And the planning for next year’s race has begun. But a few details need to be worked out. We are making some changes (this is reusing some information from the last post):

1.We are getting rid of Monthly Goals. While they have been more successful than last year’s Checkpoint caches, they can be frustrating to score. However, the idea of bonus goals isn’t a bad idea. So next year, we’ll look at adjusting when and how we award them. Maybe some bonus goals to be awarded at the end of the year: mileage, # of events attended, # of pictures posted, etc. Or maybe quarterly or a mid-race bonus. We’ll see.

2.Timeliness. We are still looking at how to improve the process of getting updates posted. As I’ve stated, we’ve found a way to spread out the workload and now we need to work on timing. We’ll continue to look into the idea of an automated process, but progress in that area has been slow. Other ideas will be considered, so if you think you have one, let me know.

3. I am considering removing the FTF goal.  It creates some conflicts with scoring with regards to other rules.

4.Starting location. I think moving from Kansas City to Dallas for the starting location was a good idea. It changes things up a bit and ensures that the same people are not responsible for getting the race going every year. So, with this post, I’m putting an all call out for anyone interested in being the host for the start of the race. What does this entail? It means that you would be in charge of being the mailing point for all the entries, getting tracking information to me, attaching race tags, and hosting a New Year’s Day event to release the bugs (that was another successful change this year). We would like to see this occur in a larger city that has enough cachers and caches to spread out the TB’s. Expect there to be about 100 TB’s (Year one had 81 and this year was 94). If you’re up for this role, please post a comment on here with the city you are submitting for hosting the start of the race.

On #4, we are still looking to see who else might be interested in helping with this critical part of the race.  So I’m going to up the ante just a bit and say that whomever wins the role of running the starting location will also receive two complimentary entries for the race.  In other words, you’ll get two free travel bugs, one for yourself and one for someone of your choosing, to be used in entering the race.

Right now, we have the following cities that people have offered to host in:

Tampa, FL

Anchorage, AK

Toronto, Ontario, Canada  (my only concern is possible increases due to international shipping…I’ll look into this).

I would like to have some more suggestions by the end of this Friday, September 24th.  We will take the submissions and open up voting for the weekend.  Please make sure that if you offer a location, you are aware that you will be responsible for the details listed in #4 above.

Dallas, TX and Kansas City, MO are out due to their use in prior races.

So, who else is up for the challenge?

TripCyclone