The old year is dead! All hail the new year! Or some kind of crap like that. It looks like I’m beginning a tradition. I hadn’t intended to, but it seems to be happening. Last year, I threw Events on the final day of 2023 and the first day of 2024. This year, I did it again. That’s how a tradition starts: when you do something and keep on doing it.
On the final day of 2024, I threw an Event. A local shopping center has a hidden Japanese garden that I thought would be a nice place to have a thing. Unfortunately, they don’t keep it as pretty in the winter as they do in the spring and summer, so the only color to be found was the brown of the fallen leaves, but there was a nice turnout. The previous day had gotten up to almost ninety degrees, but the temperature had been slowly dropping, so we enjoyed sixty-degree weather with mild breezes. If there was a day to be outside in December, this was it (a sentiment shared by our farthest-traveled visitors who had RV’d here from Illinois). One of the new hiders also came out of the woodwork to attend his first-ever Event. It turns out that he started caching long before I did, but he quit for years and has been getting back into it with his kids. It’s always nice to see new faces, whether they’re from afar or from anear. Afterward, a few of us stayed behind and had Korean food at another hidden gem (obviously a restaurant) by the garden.
On the first day of 2025, I threw an Event. And not just any Event. Headquarters saw fit to give me a Community Celebration, so I started the year with it. There’s a coffee shop right by the garden, so I had it there. The temperature had continued to fall, so the morning was in the forties and fifties, a perfect time for being indoors with warm beverages. Some of the same faces returned, and others arrived. The cachers from Illinois came back, and in an unexpected twist of fate, another cacher from Illinois also attended, and they knew each other! Small world getting smaller every day! Twenty of us showed up to drink, snack, and talk about various things (recent trips, snakes, the Mystery housed in the parking lot).
I found myself talking about a minor conundrum. As mentioned previously (but only in passing), I’m on the verge of my ten thousandth cache. As you can imagine, I’d like to do something special for it, but when you did Mingo for 2K and HQ for 5K, where do you go from there? That doesn’t involve international travel (possibly to Brazil), I mean? Well, I remembered something. Many moons ago, I completed and logged a challenge requiring five different icons as milestones. I don’t know for sure if that would still be a permitted challenge these days, but I did it. At this point, I have eight types. It occurred to me that I could add another icon to my milestone list with Texas Challenge coming up in a couple of months. Oh, I already have a Mega as a milestone. But what I have now is a choice: do I want a Block Party, or do I want a Maze? I’ve got time to think about that. Well, that and a number of other things, but we’ll cross those bridges when we get to them…
Geocaching While Black 
Hello from British Columbia. I have been reading your blog for awhile and always find it interesting. My husband and I have been holding events on the last day of one year and the first day of the next for a few years (except for 2020 when COID stopped events). We alternate who does what day. It’s always at the same park about 1km from our home. This year, we were asked in the summer if we were doing it again, so I guess it has become a tradition. We always supply coff, hot chocolate and Timbits from Tim Hortons. There may be homemade cookies. There’s a trivial part and then prizes.
The same people always attend no matter the weather (one year there was 5cm of snow and the parking lot was closed).
This year we talked about the Block Parties happening in Hamilton ON, Halifax NS, and Olds AB.
Sounds like you had as much fun as we did.
green_words
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