My friend and her husband are turning 40, and we are planning a birthday party for them in San Francisco. Her brother came up with the idea for a scavenger hunt, and since my husband and I are just joining the fun of Geocaching, I suggested that we do something along those lines. We're just in the planning stage now, and trying to decide if we will do a "true Geocache" or make up something on our own, but I thought I would get some ideas from those more experienced with Geocaching.
We expect to have about 25 people, with most being novices to Geocaching. We will probably break into teams of 4-5 people, and we hope to have a smart phone dedicated to each group, so groups can either choose to download the Geocache app or enter coordinates on Google Maps. (If we go with a real Geocache)
Any suggestions on making this work smoothly and with muggles? Some of the guest do not want to drive all over San Francisco. So we are hoping to either target caches that are within walking distance of the party location, or drive to one location, such as Golden Gate Park, and have people set off from there to find caches. One idea is for a group to find as many as they can within a given time period, and to assign higher points for more difficult finds. So one group may choose to find 3 easy ones, and earn 3 points, and another group may choose to find one that's more difficult and earn more points. They would have to picture document the team with the found cache to get the credit for it. We also found a cool multi-cache challenge that is not too far away from the party location. It seems challenging enough to be fun, but not too difficult. The winning team solves the puzzle and finds the cache first.
We don't want to make it too difficult, because I suspect we will have some "grumpy" participants that wouldn't choose to do this on their own, but reluctantly agree to do it for the party.
Any suggestions are appreciated, especially, a discussion of problems with doing things any one way.
Thanks!
