Wednesday 23/01/2013 - Utrecht, The Netherlands. #ingressreport

Originally shared by Evert Eckhardt

Wednesday 23/01/2013 - Utrecht, The Netherlands. #ingressreport  
30 years after the first episode of The A-Team.

“I’m waiting for you guys at Brasserie Domplein!” said tiliaris, the first on the scene. Everyone was on route to the starting point in Utrecht, in order to pull of the largest L8 operation in Ingress to date. 
The buzz was already started by Oxymoron with hints and quotes from The A-Team:

”Today we will write #ingress  history. If you are Enlightened, watch the COMM. If you are not, now is a good time to switch sides.”
“Hang on, #ingress - I wanna try something I saw in a cartoon once!”
“In no time, we'll be running around like a Mexican Jack Rabbit. One that just got out of therapy.” #ingress  

We shared to Dutch Communities to peak interest, and created an event to post updates. https://plus.google.com/events/cedbm7a47jcdplvre4fmss7rrtc

When everyone had arrived, including our van which would get us where we were going this evening, it was 18:00. And sapereaude(Tim van de Rijdt ) brought some awesome Google+ smartphone gloves! We planned our strategy, everyone had a compass point, deploy and go. This looks easy, but coordinating 10 players is hard, we got the jist of it after a few portals and upped 14 L8 portals in no time.

The first two level 8 portals to be erected in the Netherlands were a *
Resistance Memorial and the "Sol Iustitiae Illustra Nos" (latin: "Sun Of Justice Enlighten Us").  After these two symbolic and antithetical conquests, a total of fifty more were to follow; scattered across the Netherlands to aid our Enlightened brothers and sisters, wherever they may be.

We had another vehicle, thanks to Harauwer(Harro Rauwerdink ) a L7 player, with me(paralyz3) and BlackHawkNL(Nick van Gilst) to destroy any portals for them to gain AP. The van was driven by Namzaj (Jasper Kuiper ) and filled up by CrookiET (R CrookiET), tiliaris(jean-françois suret ), Oxymoron (Lukas Vermeer), Matticus(Matt Feigal), ixs(Andreas Thienemann), Ixotopp(Kristian Köhntopp), Krypt(Jeroen de Jong) and pieeet(Piet de Vries). 

Our second stop was The Hague. After a swift destruction of the support team, the portals started popping up again. The locals joined in the farming as well! 
After 12 portals this site was done, and #the8team  was on the move again, to grab some hot coco! To Leiden! In Leiden we upped 6 more portals, after we drank our coco of course. We were at a total of 32 portals, exactly as planned. 

Then it was time to split up, I switched places with Oxymoron and they went to destroy the Resistance farms in Katwijk and Noordwijk as a decoy, while we would make our way to our final location, Amsterdam. 

In the van we dicussed future plans for the coming months. We made a quick pitstop at Schiphol to grab 5 more portals and some burgers(trust me, walking around with these temperatures gets you an appetite). When we arrived in Amsterdam, we did 3 more portals at Amsterdam Zuid, then moved to the center, to enlighten Rembrandtplein. The plan was 11, but we did 12. Why? To complete our card deck of course! And because we can.

But let us not forget what this game and last night's event are really about. It was never really about those portals. It was about all of you who participated. Your newfound friendship and future cooperation. Your sense of achievement because you were the first.

Fifty-two level 8 portals, total of 14 people who helped out, operation time of 9 hours. In the coming days, the Resistance will surely come crawling from under their rocks and work hard to destroy these monuments to our joint achievement; and although it saddens us, we are confident that they will eventually succeed. It is always easier to destroy than it is to create, but we have the determination, the coordination, energy and time to do this.

My friends, #ingress  and #the8team   is about people.

Whatever comes next; they can never take that away from us.

We love it when a plan comes together. 

Ingress Joe Philley Anne Beuttenmüller Brandon Badger  #enlightment