Nunnery Funnery

24/12/2012 By Kabutroid
Feels like -30 out? Christmas eve? Seems like the PERFECT time to get some geocaching in! Or more accurately I suppose, using the single free hour I think I’ve had for the entire month to go out, tackle my streak of ‘find at least one cache every calendar month since I’ve started, and at the same time find a cache on one of those hard to get days to try to find one on ever day of the year’.

And that, fellow gentlecachers, I have most certainly accomplished. Took out two goals with one chainmail ball. Get at least one of these pesky end-of-December days off the calendar that are so hard to squeeze into the otherwise crazily busy schedule, and find at least one geocache this month. I’ve WANTED to find more, don’t get me wrong. I would have loved to have go to an event or two as well. But... as with every December, it’s always a crazy, mad rush of a thousand and one obligations, gatherings, phone calls, and this year with the added bonus of car repairs and veterinary visits. It’s been rather chaotic, to say the least.

But thankfully, on this one busy day, there showed a gleam of hope. A gleam of wonder. A gleam of hopeful wonder that I may be able to quickly snag a geocache before the year is over. I’m kinda vaguely crossing my fingers on tagging tomorrow as well, but I’m not exactly holding my breath on that one ToungeOut .

But today. As with most years, I got out of work early, but had various things waiting at home needing to be dealt with. Not the least of which is spending time with my wife and other loved ones, of course. However, in the midst of baking some cookies (mmmm... those warmed me up when I got home BigSmile ), in the middle of the baking Laura said there was a bit of time to kill, and I could go and grab a quick geocache, since she knew how important it was to me to keep that once-a-month streak alive.

With the GPS updated, I hopped out of the nice warm apartment and into the icy cold outdoors, and into my almost as icy cold car (which thankfully started easily, having been driven home from work a few hours earlier). Quickly scanning the GPS, I quickly found a ‘Regular’ size cache, with easy difficulty, close to home, with no DNF’s in the last four logs (GSAK is set to upload to my GPS what type of log the last 4 logs were for any cache). It seemed like a pretty safe bet. However, the battery on my Palm Pilot was stone dead, so I didn’t have a description, any attributes (such as say... winter-friendly), hints, or even when the last log was. I was flying mostly blind.

Arriving near ground zero, I parked the car and pondered for a moment how to approach the cache. I was a bit stumped, since I hadn’t thought to... I dunno, wear winter boots or anything. With a small park of untrodden snow in front of me, I soon found that I could circle around it with a walking path beside the building. However, I soon found that the plowed snow seemed to stop right at ground zero, making for at least 5 feet of snow-trudging until the most likely location of the cache, in my mind. The most likely location at ground zero being somewhere distinctly not winter friendly looking ToungeOut . But time was short, and I was here, so let’s just give-er and see what happens!

My feet quickly got reacquainted with snow, and as I reached ground zero (thank god for bang-on coordinates), I began to frantically paw around through the snow with my gloves (which I WAS smart enough to bring ToungeOut ).

Luck was with me on this eve of Christmas, for within a few moments, one of my fingers brushed against something rounded and solid. A few seconds after that, a quite frozen looking cache container was in hand BigSmile . A quick chainmail ball drop and logbook signing later, and the cache was replaced as found and I was soon banging the snow out of my shoes and heading to the car. Mission accomplished!

Thanks for the cache! It definitely helped me out when the geocaching gods were needed most Smile .

Took: Nothing
Left: Logbook entry and chainmail ball