06/11/2011 By Kabutroid
At long, long, LONG last... I can finally delete the 'solved' waypoint for this cache from my GPS. I've had this solved for probably about 6 months, just sitting on my GPS waiting for me to get around to finding it. Not that the puzzle is particularly hard to solve, but since it involves an image, I wouldn't have been able to solve it while out and about with my palm pilot and cachemate. Thus, it sat on the GPS. And of course, was naturally almost deleted every single time I went to clear the old waypoints and upload the new ones, until I stopped myself at the last second.
BUT... all of that comes to an end now. My wife and I had some shopping to do today, which would end up taking me in the general vicinity of the final coordinates. I'm actually a bit lucky, since my wife (an avid non-cacher) didn't really feel like sitting around while I geocached today, but I managed to talk her into letting me go after at least one. It may have been cold and drizzly out, but I was determined to finally take this one off my list. So into the car we went and continued on our merry way.
Midway through our shopping was when we'd be nearby, so I told my GPS to follow the roads. Most confusingly however, I didn't see the line drawn from on St. Anne's where I was at the moment. I told it to recalculate... nothing.
Huh. Bizarre.
I zoom out a bit, and discover the problem... for some weird reason, the GPS decided to... simply not have map data on it any more. It had the basemap, and that's it. I can't even fathom how it lost the rest of the data that was there as recently as yesterday, but this was a setback that I didn't need at the moment with my wife not wanting to mess around trying to find the area. Ok, we'll work with it this way... just point to the waypoint offroad, and I'll figure it out from there. I managed to get into the right area as a whole, but misjudged the distances away, and found myself walking away from the car into the wrong area. A quick backtrack, and I hopped into the car and finally found the distance to ground zero dropping quickly. I ended up parking about 12 meters away from ground zero in fact.
And actually, it was the fact that I was 12 meters away when I parked that perplexed me the most. I had trouble pondering where the cache could be hidden. There was one semi-obvious area, but I wasn’t sure if a cache container could go there. Nonetheless, I hopped out of the car and soon found my way to ground zero itself. I’m not sure if it was the clouds or whatnot (I somehow managed to find a gap in the drizzle to hunt for the cache by blind luck), but my GPS was telling me that ground zero was a little bit off, and so confused me for a bit.
After a few glances at some highly unlikely locations, I turned my attention to the aforementioned ‘semi-obvious’ area. Thankfully, there was nobody outside that I could see, and no cars were coming by... the perfect opportunity. A bit of glancing around here and there, and I spotted something that might possibly work. Investigating it a little bit closer, and I spotted the unmistakable sight of a cache container. With one deft hand movement, the cache was in hand, and I was standing off to the side opening it up 
.
I quickly signed the logbook and dropped in a micromail ball. Although the logbook is dry, I was somewhat amused that it was still kinda wrapped in a ziplock bag that was ripped completely open in two places. After signing, I once again wrapped it in the plastic, not being sure if I should just ditch it, and closed everything up again. Not that it matters, the container looks pretty watertight, and the location isn’t particularly conducive to getting wet. But with the cache finally found, I returned to the car and we continued on our way.
Glad to have been able to find the cache today. I’m always glad to put another puzzle under my belt .
Took: Nothing
Left: Logbook and micromail ball
And the Children Shall Lead
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