close counts here

23/06/2012 By Kabutroid
We were flying high when we headed over towards this geocache. Yes, I said ‘we’... one of the extraordinarily few times when I was able to geocache with friends (seeing as most of my closer friends are avid non-geocachers. Outdoors? What’s that?) Not only was I not caching alone like usual, but the two others that were with me were absolutely, completely new to geocaching. Well, almost. Both had only a vague idea as to what is involved in geocaching, and up until about 15 minutes prior when we found their first geocache together, had never seen one or known the process. Thus, today was lookin’ good so far.

So having just left their first cache ever, the person driving instructed me to lead them to another geocache waiting to be found. The driver has lived here for years upon years, but had no idea what was kicking around, waiting to be found. Some areas that he ‘knew like the back of his hand’... the island type area... contains several caches as I showed him on the GPS. But... those are to wait for another day when there’s more time. At the moment, we had our eyes and GPS set on this one.

Zipping over, we parked nearby and hopped out of the car. Within seconds, I was zeroing in on ground zero, counting down the meters. One of my friends (the non-driving one) immediately ran forward and said ‘the stump!’ However, seeing as the stump was about 5 meters away and my count was at about 20, I told him that he may be a tad off. This was quickly revised, and we entered the general vicinity of ground zero. Thankfully, despite it being a beautiful day out, the park was just about as empty as it could have been. The sounds of some people playing off in the distance, but nothing even remotely nearby.

Which is probably for the best... one of my friends commented that three guys crowding together in the bushes may look a little strange ToungeOut .

But with so few people, any such worries were barely worth the effort of typing the above line. As it turns out, we were to be standing around for a significantly shorter period of time than I had figured. About 6 seconds after having walked into the general area, I spotted the geocache, lying completely out in the open, unhidden even slightly (aside from the camouflage affixed to the cache container itself). I kinda assumed that it was supposed to be hidden in the manner indicated in the cache hint, but at the time we arrived, it wasn’t. It kinda makes me want to move out here a bit more, because in the city, odds are that if some random kid stumbles across a geocache, it’s gonna go missing or be destroyed. Out here, I was pleasantly surprised that it was sitting there pleased as punch.

So with the cache container open, I showed them what types of general contents are inside of a cache, and not surprisingly neither of them had any interest in the pink plastic sunglasses or other random contents ToungeOut . I at least had this opportunity to show them what my regular sized chainmail ball signature item looks like, as I dropped it into the cache and closed it up again. I’m not sure if it’s the tape, or what the problem is, but this cache container isn’t particularly fond of clipping closed entirely properly. The contents were bone dry, so I assume it’s doing the job... but it just feels strange when attempting to close it. Felt the same when opening it, so not sure what’s up with that.

In either case, I hid the cache significantly better than when we had arrived, and we headed back to the car victorious. With any luck, this find and the last one will have set our community up with two new geocachers waiting to create usernames on here BigSmile . So if you see any new cachers with usernames being aliases for Chris or David, maybe let them log this one.

Thanks for the cache, and opportunity to show some potentially new cachers the ropes.

Took: Nothing
Left: Logbook entry and chainmail ball