Advance warning certainly would have been thoughtful and polite. I have been working on a Challenge Cache for over a year. More than 15 months ago, I sent our great Reviewer an email to see if it would fly. In the interim, I found the perfectly themed, family friendly, legal place to stash it. I purchased a themed Trackable as a First To Find prize and bought a new container, logbook, and swag to go along with everything. I then polished up my Bookmark List. I placed the container last week and have been working on making the cache page clear and attractive. There was already a cache page with a GC number issued on my account page. Although I understand why HQ did not want to give any advance notice, this is rather frustrating and disappointing to say the least. I really dont know why Im so surprised.
Edited to add: I forgot to mention, a friend and I cleaned up the area when placing the container.