What: Battle Ground's 48th annual Harvest Days Celebration
When: 1 to 11 p.m. today; 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. Saturday.
Where: Fairgrounds Park and Battle Ground Community Center, 912 East Main St.
Also: GeoCoin Challenge kickoff begins at 2 p.m. July 18 in Lewisville Park, 26411 N.E. Lewisville Highway.
Cost: Mostly free, but carnival tickets are $25 each; tasting room has $5 entry; beer garden $5 cover charge begins at 6:45 p.m.
On the web: <a href="http://www.battlegroundchamber.org/pages/HARVESTDAYS">www.battlegroundchamber.org/pages/HARVESTDAYS</a>;
<a href="http://www.harvestnightscarcruise.com">www.harvestnightscarcruise.com</a>;
<a href="http://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC5X7J9_2015-battle-ground-geocoin-challenge-kickoff">www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC5X7J9_2015-battle-ground-geocoin-challenge-kickoff</a>
Think you know Battle Ground?
So did one lifelong resident who set out last year to hunt down hidden treasures that were stashed all around the area for the GeoCoin Challenge part of Battle Ground’s 2014 Harvest Days Celebration.
Afterwards, GeoCoin Challenge organizer Wayne Rivers got an excited email from this person, who was trumpeting his visit to a beautiful little nature park near Cedars Golf Course that he’d never known about before. He was less excited about locating his secret geocaching target than about rediscovering the already-familiar local landscape, Rivers said.
“We try to find places that are just a little hidden away,” said Rivers, a geocaching fan since 2010, with satisfaction. That usually means a park or greenspace, he said; while it’s possible to embed a cache somewhere in the cityscape, it’s also possible that somebody who isn’t searching will stumble upon it accidentally.
What is geocaching? It’s a device-driven hobby with millions of participants worldwide; the idea is that your GPS or geocaching app provides you some general coordinates for the item you’re hunting for — usually a waterproof container that is sometimes cunningly camouflaged. Electronic guidance gives way to old-fashioned eyeballing and maybe even searching around on hands and knees. When you finally find your prize, you sign the log book and maybe exchange one cute souvenir for another — for example, a toy or teddy bear.
Mainly, you enter into your app the secret code for the cache you discovered — and you’re rewarded with coordinates for the next one. Find ten of them — there are many, many more than that in Battle Ground, Rivers said — and you’ll earn a special souvenir GeoCoin from the Battle Ground Chamber of Commerce.
Geocaching is an excellent way for local residents to get to know their hometown all over again, Rivers said — and for visitors to get to know it, too. Last year, somebody came from Washington, D.C., to take part; and another email recently came from a global geocacher in Mexico who plans to take part in the Battle Ground GeoCoin Challenge Kickoff in Lewisville Park.
“Last year, we had 171 people come out to the kickoff event,” said Rivers. That’s great news for this chamber board member and local accountant, who worries that Battle Ground has no adequate mechanism for “putting tourism money back into the community” to promote more tourism, he said.
The geocaching enthusiasts who come from far and wide specifically for this event “will be eating and drinking here and maybe sleeping here that night,” Davis said. “I’ve always wanted to do this challenge because it shows that spending money on this kind of event does bring in people from outside.”
Believing in the park
If you never stopped believing in Battle Ground, Harvest Days is for you. Catch crowd-pleasing Journey tribute band TLS Journey — TLS stands for Touchin’ Lovin’ Squeezin’, which is a song by the group. They perform from 9 to 11 p.m. July 17. (TLS Journey reportedly enjoys the distinction of being the world’s only female-Filipino-fronted tribute to Journey — which, as of the hiring of a new lead singer in 2007, became the world’s biggest Filipino-fronted rock band).
And, on July 18, local star Britnee Kellogg opens at 7:45 p.m. for country singer-songwriter James Otto, who takes the stage at 9 p.m.
Harvest Days returns this year to Battle Ground Community Center and Fairgrounds Park, on the east end of Old Town’s main drag, after spreading up and down Main Street last year. Maybe it was a little too spread out, organizers have acknowledged. This year, most activities will be focused right here: a beer and wine garden, as well as a local winery tasting room; a sale by the Battle Ground Arts Alliance; a professional freestyle scooter competition in the skate bowl from noon to 9 p.m.; a kickball tournament; a classic car show; and much more.
Still spreading across town, however, will be the Harvest Nights Cruise, with as many as 400 classic cars invading Main Street from 7 to 11 p.m. July 17; the Fred Meyer Grand Parade, starting at 10 a.m. July 18 on Main at Northwest 5th Avenue; and that GeoCoin Challenge, which kicks off at nearby Lewisville Park at 2 p.m.
