Friday, November 28, 2008

An after Thanksgiving Day Cache

I hope you all had a terrific Thanksgiving! My in-laws came down to spend the holiday with us. Before their arrival I had spoken with my mother-in-law about going geocaching. She has witnessed people searching for these hidden treasures in our hometown and knows someone there who hides and seeks herself. So yesterday after we re-cooperated from stuffed tummies with a good night’s sleep, Hunter, Linda and I set off for two cache’s I had chose and Hunter deciphered.

It was a chilly 34 degrees when we headed out late in the morning. Richard was on and directing us from his suction cupped windshield mount. Linda rode shotgun while Hunter was behind me with the journal and his soft purple sack. At this cache we would see a big water tower sandwiched between a small park and some houses. A parking lot was mentioned in the cache description, but Richard brought us to a dead end residential street. We could see the water tower, but it wasn’t until we parked my van and walked down a black topped path to the park did we see the parking lot described.

This cache was categorized as small and we read it would be a small coffee container that would be hidden on the ground. While we approached the water tower from the narrow dirt road leading away from the parking lot, I asked Hunter to read the coded hint he deciphered the night before. He said,

“Water, water every where, nor any drop to drink. Look for where the water tower gets its energy.”

OK. Obviously the water tower gets its energy from the small burnt orange colored shed sized building at the face of the tower, just in front of the first leg supports. A barbed wire fence began at the sides of the shed and outlined the water tower in a long rectangle. I put Richard in my pocket, thinking I wouldn’t need him anymore. We were here, now we just had to use our eyes….

We had 3 pairs of eyes looking for this one. We were a little leery though because there were warning signs on the door of the shed and no trespassing signs on the property lines of the houses next to the tower. We probably guessed correctly when we talked of past geocachers crossing into someone’s back yard while looking for the cache hidden among the trees and fallen logs between the tower and the houses. We looked for probably twenty five minutes, but didn’t find it. Thinking back we probably should have dug through the leaves more next to that building than we did, but our fingers were cold. I forgot to bring a garbage bag, but Hunter collected some empty potato chip bags and other wrappers and put them in the trash cans inside the park.

We returned to the van disappointed, but we still had one to go!

Hunter entered the Latitude and Longitude into Richard. From reading the cache entry we just attempted, I learned there was another cache less than a mile from our current location. If it had been a bit warmer and I had a better handle on what my GPS was capable of, we probably could have walked. Instead we warmed ourselves back up inside the van and obeyed Richard’s commands.

Richard is a helpful and effective machine, however, his knowledge is roads. The destination of our second cache was described as Regular size and hidden at the end of a dead end street called Heather Lane. We were told to drive to the end and the cache wouldn’t be far from the road, not far off a dirt path next to a park the path passes by. Well, Richard brought us to the end of a Cul-de-sac, Cricket Lane, and told us where we wanted to go was through the yard and past two houses and just beyond a weathered split rail fence. You can’t really tell a machine that walking across someone’s yard without permission was a no-no! LOL We could see the woods and the park beyond the fence, so we back tracked a bit and found Heather Lane and smiled at the dead end before us with a path to the left.

The original cache, placed in early February of this year, was all golf oriented. In the beginning it contained golf balls, tee’s, divet fixer and a Grand River Academy coaster. We weren’t expecting to find any of those items left, if we found the cache at all. Don’t count us out yet!

As we walked down the beaten path we came up to a small wooden bridge that arched across a shallow ravine with a bit of ice amongst all the frozen mud below us. I wanted to catch this moment digitally. My MIL was eager to pose with Hunter, but Hunter, as you can see in this picture, wasn’t thrilled with the idea of stopping. He wanted to find that cache!


Just like before, he read us the hint he deciphered, the longest one so far:

“Two paths diverged in the wood and I took the one less traveled by and that made all the difference. From the park turn left, from the street turn right. The ground is a little bumpy around this one.”

We came up to where there was a fork in the road but they both appeared the same, one didn’t look less traveled by than the other. Since we came from the street we turned right and started walking slowly, looking for anything unnatural like a pile of stones or branches crisscrossed. After about ten minutes, when we had walked around the small wooded area and approached the park, I determined that I would need Richard and I headed back to the van. We came up to the park and saw that the path we had begun to walk on was paved and the one that went into the woods, the one we had been on, was dirt packed and littered with leaves, stones and broken, “…the one less traveled by…”. So after I got the GPS from the van, we met at the split and took the path back into the woods.

During this time a tall woman had appeared on the path. She crossed the bridge with her arm held out and at first I thought she was the Hider or even a Seeker pointing out the way to us, but then I saw the chubby dachshund who was leading her, decked out in a Christmas sweater with a pocket on his back. I wanted to ask her what her dog kept in his pocket, but instead I answered her question honestly and said, We’re geocaching. I knew from her dumbfounded look she was a Muggle, a term used after a non geocacher looks puzzled when befriending a geocacher searching for a cache. I explained it was a scavenger hunt with GPS systems. She smiled and nodded, saying she had heard of that. She also said she and Rufus (I don’t think that’s the dog’s real name…) come to that park twice a day, six days a week and she hadn’t seen anything and he hdsn’t sniffed anything out. I think if she had heard of geocaching she’d know that it wouldn’t be where just anyone would see and no dog would be interested in it because no food items are allowed. Play-Doh is even on the Do Not Use list because apparently raccoons think it’s a treat. She and her warm and cozy dog carried on and the three of us put our eyes back to the ground.

My plan was to watch the coordinates on Richard’s screen (what I should have done at the first cache) and get us close to the L&L given for this one. Unfortunately, I hadn’t finished my homework. I still didn’t know how to use the walking directions yet and gosh darn it, my L&L were presented in the wrong format! I played with it a little bit while Hunter and his grandma continued a slow trek through the woods, looking for anything that would be an X for a geocacher. I was impatient and called my sister Karyn in Georgia. She was actually just about to head out in search of her own cache. She was very helpful and did all the work for me. When I said goodbye, I knew I was going to get an A+ because Richard was now talking on the screen in a language I could understand!

I called out to Hunter and my MIL. I got it now! I told them. I showed Hunter what I was watching for, comparing what Richard had displayed to what we had printed in our journal of where the cache was hidden. GPS’s can be up to 10 feet or so off, so when we got close to the correct coordinates, I stopped looking at Richard and told my fellow finders to now start looking for something “not right” or holes, something that you would consider hiding something in. My MIL was already looking, intent of making the best out of her first day of geocaching. Hunter had returned his attention to the small items he carried with him, but when I told him we were close, he began to look as well.

Linda spotted a large pile of snow covered fallen logs and had gone around to the other side. Then she called out that she found it and Hunter and I ran and stood next to her. I let Hunter look for himself, although he was trying to look in-between logs packed on top of each other. MIL suggested he look more to the left and he put his face level with a hole the size of a basketball and he said, I think I see something! He pulled out a large plastic coffee can covered in silver duct
tape. This one didn’t have a Geocache sticker on it, but how it looked, where we found it, and the discovery after Hunter pried off the gold lid and pulled out a wrinkled plastic bag, told us it was the hidden cache! There wasn’t all that many tradable items in there, but as Hunter took a red barrel monkey and left a glow in the dark dinosaur, I wrote our geocacher username and the date in the small log book. I checked that the lid was on water tight and Hunter put it back in as he had found it. Our second successful find and we were so glad to have grandma with us!

No comments: