The Olde One (8)

30/11/2011 By Kabutroid
This one had a rather unusual tale behind it. Being as my birthday falls on Nov. 30th, I wanted to give myself a present of sorts by way of finding a geocache on my birthday. However, I figured that this would prove to be rather difficult, due to waking up, going to work, and then going out for dinner with my wife right after work. Immediately after that, it would be a) completely dark out, b) very cold out, c) I don’t want to put my wife through sitting around in the cold late at night ToungeOut .

Thus, I figured that the best possibly alternative... since like hell I’m going to be able to wake up early enough to do this before work... would be to do a quick run out during lunch at work to find me a geocache. I’ve only got a half-hour, but if I go after something that’s nearby, not a micro or unknown size, and doesn’t have a pile of DNF’s, I should theoretically be good. So I updated the GPS the night before and headed on my way.

Well, it didn’t take too long for my plan to completely unravel. As luck (or lack thereof) would have it, about an hour before my usual lunch break (about 2:00pm), the entire network went down. No phones, no computers, no fax machine, nothing. Being as everything we do requires a network of some sort, our office entirely ground to a halt. Convenient opportunity? Not so much... we were waiting for the systems to come up, or for our support dept. to figure out what’s wrong. After about an hour of this, and attempting to work from an office laptop connected to the neighbour’s wifi, it was worked out such that I and several others could work from home on our desktop computers there (since there wasn’t enough laptops, and laptop keyboards suck).

NOW we have a convenient opportunity. I can’t take too long, since they’re expecting me to jump on right when I get home... about a 20 minute drive. However, I can say I needed gas or traffic slowed me down or whatever if it came up (it didn’t anyway). BUT... now’s the chance to swing by a quick cache on the way home. Scanning the GPS while making my way home, I noticed that THIS one was just a few blocks out of the way, no recent DNF’s, and not a micro... the perfect combination!

So heading down Jubilee, not only was it in a rather convenient location with all of the requirements I was looking for, but I managed to be able to turn at the lights without having to wait more than 5 seconds for oncoming traffic to clear up enough for me to get through the left turn. I quickly passed through the quiet residential neighbourhood and soon found my way onto the street leading up to the geocache. All of the bad luck for the day seems to have been used up at work, because I also found a parking spot as close as possible to the coordinates. It’s like fate was making this cache as simple as possible for me as a birthday present ToungeOut .

Parking 20 meters from the coordinates, I quickly hopped out of the car and headed for what I imagined could be about the only place the cache could be. I was not disappointed, when I found the cache pretty much exactly where I had anticipated it to be. Definitely a good thing, since time was not on my side today. One quick signing, and I returned the cache from whence it came, and swung the car around. The entire process, from when I deviated from my route home to when I returned to it, took maybe 5 minutes. I was quite proud of the efficiency of that process Smile .

The mission accomplished, I headed on towards home, and got to spend the rest of my birthday-at-work working from my home computer with a cat purring on my lap. As far as birthdays go and not bothering to book the day off work... gotta say, this is pretty high up there with being the ideal situation Smile .

So thanks for putting out a cache that worked out just about perfectly for my situation. And I got my present to myself... finding a geocache BigSmile .

Took: Nothing
Left: Logbook and chainmail ball