But what exactly is Pi Day, and why is it celebrated?
Wiki explains it as:
"Pi Day is an annual celebration of the mathematical constant π (pi). Pi Day is observed on March 14 (3/14 in the month/day date format) since 3, 1, and 4 are the first three significant digits of π. In 2009, the United States House of Representatives supported the designation of Pi Day."
It also goes on to explain:
"The earliest known official or large-scale celebration of Pi Day was organized by Larry Shaw in 1988 at the San Francisco Exploratorium, where Shaw worked as a physicist, with staff and public marching around one of its circular spaces, then consuming fruit pies. The Exploratorium continues to hold Pi Day celebrations. On March 12, 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a non-binding resolution (HRES 224), recognizing March 14, 2009 as National Pi Day."
Ok so now we know a bit about it's history. But this year geocaching.com decided to jump on the celebration bandwagon, and the result was one of great fun and great reason to be with our friends. What they did was create 2 new souvenirs that someone could get by simply attending any geocaching event on Pi Day, and by solving and finding a mystery cache.
Please remember you can click on any image in my blogs to view larger versions at any time! Additionally you can click on colored words which are links to relevant information.
So enter Pi day and it's celebrations. Worldwide there were many Pi Day geocaching events held, and the one that was held here was hosted by non other than Lumbo-Tire! His event "Strollin on the Pi(e)" was held at the View Royal Serious Coffee at 9:00am, with the official event page stating that "Come early, because at 9:26:53 am, everyone is to celebrate by yelling PI." If you haven't put it together yet the first 10 digits of Pi is 3.141592653.
We The GO! Team arrived at the event just shortly before 9:00am. We had both been up and getting ready so as to be there by quarter to nine, but somehow we totally lost track of time. I knew that it was going to be a busy event, and had a feeling we would be walking in to a standing room only deal. And after parking the car and walking in the door my feeling was confirmed, and we were seeing a very well attended event.
We felt sorry for the poor girl working the counter. While Lumbo did inform the owner of the establishment and got permission, they only staffed the location with just her. However she did eventually receive reinforcements, but not before it really was too late.
At just before appointed time Lumbo got everyone's attention said a few words, did a count down, and everyone yelled "Pi". It was followed by a round of laughter, and everyone got back to visiting with friends and discovering trackables. But Lumbo wasn't done yet. You see he had walked through the place earlier giving everyone 50/50 tickets for a draw. The prize, a few Pi(e)s to take home. I think there were 3 lucky winners, and who they were has escaped me, but I am sure they enjoyed their Pi(e) for dessert that evening. We enjoyed visiting everyone we could again! You can imagine it is difficult to visit with everyone, and we do try so hard to do so. But in the end in true The GO! Team fashion, we were the last to leave.
Moving along we headed out to do the second part of the day, finding a mystery cache. Here at our home like many geocachers we use GSAK.. Ok, ok, I use GSAK! So keeping databases of caches is a breeze. One such database on my copy is a "Solved Puzzles" database. Here is where I store all my solved mystery caches; cause lets face it, just because I solved it doesn't mean I will be rushing out the door to do it that day! So in anticipation of today I chose a mystery I thought I had solved, and had a final that wasn't that far away without requiring a significant hike.
We proceeded to the solved coordinates (which seemed to match the description of what you would find), proceeded to do the projection (something I have done many many times before), and did the area match the description no... NOPE, it did not! So this resulted in a very disappointing DNF. This is also when I should mention that mystery cache owners should use some sort of checker on their cache page. There are a couple geocheck and geochecker. These are great since the person can check their solved answer and see if they would be wasting their time if they headed out. Something this mystery didn't allow me to do!
By this point Mrs. GO! Team needed to get home to sleep for her night shift that night, so I got her there and I went straight to GSAK to see what else I had. I quickly poured over the database, chose three prospects, and flew out the door. Sadly they were epic fails too! The first one was correct but had been disabled due to the cache being missing, which I didn't know until I looked it up on my phone after 20min of searching. The second, well it had been archived about 3 months ago, while the third was so wrong it makes me think of THIS VIDEO of Dr. Cox from scrubs... So yeah, I wasn't too happy. But I headed home one last time, checked my database once more, and after running the refresh so I could see what was disabled and archived found one last one that fit my criteria of no hike and close to home. One last time I headed out there, and this time SUCCESS!! And the final souvenir was mine!
Now since this is over now I don't feel bad sharing this, but embedded in the souvenirs was a secret. That's right if you look closely in the images there is some letters and numbers a geocacher should recognise.
That's right, there was a secret GC number in the images, GC31415 which took you to this cache page HERE. No geocache to find, but rather the cache page was a placeholder for info for a contest. I do love geocoins, and having the one they were offering as a prize would have been great, but I decided I wasn't going to get involved. But it was a cool add on to the Pi festivities!
