We got CACHE!

As Sat mentioned we went out on our first geocaching hunt on Thursday. It was a lot of fun, but kind of frustrating. We had been warned that it is harder than it appears. We had the coordinates, we had our GPSr, we had a compass. The one thing that we didn’t have was a topographic map that would have told us we couldn’t get to where we wanted to go by taking the path that we took. We are starting out with caches near us (so that Colleen can handle the “anxiety” of the adventure a little easier). We found two that were close to us and seemed within easy reach. Our original goal was “Sycamore Surprise”. Well, the surprise was it is not only on the other side of the railroad tracks from us, but also across a ravine that we couldn’t find a path over. So we got within 100 feet of the location and had to stop because there was no way we could get through the thick of trees and brush that blocked our path. Luckily, as we were hunting our Sycamore we happened upon the first location of a multi-cache (you go to the given coordinates to find clues to the second set of coordinates). All of the sudden the GPS went nuts because we were under some high voltage power lines and when we finally got it back on we were right in front of Part I of Otto’s Halloween cache! Sat and I didn’t have paper or a writing utensil with us so we did what all tech. nuts do, I took a picture with my camera phone and Sat took a picture with the digital camera. So the first trip wasn’t a TOTAL bust, but we were a little disappointed that we didn’t find our first cache during our first try.

And now for day two, the exciting day! I didn’t feel like hunting yesterday so we took a little break but went out nice and early this morning. It had been raining earlier and it was still overcast so I was concerned about getting caught in the rain. We decided to take our chances - plus, that is what we bought the rain ponchos for, right? Well we hit the road around 10 this morning and this time we had a better idea where we were going. We had done a LOT of research on our day off including putting our coordinates into Google Earth, working with geocaching.com’s Google map feature, and reading the logs and hints left about our destined locations. After a nice walk in overcast San Diego we got to our first location in about 10 minutes. We thought we were going the wrong way so we back tracked a little and got closer to the train tracks to find our cache. Right as we were about to be on top of it we realized that we should have stayed up top. We were close, but about 15 feet below it. We decided to skip that one for now and continue to the railroad crossing to get to Sycamore Surprise. And let me tell you, it was a lovely walk. I am not a huge fan of California landscape - it is all brown and dead looking if you ask me - but this was still nice. We found two scary looking half dead trees that were eerily beautiful (yes, we took pictures), and there was a nice bridge over a little creek. When we finally got to the cache spot it was at this beautiful sycamore. I can only imagine what it looks like when the leaves are still on it and it is green. It was really exciting getting to the spot of the cache. I get to run the GPSr when we are out in the field so I got to watch the count down to 0ft distance.. It was awesome. Almost right after I got to 0 ft I saw the cache!! It was hidden in the tree trunk of this giant sycamore. Sat and I got lots of pictures, so don’t worry. It was a lot of fun. On the way back we were on a high and DETERMINED to find Otto’s cache! And guess what? We did!! Unfortunately someone else had gotten to it before us and left it open and some of the items were on the ground. Because of the rain that morning it was also wet. We tried to clean it all up, wrote a note in the log and put the log in a zip top bag for them. We tried to hide the cache again, but I am pretty sure it will be pulled out again. It looked like someone was spending the night right across the way from the spot we found it, so I am sure it will be opened again.

Anyway, so that was our fun caching experience. We had a lot of fun and have a whole bunch more waypoints to hunt down. We are just working on what our signature item will be to leave in the caches that we hit. And next time we are going to have tissues and our ultrapod so we can blow our noses and take pictures of us together!

The cat is all up on the computer now, so I gotta really scoot. Make sure you check out the photos on Flickr!

~Cachin’ C

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