Metro Gathering 2018

[mortonfox]

I was in Northern New Jersey October 18 thru 22 for Metro Gathering, the only geocaching mega event I've been attending annually. I went to fewer events this year than last year. Those were:

• Pre~Witches of Salem Event Meet and Greet at the Mt. Allamuchy Scout Reservation the evening before the main event. This was a pot luck dinner and also a chance to pick up the attendee packets early.
• 2018 Metro Gathering ~ Witches of Salem, the main event, at Waterloo Village.
• NJ - Small Town Stanhope, a Munzee event at Riverside Park in Stanhope.

There was also a smaller geocaching event on Monday morning but I decided not to go to that one because I would've been busy packing up and getting ready to leave. The weekend was a good time as usual. There were the usual two sets of 10 lab caches that got everyone walking around Waterloo Village. Each lab cache location had a spooky item or setup from which one had to get a code word to enter into the mobile website to register a find. Some of the regular geocaches in the area had also been archived and relisted. Since I was there early, I found and logged those the day before the main event so I could focus on activities in the village during the main event.

After leaving the mega event, I went to the "NJ - Small Town Stanhope" Munzee event just down the road. Same as last year, the reason we had a separate Munzee event at a separate location is Space Coast Geo Store was forbidden from vending Munzee-related goods at the mega event. It was a short event because by the time we got there, we only had an hour or so before dusk. Still, we packed a lot in. In addition to capturing the event munzees around the little park, we also had cake and celebrated a fellow Munzer's birthday.