Alexandra Mega Weekend

As Victoria geared up for its second mega event we decided a weekend roadtrip would be the best way to make the most of this event. A planned was hatched which would see us grabbing some big numbers to make the most of the weekend.

On Thursday 16^th Nov, we headed south after work, driving most of the night had us arriving in rural Victoria about 3am where we grabbed a few hours’ sleep beside the road. Just after first light and with our energy levels returning to some sort of normality we set off on what would be our biggest day of the trip. The 300 plus caches around Mt Disappointment proving a magnet to the many geocachers who were flocking to the area. The forestry roads and hills were a labyrinth of trails and the caches that dotted them. At times throughout the day the weather wasn’t too kind and on more than one occasion we had to sit out severe thunderstorms, however as the day progressed so did our find count and by days end we’d put a huge dint in the Mt Disappoint plethora of caches.

Saturday dawned under clear skies and we set about completing the remainder of the Mt Disappointment caches before heading across the Alexandra Mega Event. Here we met up with hundreds of likeminded geocachers, many of who were friends from far and wide. After the obligatory announcements, we spent the rest of the day finding unique cache types in the area. It was at one of these unique finds where a crazy plan of finding 10 cache types in a day was floated. Well don’t ever tell a cacher “it can’t be done” because we’ll do our best to prove it can be done and thus we started doing some big kilometres to find a webcam cache and then to the other end of the state to find a virtual cache, oh and quick stop back at the mega event where I was inducted in the Geocaching hall of Fame.

Our webcam cache had us driving to windy heights of Mt Buller where we posed with the skier statue before driving back to the heart of Melbourne City where we found a virtual cache just near Flinders Rail Station. These 2 rare finds coupled with our traditional, multi, mystery, earthcache, mega, wherigo, letterbox and a lab cache ensuring we finished the day with 10 find types….. Impressive!

Our last in rural Victoria started a little slower than the previous days. Waking up on the banks of the Murray River was quite peaceful. Once packed up we were quickly back in our stride of finding more caches in the Wangaratta area. By lunchtime it was time to hit the black top and head for home. Our 3 day caching haul had amounted to 500+ finds.