Gold Coast Ramble 2017 makes colourful debut
To all our wonderful volunteers - a great big thank you from the Gold Coast Ramble. We could not have done it without you and your effort was not only appreciated by us, the organisers but also by the participants.
We got this message from one of the Ramblers:
I just wanted to say that the Gold Coast Ramble was really fun, and really well organised, and thank you all for all the work you put in. Organising the maps, clue sheets, the app, the "go manual" contingency plan in case the app died, it was all great. Even the clues on the clue sheet were just the right amount of cryptic and mysterious, and I really loved the vollies at every clue station -- they were all super friendly and encouraging and helpful.
So thank you very much. It was fantastic fun, and I really hope it becomes an annual event.
We learnt some lessons from a few hiccups - like putting a couple of checkpoints in the wrong position (Yidan and Josh get the prize for loneliest checkpoint volunteers!); putting incorrect map co-ordinates on another; having a couple of confusing questions and placing some of our checkpoints in locations exposed to the afternoon sun (our apologies to those volunteers affected).
Overall though, the event and technology worked as we planned it, even the manual back up was actioned for one group. The wet weather in the week leading up to the event probably affected registrations so we ended up with 58 teams (220 registrations). It was a dress rehearsal for the future when our numbers grow to 2,000 or 5,000 - we would not need any more volunteers than we had on Sunday.
We are likely to make a small loss on the event itself but everyone enjoyed themselves; the 'Gold Coast Ramble' brand has been established and the event enabled the nominated charities to benefit from donations of $7,000, which was the primary purpose of staging the event. All the participants had fun and the wonderful prizes were much appreciated. A full list of team scores will be available soon.