Waymarking Bingo

 

I've been doing more waymarking than geocaching lately. I have a couple of main motivations for this -- one, if I'm in an urban/suburban area, waymarking doesn't require me to dig around suspiciously. Two, if I have a choice of areas, I lean towards the area without ticks.

A secondary motivation, however, is waymarking bingo. For each category of waymarks (e.g., pyramids, sushi restaurants, "you are here" signs) that I log, I get an icon on my user page. Above, you can see rows 19-37 of my user page (the current page is here). As of this morning, I have 73 out of a possible 752 categories.

Some waymarkers have introduced the concept of "waymarking bingo", which they defined as 20 icons in a row, column or diagonal. Very few waymarkers have achieved this. I feel like I've been doing a lot of waymarking, and the best I have done is 4 in a row (row 33). It'll probably be a long time before I get a bingo. You might think row 33 is my most promising row, since I already have 4 in a row. But row 33 contains such tricky categories as Abandoned Air Force Radar Sites, Martello Towers and Holy Wells. There are 13 existing waymarks worldwide in the first category, 14 in the second, and 29 in the third. I don't expect to be in the neighborhood of them any time soon.

I can always wait for someone to create a more convenient waymark in one of these categories or even - gasp - do the research and create one myself. For categories like KFC and 7-11, that's easy...and then I get to put them on my "ignore" list, since I'm not really interested in seeing more than one. For the above categories, that could be a little trickier.

Truthfully, I'm more interested right now in filling out the grid as much as possible than in getting "bingo". It's interesting to hunt down the rarer icons. When I was at LAX last night, I noticed I was near an example of Googie architecture. Since there aren't any examples near home, I decided to find that one. It turned out to be the most expensive waymark find yet, but that's a tale for another post...