23 hours of ingressing and they put 761 miles on the car in that time.....This is dedication

23 hours of ingressing and they put 761 miles on the car in that time.....This is dedication
great work! #nianticproject   #ingress   #ingressreport   

Originally shared by Corey Peoples

It took planning and plenty of coordination, but we managed to build a field this weekend.  A big one.  1.5 million MUs to be precise.  It started with an idea months ago when we had a few L8s but it was a backburner idea.  The keys were far away from where we live and the areas between them changed consistently.  Finally, one day, we began to seriously consider the plan and started to map it out/collect keys.  Since I lived closest to the southern point we selected, Rose Creek MN, I set out to get keys.  I manged to get 2 from a couple of trips over a couple of weeks, and keps the portal charged.  I knew we would do this eventually and the portal was very out of the way.  One weekend a couple of weeks later, my family and I went up to visit my sister in Duluth.  While there, I set out to collect a couple of keys for the southern portals in Duluth and met up with one of the local Reistance players there, Wonderorc, who suggested and donated keys for Gooseberry falls park, a portal about an hour north of Duluth that is rarely ever hit by the bulbs (for those not from MN, we refer to the Enlightened as bulbs, always have).  We now had 2 portals and a plan.  We put together a request to the L8s to see who was interested.  We needed 3 for the Duluth/Gooseberry Falls crew, at least 4 for the Fargo/Felton crew, and people on standby to take out any blocking links.  The 3 that volunteered for Duluth were Nickykatz, Nerk01, and Sipidation.  For Fargo, I (Peeps) offered to drive and meet anyone in the twin cities to head out.  I drove up from Mankato and Draconisdax drove up from Rochester (Both are between an hour and an hour and a half to get to the metro).  Pyroscott and Nevan from St. Cloud agreed to go as well.  We had our crew confirmed for Saturday the 30th, Easter weekend.  For a week, we watched, waited, and planned.

Zenmabel and Davethebrewer were ready for cleaning out any of the bulb's blocking links, but we had a problem.  Someone trying to level on our own team created a link from New Market to St. Peter that blocked us.  We did not announce this to our entire team publically, so it is understandable that this could happen.  The problem was both of the portals were new as of that day so they would not decay for a week.  We had to make someone want to take out that link.  Dmention7(enl) typically always takes out Elko and New Market but he left New Market up that day, both in the morning and on his way home.  We had to act.  4 L8s went to New Market and placed 8s and 7s on them.  We had a new name post in pulbic chat that we were building an L8 farm.  We hoped the bulbs would be a little sore from the L8 farm that they tried to build and we destroyed before they managed to complete and would want to take ours out right away.  We also set up a bunch of spider links from it to make it more appeasing.  I then went home to Mankato, picked up an L6 from my area, and we went to St. Peter to build it up to encourage someone to come up and destroy it as well.  They didn't destroy it from St. Peter for days, but the resistance player reached L7.

Then it happened.  KTerk(enl) took out New Market on Friday night.  This entire day would not have been possible without the unknown assitance of KTerk.  Who ever you are, I owe you a beer sometime ;)

So Saturday morning I confirmed all of the lines were still clear ofresistance links and we set off on our trip.  I met Draconisdax in Burnsville and we left for St. Cloud.  Shortly after, Nickykatz, Nerk01 and Sipidation left for Duluth.  We picked up Nevan and Pyro and still confirmed the links were still open.  We left for Felton (a city about half an hour out of Fargo that we could make the links with 4 L8 players.  The Duluth crew met up with Wonderorc for lunch since they had more time.  Zenmabel confirmed the West Side blocking links were taken down around 11.  We arrived at Felton around 1:30 and mapped out the portal.  It was about 50 yards down an unused railroad track, so we had to walk down to it.  Davethebrewer set out to take out a couple of the East side blocking links and waited for the confirmation to take out the last one.  The Duluth crew got to their portal right around 2 PM.  We gave Dave confirmation and he took out the last blocking link.  The Duluth crew upgraded their portal and linked to Rose Creek, MN.  We then deployed on ours and linked to Rose Creek and Gooseberry Falls.  At 2:14 PM, the field went up and we posted in our chatroom.  1,505,942 mind units, the largest that MN has seen.  Everyone on the Resistance teams loved it, and it sparked quite a bit of an outburst from certain bulbs.  Screenshots were taken by all and posts went up on G+; it was glorious.

Our plan then was to upgrade local portals.  The Duluth area is mostly Resistance, so the 3 Level 8s that went up were able to create some L7 portals there.  The 4 of us that went to Fargo found that most of the portals were green, so we went on a spree and took everything and upgraded to 7s. Dillworth, Moorehead, and Fargo, 49 portals in all: L7 Resistance.  One of the local Fargo players, Walkeran, was going around and linking everything that we took.  Any time we met up with each other at a portal, we would drop whatever keys we had collected for him.
Because of the distance of the points of the large field, we had suspected that the Felton/Fargo end would be the first to go down.  It was relatively closer to Fargo than the other portals were.  Had Xterra taken it, we simply would have linked it again on our way home.  Unbenknownst to us, danger loomed in Albert Lea (about 25 minutes from Rose Creek).  Lnxfrx, a L8 bulb from Anoka, was visiting his family.  He had to cut his easter plans short to take out the field.  The links went down from Rose Creek at 6:24, the one place we really did not expect anyone to take.  The people of MN were safe from influence for 4 hours this day.  We now have to go back to our normal Give and Take.

We finished up the night in Fargo with dinner at Doolittle's Woodfire Grill and started our trip back at 11:30.  On our way back while playing, we were stopped by 3 police officers because 4 grown adult men sitting in front of a government building at 2 in the morning is "suspicious."  They were out looking for someone that was off on the side of a highway with their flashers on earlier that night.  We explained the game to them and what we had done that day, and they just let us know that we could likely get pulled over again.  That was the first time I have ever been stopped by local law enforcement and thanks to writeups that I have read on DecodeIngress, all went smoothly.

I dropped off the players at their cars and made my way home.  I stopped off at a portal along the way to create a link and another portal to destroy a link, and a brand new player in my area used that opportunity to level up this morning.  I started Saturday at 7:00 AM and I returned home on Sunday at 5:51 AM, nearly 23 hours of ingressing... and yes, I put 761 miles on my car on this day (that does not include the Rose Creek or Duluth trips that I took to make this possible).

Special thanks to Dane Ger, Christian Schrandt, Dave Gobran, Jennifer Parks, Jonathon Carlson, Jonathan Krengel, Jen Krengel, Sipidation K, Nathan Mellendorf, Jarrard Woodward, and Scott Johnson for all of your work in this project! 

It was crazy, and fun, and I would do it again, so until next time, Lnxfrk ;)

-Peeps