This past Sunday, April 15, was another Pokemon Go Community Day, this time featuring Mareep. Since I tend to find it too disruptive to my normal routine to walk to a park during the 11AM to 2PM schedule I decided to see if driving to a park would make it more palatable. Generally I don't like to drive places just to play Pokemon Go, most of the reason I play is to motivate me to walk, but I got so many shiny Bulbasaurs last time that the possibility of getting some more shiny pokemon was too tempting for me to skip. In addition to increased Mareep spawns the bonus during the event was that eggs would hatch in ¼ of the normal distance. I thought I would be clever by starting up a bunch of eggs in incubators just before the event started to maximize the effect but I ended up outsmarting myself – the actual mechanism was that the egg distance was cut by ¼ if you started the incubator during the event, not that your walking rate was 4X as effective. Woops! I still managed to hatch a lot of eggs, and the double-candy Kanto event was running concurrently so I probably got a lot of extra candy from that.
One fun element of the event is that they incorporated the Field Research element of the Research Subsystem that they added recently. During the event virtually all of the tasks I got from pokestops involved capturing Mareep.
It was a rainy day here in Eugene which makes it a lot harder to play the game (when the phone screen gets wet it gets hard to interact with), so I wasn't having the best time walking around the parks. The battery on my phone started running low and I didn't encounter any shinies during my walk, so I was pretty disappointed. I evolved my highest level high-IV Mareep up to Ampharos to get the special move (although having a Dragon-type move on an Electric-type pokemon doesn't seem that great) and left.
On my way home from the park I stopped at the grocery store. The time for the Community Day hadn't expired yet, so I checked the game in the parking lot before I heading in to pick up some food. There was a cluster of Mareep there, so I decided to try to capture them. Two turned out to be shiny, so that tempered my disappointment quite a bit.
Driving to the park rather than walking was probably an improvement over my previous Community Day experience, but not by much. I think my body just isn't used to being out and about at that time of day, and since I skipped my morning walk I had been going a bit stir-crazy for most of the morning, so it was still a pretty big disruption from my normal routine.