Several months ago John Kaup asked if I would do a geocaching workshop for Paris Mountain State Park’s Fourth Saturday program. The appointed Saturday came around, so I headed up to the park with all of my GPSs, laptops, etc, in tow for the workshop.
I planned to do a repeat of the workshop I’d done for the park back in 2009. We had secured eight Garmin eTrex GPSs for the participants to use, and I had set up ten dummy geocaches within sight of the building where we were holding the workshop. The plan was to go over the basics and show them the website, then send the participants out to find the dummy caches. I had the coordinates for the caches in my netbook, and had several different types of cables for different models of GPSs, in case someone had brought their own and wanted to participate.
Last time I did this I only had two participants. This time I did more advertising. I posted on the Upstate Geocacher’s Facebook page, and I also got it added as an event cache on geocaching.com. That way, anyone who attended to add the workshop itself as one of their finds. Ranger Cathy Taylor also posted announcements in the Greenville News.
It worked. We had nearly 20 participants. Also attending were experienced geocachers Patrick Peden and his wife, who have over 6000 finds (compared to my measly 135). Patrick took the photos here, since for just about the first time ever I got so wrapped up in the program that I forgot to take ANY photographs. What I really like were that there were families with lots of kids there. It was almost like teaching fourth grade again.