Yesterday was another Community Day in Pokemon Go, this time focused on Larvitar with lots of spawns and if you evolved a pokemon all the way to Tyranitar it would get the special Rock-type quick move Smack Down. While it's called “Community Day” I'm more of a solo player, but there's nothing really community-specific about the event, it's mostly called that so that groups that do like to do meetups have something to rally around.
I've moved to a different part of town recently so it's a bit easier for me to get to nice parks while Community Day is running. I'm still not crazy about doing it in the middle of the day (I prefer to go for my walk and play Pokemon Go early in the morning), but yesterday was a pretty great day for it. It was in the low 70s in Eugene and technically partly cloudy (so all of the Larvitar I caught were weather boosted) but mostly sunny and pleasant. I spent most of my time walking along the riverbank path system and my favorite parks, Maurie Jacobs Park and the Owen Rose Garden.
The rose garden is always pleasant to visit, and the Community Day element prompted me to snap a bunch of Larvitar photos with the AR camera.
A lot of the roses are concentrated on either side of the path in one area of the park.
There's also a nice gazebo in the park. It's a PokeGym but I didn't bother battling for it this time, I was focused on capturing Larvitar.
I also swung by the pokestops and gyms in Skinner Butte Park.
In addition to the parks themselves, most of this route is near the Willamette river so the water is part of what makes this route so nice.
As you can see in some of the photos, shiny versions were pretty abundant. I managed to catch five shinies, one of which had good IVs so I didn't feel guilty evolving it all the way to Tyranitar. The shiny versions of these aren't as eye-catching as some of the other shiny variants (such as shiny Charizard) but it's cool to have bragging rights of having the shinies in my collection. I had heard before the event that a Tyranitar with Smack Down would be a really powerful Rock-type attacker so I decided to evolve several to get a whole stable of them. Not all of them have the ideal charge move, but I might use some of the Technical Machines I've been hoarding to fix that.
Overall I was really happy with how many Larvitar I was able to catch. I used up all of my pinap berries so I could get as much candy as I could. Even with all the complete evolutions I did I ended up with more candies than when I started with (although I'll probably use some of that powering up the ones I just evolved).
Previously I've had mixed feelings about the Community Day events, but I was really positive about this one, although that's probably because getting lots of easy access to powerful pokemon is hard to dislike and probably not something that's readily replicable.