The Best Laid Plans
After 12 years of hosting the Discovery Walk Festival, our team of volunteers knows that the only sure thing is that something won't go as planned. We had some wonderful surprises and some unpleasant ones. We take them all in stride to be able to improve the event in coming years.
We apologize for the breakdown of the ice cream truck for Saturday. The sponsor providing the truck and ice cream is likewise disappointed. My personal motto is to underpromise and overdeliver (don't anybody there is ice cream until it is being handed out!) But when a sponsor commits to a giveaway they expect pre-publicity of it as part of the package.
Our committee has long been planning to re-do the Sunday walks to eliminate busing the long distance participants. For the past two years we have enjoyed showcasing the lovely WSU campus and Salmon Creek Greenway, which only busing would allow. But this year the buses we contracted for did not arrive. We went to Plan B and used the swim shuttle to take the few 33K participants to the starting point, or gave them the option of doing the 10K route three times. But our shuttle van couldn't accommodate the numbers we knew we had for the 21K. So we asked those participants to circle the 10K route twice.
This distressed some participants who were looking forward to a unique route. As a committee of walkers ourselves, we know that the solution was not ideal. But it allowed us to provide an instantly available marked and mapped route complete with checkpoints. Our lesson has been learned, we won't be relying on buses in the future. We will be redesigning the Sunday route to feature other lovely areas of Vancouver. We apologize to those who were disappointed.
One gentleman made lemonade out of the lemon by circling the 10K route 4 times and thereby completing a marathon distance 2 days in a row - a personal goal for him in his 70th birthday year. One of the groups of Japanese on the 33K route took a wrong turn and made the route into a marathon distance by accident. They were happy - they preferred to do the longer distance!
A happy surprise were the number of families and teams. Our Family Fun Walk participation went up 65% and we had almost twice the number of teams registered as last year. The good weather probably contributed to these successes.
We are looking forward to 2009. We have ideas brewing to improve the award system, routes, and entertainment. We can always use new people on our Core Committee to bring new ideas and work to implement them.