Mac Attack

31/12/2011 By Kabutroid
I had a very specific reason for going out geocaching today. For some reason, I got it into my head that I wanted to find a geocache on the last day of the year, and also on the first day of next year. I’m not entirely sure how I came up with this goal of sorts... perhaps some subconscious new-years resolution to geocache more or something, but one way or another, I decided that would be my goal, and my goal I set out to accomplish. We happened to be puttering around a bit doing some minor shopping for odds and ends... moreso just to get out of the house so we didn’t get a headache from being indoors all day.

While preparing to head out for the day, I updated my GPS and we took off. A bit of semi-aimless wandering later, we found ourselves in the Kenaston strip-mall type area (Kenaston Commons? That name comes to mind for some reason, but I never actually bothered to get around to learning the name of that general area with a ton of stores). Glancing at my GPS here and there, I found that we were right about to pass beside one on our way to Canadian Tire. I took a minor detour into a ridiculously empty section of parking lot.

Seriously, what in the world is all that parking for? I can’t possibly fathom a furniture store needing anywhere remotely close to HALF that area. I think the most people I’ve ever seen there... aside from its first opening day... is maybe 15 cars total.

In either case, I parked the car where I figured it’d be, realized I was about 30 meters away, and proceeded to park 2 meters from it ToungeOut . My wife stayed in the car, since I figured this would be rather quick, and although my first thoughts as to its location were off, I found it about 10 seconds later (I was looking about 3 inches too low initially). At first I was rather confused about the cache name, but once I found the cache it aaaall made sense. I’m actually a bit surprised this is counted as a ‘micro’ cache. I would have figured this as a ‘small’ for sure. Heck, I’ve seen Altoids tins counted as ‘small’ (much to my disagreement), and you could probably fit several of those into here ToungeOut .

But anyway, I glanced at the light traffic passing somewhat nearby, but didn’t worry much since I parked the car between myself and where most traffic would see what I was doing. One quick signing and a micromail ball later (didn’t want to soak up too much room inside of there with a regular size signature item), and I slipped the cache back from whence it came. Word of note though... the logbook is... quite packed into it’s method of keeping dry. I’d probably consider decreasing the width of it by about 1 cm whenever it gets full and needs replacing. The paper’s getting kinda crumply and weak now due to this.

After replacing the cache, I found myself mildly amused with a rather peculiar action taking place on the street light pole. While I was standing near it, I heard a slight crunching noise coming from it. Looking closer, I noticed that the thin sheet of ice coating the entire pole was eeeever so slowly sliding down it, and breaking up when it reached the bottom (and also over a metallic sticker indicating the serial number, etc). In an almost glacially slow motion, the entire pole worth of ice (minus what had slipped down before I got there of course), there was a steady sliding of this sheet of ice down the side. I grabbed onto the sheet with my fingernails and pulled downward, and indeed was able to drag the entire sheet down, watching it break up... the aforementioned sticker acting as an ice-breaker of sorts, shattering away the center of the ice sheet.

After being amused with this for a bit, I dragged myself away from it and back into the car. Mission accomplished! A geocache on the last day of 2011. Let’s see if I can keep this resolution of sorts and tackle one tomorrow BigSmile .

Took: Probably an hour off of the life of that sheet of ice’s downward slide
Left: Logbook entry, Yellow Trackable Adventure Guide TB, and micromail ball