Austin Geocachers Happy Hour

Austin Geocachers Happy Hour (GC389) is the first event in the history of the game. On 24 March 2001, in Austin, Texas, Rich Carlson - Eoghan on geocaching.com - and Rachel Benavidez simply invited the city's geocachers to a bar: "Come and have a beer and meet the people whose names you see in the logbooks."

The context fits in a line: Austin had a single cache on 1 January 2001, two dozen by early March, and the people placing them knew each other only by their handles in the logbooks. Hence the recognition instructions, by sight: look for GPS units on the tables, or somebody wearing a Geocaching.com t-shirt. The announcement noted that the venue served beer, wine and coffee but no spirits, that there was a pool table and darts, and that dogs were welcome until 10 p.m. A commemorative cache placed on the spot ten years later puts the evening at the Scholz Garten, a beer garden opened in 1866 by a German immigrant and the oldest tavern in Texas. Rich and Rachel married in 2003.

The event became the monthly gathering of Austin's geocachers, a happy hour in a pub one month, a picnic in a park the next, each date entrusted to a different host and the calendar kept on Eoghan's personal site. Elsewhere, the idea was taken up: Texas saw the birth of the first mega-event, GeoWoodstock 4, in 2006. Twenty-five years after the game began, Geocaching HQ counted close to 500,000 events held worldwide. For the gathering's tenth anniversary, in 2011, a hundred or so geocachers met up in Austin, Rich and Rachel among them.