Munzee Players of the Week: Griff and Lesley Halliwell (Georiffles)
As Munzee has grown over the years, the game has evolved in so many more ways than any of the co-founders could have imagined. We’ve certainly had our fair share of growing pains, but in its essence Munzee has tried to stick to its core goal of getting people out into the world. No one knows this better than those players who have been with us since the beginning. This week’s Players of the Week are Griff and Lesley Halliwell (Georiffles).
Who are you?
I’m Griff and my wife is Lesley, we play as a couple – our player name is Georiffles, which is based around our two names.
Where in the world do you live?
We live on the Isle of Portland which is a beautiful spot on the south coast of England, it’s the most southernly point in the county of Dorset. 
It’s not really an island as it’s attached to the mainland by a narrow causeway, but we’ve been cut off more than once during stormy weather. Portland is famous for its stone and also for its large harbour where the London 2012 Olympic sailing events were hosted.
How long have you played Munzee?
I created our account in August 2011, but neither of us had a smartphone at the time so we didn’t really begin playing until January 2012.
How did you find Munzee?
We’d been playing the other GPS location based game for a little while, various members of the family joined us in doing that. Although we’d started before them, we had been overtaken in finds by my nieces Louise (geoibsons) and Dee and her husband Chris (DarthXrisFaerieDee)
Louise had heard about Munzee on a forum, possibly from a caching friend “rodz” and suggested we give it a try. I created an account and a few weeks later when she visited us on Portland we used her phone to cap the only two Munzees within 20 miles of here! She was FTC on one called “Dorset’s 1st Munzee” and I was FTC on the other.
What do you most enjoy about Munzee?
We like so many things about Munzee: It definitely gets us out walking. We’ve walked so far sometimes I can’t believe it, if there’s a steady stream of points coming we’ll walk for hours. We love specials and badges, they’re a great incentive to get out and Munzee!
We’ve enjoyed traveling to various Munzee hotspots. Early on we arranged a trip based around the virtual clusters listed on Statzee, it was a combined trip to Berlin and Hamburg. We managed to be #1 for the day 3 times on that trip, typically on scoring about 2,000 points for a full day capping as there were no mysteries back then.
Having made further trips to Hannover and Cologne we made a big trip to Washington, DC and then later to the MHQ Oktoberfest Bash event in McKinney.
It’s been nice meeting fellow players while out and about or when they come capping in the area. We’ve made some good friends along the way, it was fantastic to meet up with other members of the ‘Plankers’ clan in McKinney last year.
The Plankers had recently won the clan war and meeting Wes (arts5) and his wife Deanna (arts5wife) and at the same event meeting Douglas and Christy (5Daughters and Mrs5Daughters) with three of their beautiful daughters was really fantastic. Yes, Wes, my wife still loves you 🙂
We’ve enjoyed a bit of success in clans, the Plankers recently completed the medal triple-combo by getting the silver. This came on the back of a major success for us with ‘New York Munzee Hunters’ the month before.
What is on your wish list?
Another set of bouncing specials like the ’12 Days of Christmas’ from 2013 would be nice. The Snowman was proving elusive, we now refer to the place where we capped our first Snowman as ‘The Snowman bridge’.
More badges please, particularly those that are a challenge to achieve. We think a Clan MVP badge would be a good addition and create some interesting internal clan rivalry.
I’d like to see a new ‘Millionaire’ special pin to be credited to players with over 1 million points, there are currently only just over 100 players in this category so they would be pretty rare. Unlike the ‘Premium’ gold pins a player would only ever have one of these. There could be a badge for capping 10 or more millionaire specials.
Tell us about yourself!
I’m a mainframe systems software developer, Lesley works part time as a PA. We’ll be celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary soon.
Other hobbies include:
Beside a love of traveling, which we both share, I like to do a bit of windsurfing. Even in the UK winter I windsurf whenever possible, just so long as it’s windy. Lesley likes to go to gym classes, swims and reads a lot.
Interest in Munzee statistics and specials has encouraged me to teach myself some web programming skills, I created a little website that records and displays the daily top 20 leaderboard. More recently using the new official Munzee API I’ve split the global top 500 by nationality and to a limited extent created some national league tables.
Georiffles also included a social, so cap away!
