KenKen in the Kildonans

01/08/2010 By Kabutroid
This was the last cache of the day for me. Actually, for the past few days I've been in the process of finding all of the caches in Kilcona Park (and yet I'm only about halfway through... it appears to be a pretty big park!), and had my eye on tackling the puzzle cache after I got home last night. Although, I didn't even notice that there was a second puzzle listed in the park until the end of TODAY, but I've already got that one solved for my next trip out ToungeOut . In either case... as of last night, I had this particular puzzle to solve... and it looks like it hasn't been solved in a while, by the look of it. Or at the bare minimum, the final location hasn't been logged for almost two months now! Pretty rare to see that directly inside the city.

Now unfortunately, although I'm well-versed in doing a SuDoKu puzzle, I'm completely unfamiliar with KenKen. I've seen it... I think once or maybe twice in the newspaper at work, but otherwise since I don't subscribe to an actual paper newspaper at home I'm unfamiliar with any of the newer puzzles that are popular nowadays. And if I'm not mistaken, the ones that I've seen in newspapers are a lot smaller grid size than this one! So to say the least, I was a bit intimidated looking at it. Especially with some of the squares having really big number ToungeOut .

So, but the time we got home yesterday and I opened this cache page, it was late, and I was pretty tired. I'm not proud of it, but I have to admit that I acquired a bit of... automated help, shall we say. So wimping out and taking the easy route, I eventually came up with the results required, and found myself the coordinates to the geocache.

But if it makes you feel any better, I AM quite perplexed by this new math-based puzzle, and will be looking into them in the future to see what's up ToungeOut .

That aside however, today I had a cache to find! Having just found several caches (one being a resolved DNF) in Kilcona Park, I was going to tackle finding this puzzle cache and then call it a day. My wife and I unfortunately had obligations shortly after I went after this cache, so I couldn't stay to explore the park any longer Frown . But mental note in the future... methinks it could be some fun biking around this area. With my wife waiting for my return from geocaching (she's been sucked particularly thoroughly into a book, and so has been reading that when I'm off caching), I set off towards the solved coordinates, hoping that they were correct. They seemed somewhat... peculiar after I had solved it, but it still somewhat made sense in a way.

Several minutes later, I found myself standing at ground zero. There appeared to be a few other pseudo-trails nearby, so I was vaguely hopeful that they might be geo-trails, indicating I was in the right area. That, or it could have been animal trails, I have no clue ToungeOut . They were vague and faint at best, anyway. Doing a quick circle around the immediate vicinity of the coordinates, and I turned up nothing. I spread out a bit further in my search, but still everything that I looked at clearly was cache-less.

However, right at that moment, I turned around to go back closer to the posted coordinates, and my eyes just... locked onto something. I figured it stood a fairly good chance of being the right place, so I immediately headed over. A bit hesitantly, I checked it out and was pleased to find my hand wrapped around a cache container BigSmile . Quickly poking through the contents (lot of erasers in this one it seems like), I signed the logbook and replaced it as found. All in all, a very successful day. Thanks for almost entirely introducing me to this puzzle type though... I've definitely got to look into these in the future.

Took: Nothing
Left: Logbook entry and chainmail ball