Cache and Carey

01/01/2012 By Kabutroid
Mission of sorts accomplished! Several days ago, I came up with a vague plan of sorts, to attempt to find a geocache on the last day of the year, and then on the first day of the year. No real reason other than ‘because I can’. I was also somewhat eager to drop off several travelbugs that I’ve had since the last event in mid-December. I dropped one of them off at yesterday’s ‘last day of the year’ cache find, and went out today in hopes of dropping off this geocoin to complete my resolution of sorts.

Being as it’s January 1st, there’s very little open right now. However, my wife wanted to stop by a 24-hour Shoppers Drug Mart mainly just to get out of the apartment for a bit, and pick up some odds and ends. Sounds like a good opportunity to head out caching to me. After our quick stop, I directed my wife to this cache, which I had picked out at home ahead of time. I contemplated going after a different cache close to the Shoppers, but the description didn’t sit well with me so I went with my original plan of this cache. A few quick turns later, and we found ourselves in the general vicinity of the cache. I hadn’t read the cache description ahead of time, so at first was rather perplexed as to a cache dedicated to a geocacher, and how it related to them. Once we passed the sign for the name of the park, it all made a lot more sense. That mystery out of the way, we soon found a place to park. At first, my wife parked on the opposite side of the park, but we quickly swung around, and she ended up parking on that back-road thing that goes beside the park. In the end, I think we were about 10 meters from the cache when I got out of the car ToungeOut .

Now, despite the ridiculously mild temperature we’ve been having so far (seriously, where’s my snow? My snowshoes are feeling neglected here!), today decided to be a particularly cold day out. I’m not sure what the exact temperature was, but I know that standing outside for 5 minutes made my ears beet red. Figures, the one time I forget my Cossack hat at home, it’s the one day when it would be the most useful so far this winter. I was going to say this year, but technically, it’s both the warmest day and the coldest day that we’ve had this year so far ToungeOut .

In either case, with my ears getting redder I began to hunt for the cache. There was seemingly many places it could be hiding, but after a few minutes I struck paydirt. My highly trained geocaching eyes spotted the cache before I grabbed for it, so after I left I made a note of hiding it a bit better than I had found it. I imagine the wind over the past few weeks had made it a bit more visible. Hopefully this version of its natural camouflage will last a while. But with the cache in hand, I quickly pulled out and signed the logbook. Replacing that, I tossed in a micromail ball, since at the moment I had accidentally left all my regular sized signature items at home. Probably for the best anyway, since the cache container seemed fairly full, and a regular one would have made it annoyingly full. I also slipped in a Central Jersey Geocoin, and closed up the container. A few minutes of working with my cold, gloveless hands (seriously... why did I have to forget all of my winter wear at home today?), the cache was invisible to the naked eye, and I had accomplished my mission of finding a geocache on the last day of last year, and the first day of this year. I’m hoping that this acts as a sign of things to come, and I might do more geocaching this year.

In either case, a nice little park you have here. As with many, many locations in the city, this is one of the seemingly million parks that I wouldn’t have known existed if it hadn’t been for geocaching (or YAPIDKA - yet another park I didn’t know about).

Thanks for the cache, and I hope to see more of them in general in 2012. At least until the world ends on December 21st ToungeOut .

Took: Nothing
Left: Logbook entry, Central Jersey Geocoin, and micromail ball