Christmas Orienteering Event

Saturday, 9 December 2023

Last weekend was the Christmas orienteering event. These events usually feature a novelty factor and I'd say the McComb family has had a heavy hand in organising the bulk of them for the much of the last decade. Through this time we've made participants (during race time) wrap a present, run through a maze, find a decorated christmas tree amongst sea of christmas trees, complete a bauble-and-spoon obstacle course, attempt to punch a control being dragged across the ground by naughty elves (you can guess who they were), and probably some other stuff that I've forgotten.  So it was a miracle that Zali and I managed to come up with a new novelty event for this year - something we called - 'lay-the-table'.

Essentially participants had to recreate a Christmas place setting mid course before they were allowed to continue. 

Due to the many colours and patterns that were featured in the original design it would have been hard enough but we added some extra difficultly by putting the original setting a good 30 metres away from the supplies and judging area and also having lots of dummy supplies the participants had to choose from:

My job was to stand at the original setting and explain the task, Zali's job was to judge the place settings.   It was deeply amusing for both of us. Some (few <5) people managed to nail it first time, others required 5, 6 or more trips back to the sample to get it right.  I'd say the median was about 3 trips back to check the original.

Thank fully everyone was pretty good natured about the task and seemed to enjoy it. When they got it right they had to pull a cracker with Zali (she must have done 70 that day) which contained the second half of their courses:

This feature had taken us hours to achieve the day before - we had to carefully open up and 'gut' cheapo Big W crackers, then insert our tightly rolled maps and gently re-seal them.  It was a lot of work but a fun little thing that I think everyone enjoyed.