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The Sketch
North Wales Mega Event day began fairly early for us. Because we were leaving Phil’s flat, we couldn’t be bothered to cook anything while we were there. And because Llangollen was likely to be busy, we set off early to grab our assigned parking space. It took some time to find, mainly because at the time we arrived they hadn’t yet stationed anyone in a yellow jacket out on the road. So as we drove past what looked like a bit of tarmac on the outside corner of a sharp bend where people just abandoned their cars, when it was, in fact, the entrance to the official car park. I got a funny look when I mentioned this to a marshall as we entered. We’d already driven two circuits around the town before finally spotting it, but he didn’t seem bothered.
Breakfast First
Suitably parked up, we were still half an hour before the official start of the event. Not everyone (or everything) was open, so we walked over into the town to grab breakfast. There was a little cafe next to the bridge over the river that looked good. Well, we grabbed a cache on the way over, but that’s kind of a given on days like this. Whenever you see a crowd, you walk over and get the cache of someone.
Breakfast was a “pick from the menu” affair. Ami had some mash-up of pastries and toast while I had a Full Monty with extra toast. It was good.
After breakfast we decided to do a handful of caches in the town before retiring to the event site. One was a WherIGo that involved playing a game of “chicken, fox and corn” on the bridge, although in this case it was “geocacher, tiger and beer”. I was surprised to see how far away the end point was once we’d run back and forth over the bridge the requisite seven times. It was steeply uphill to get there, but it had to be done after all that bridge crossing malarky. On the way back down we passed and found a couple of Church Micro caches before heading up to the event site.
The North Wales Mega Event
I have to admit the massive mega events themselves never hold much sway with me. It’s really a question of what activities they have available at the event and what quantity and quality of caches they have available nearby. In this case, they had a few kids bouncy castle things as well as various fairly interesting games that constituted the lab caches. The event itself was a massive tent full of cachers all chatting and buying caching stuff.
We had limited time on the event day because we had an appointment back in Milton Keynes to go watch one of our friends’ kids performing in a production of Fame at the MK Theatre. So by 1 pm or so we’d had enough and we decided to grab some chips and then head home. Ami was visibly wilting in the heat anyway. She doesn’t “do” hot weather very well.
The drive down was rather slow, but not as slow as the drive into Llangollen]] along the A5. It was a Saturday in August, so the road was crammed with people heading off for a week of holiday fun in North Wales, and the road was heaving. Once we got past Shrewsbury it wasn’t too bad, but it seemed to take ages to get there.
The production of Fame was great.
The caches we found on Saturday were: