A view

19/02/2012 By Kabutroid
Ahh... now this is a cache that takes me back. At least to the general area, anyway. It’s a bit hard to believe that it’s been over 5 years since I last found a cache. In fact, I had only been caching for about two months back when I had found Edak Rap. But honestly, I wasn’t even aware that this cache was going to be around that area. I had actually come to the U of M in order to attempt my very first ‘Geocaching Challenge’, situated relatively nearby on the other side of University Center. However, prior to going after that, I figured I’d dig my teeth back into geocaching by finding one or two of the caches that appear to have sprung up around the U of M since I was last here. I appear to have kinda forgotten about geocaching for the past few weeks... a bit over a month, to be honest. Thus, today I decided to get into the swing of things again with not only cache-finding, but challenge-completing.

Thus brings me to this cache. I had decided to park in the staff parking lot just beside the parkade (yay for parking basically anywhere on weekends), and quickly noticed that this cache was actually closer to me than the challenge. Since the order makes no difference to me one way or the other (in fact, I don’t think challenges even count towards your ‘find’ count... guess I’ll found that out for sure after my next log or two), I booked it over towards the coordinates for this cache, it being a bit over a hundred meters away. When I started to get close, I thought to myself “aaaaaaah, nuts. This could either be really easy, or really hard”. In the end, it turned out to be somewhere in the middle, albeit skewed towards the latter. Given the cache name, I decided to hunt around a bit at what ended up being about 10 meters away from ground zero. Unfortunately, my palm pilot with all the cache details/description/etc was at home with a dead battery, so I was flying blind today. All I had to work off of was the name, difficult/terrain ranking, and if the last 4 logs were finds/dnfs/etc.

Thus, after a quick hunt around in what ended up being the entirely wrong area, I soon corrected my line of thought and proceeded to hunt in a more accurate manner. Although I was a bit worried about wandering around here for too long. Y’see, I was also hoping to get some snowshoeing in today (if I could find any decent snow to shoe in... in the end, I did not Frown ), so said snowshoes in their carrying bag were currently strapped to my back. From a distance, or perhaps from a security camera if they happened to be looking at me at the right angle, the long black bag strapped to my back could be mistaken for a rifle case or something. But in all honesty, I was kinda hoping someone would come up and question me, so that I could go on about my snowshoes and show them off and stuff ToungeOut . Alas, I worry too much, since none of that happened (well, I might have been watched on camera or from afar, but nothing came of it regardless).

After looking around for several minutes in what I figured would be the correct area, I kept coming up empty, and given my distinct lack of Palm Pilot, I was somewhat baffled as to where it could possibly hide around there. Not like there was a ton of spots. I was about ready to throw in the towel, when I had a vague hunch to try a few other places. It’s probably for the best I did this, because no more than another 30 seconds passed by that the cache was in my hands at last BigSmile . Gotta say, the hint does not lie at all. Luckily, I was able to manage, and soon had the cache replaced, one travelbug lighter, and one chainmail ball heavier. Thanks for the cache to get me back into the game .

Took: “Icebox the Penguin Travel Tag” travelbug
Left: Logbook entry and chainmail ball