Meeting notes: February 9, 2002

Greetings to all.

On February 9, the Georgia Geocachers Association (GGA) had their ninth meeting. On this occasion, we were hosted by Eric Gunderson of REI at the store near Perimeter Mall. In addition to providing the meeting facilities, Eric donated some nice items for door prizes. Also, REI has $50 rebate certificates for certain Garmin GPS products - see store personnel for details.

Participation was great, with 14 new attendees and 22 who have attended at least one previous meeting.

This meeting consisted of several open discussions, including:

Safety when geocaching - both from the personal safety viewpoint, as well as avoiding vehicle vandalism. Several comments were offered, including keeping valuables out of sight, leaving containers for such things as cameras open to indicate that nothing of value is in the vehicle, and parking in an area where there are people or other vehicles present. Be aware of your surroundings, and if things don't "feel" right, leave the area possilby to return at another time.

Possible GGA geocaching challenge event - There is considerable interest in this subject, and it was tentatively agreed to work toward having such an event at the June meeting. The first geocache ever was placed in May of 2000, and the first geocache in Georgia was placed in June of that year. Therefore our event would be timed to commemorate the two year anniversary of geocaching in Georgia. Several members indicating a willingness to participate as an organizer or to assist in the preparations for the event. If you were not at the February meeting but would like to be involved in organizing the event or in helping to make it work, please let me know and I will put you in touch with the other interested parties.

Clean up day - Gossamyrrh suggested to a steering committee member that our club look into organizing a clean up day activity at a park or other public area. Look for more on this subject on the EZ Board.

Logos - Mtn-Man led a discussion on design and production of logos that may be placed in caches as trade goods and/or placed on automoble windows. This subject is already under discussion on the EZ Board, so you may obtain current details there.

Bonfire cache for the March meeting - After discussion, it was decided that the March weather is too variable to plan an outside event, so this topic will be revisited and targeted for the April or May timeframe.

Lewis Moseley provided an overview of the GGA communication methodologies, including the e-mailing list, EZ Board threaded discussion area, and the GGA web site. Also, we are now providing links on the event cache pages (on the Geocaching dot com web site) that will take you to each of the archived event caches. You must be signed in to access archived caches.

Before closing the meeting, we had a drawing for the door prizes donated by REI and a number of members.

Happy geocaching! Hope to see all of you again next month.

-Brad

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