resources from their creator and were fun and challenging to complete for the geocachers.

The third part of the day was meeting geo friends we have not seen in the last year or longer. There were 4 scheduled events throughout the day. We made a point of being at each one so we could look for people we know and have met somewhere along the way in our 9 years of geocaching.

event #1 in a city park

I met Joshua, The Geocaching Vlogger from Minneapolis area

event #2 for a special icon

we were recognized for financially contributing to Mingo Madness

Who knew???

The maze was full of interesting facts related to geocaching. Thank you Gladys!

a Plinko game for those who wanted to play

signing the logbook/board at event #3

the Pre-Mingo Madness event

Hubby recognized these 3 folks from GA 

We attended 2 of their events last summer in the Black Hills. They were traveling through states with their son during Covid-19, looking for a new home location when they retire in a couple years. 

The 4th event ended our day. It was held in the parking lot of a hotel. We were able to visit with some other folks, some from SD, AZ, MN.

More fun tomorrow! More events. More gadget caches.