This Saturday was scheduled to be a lazy day. We didn't have anything planned other than to try to watch the baseball game (online--we went to the opening game against Georgia on Friday). Well, that changed once we decided to go and meet up with other geocachers in our area at a scheduled meet-up at CiCi's Pizza from 6 to 8 last night.
We had never been to one of these, being relatively new to the hobby. In fact, we had only really met one other geocaching couple aside from my friend that got us into it. Back in probably January we walked up to a cache site to start looking and there was another couple with a GPS snooping around a tree. We introduced ourselves and found that they were having trouble finding this one. I turned on my GPS and quickly told them we were looking in the wrong place. I think some people cache with their iPhone (not sure this couple was, but I'm guessing they were for a number of reasons) and the iPhone GPS, in my experience, is not nearly as accurate as most stand-alone GPSs. Anyway, my GPS took us right to it and we found it in less than 10 seconds.
That was the only time we had really met any cachers in our area, but going into CiCi's last night, the wife and I were discussing preconceived notions and stereotypes. We were guessing what people would look like.
#1-I described the stereotypical geocacher in my mind: safari-style hat, fishing vest, hiking boots, big wooden walking stick, beard.
#2-I mentioned that we would likely be the youngest people in the group by a large margin.
I could not believe how right on I was on both of them (minus one other guy who was roughly our age--we gravitated to him immediately). There was actually a guy dressed exactly as described in #1 AND carrying a huge stick. My wife and I had trouble not laughing. However, it turned out that guy was one of the most respected cachers in the area (his online name is Red Ink--he was responsible for The Light at the End of the Tunnel, which I described above).
We ate pizza with The5ts, who is the one that was closest to our age, and a couple of others that we cross paths with on caches pages a lot (by the names of cmccrory and mmanarch--we see their names on logs of our caches that we hid and others in the area a lot). They got into a discussion about a cache called "Eat Mor Chikin!" which is obviously near a Chik-Fil-A. It happened to be less than a mile from where we were, so after we left, we decided to try it out. Only one person in our group had found it, while the others had tried and failed. The discussion centered around how the owner and all the employees at that Chik-Fil-A knew about the cache and how they loved to watch people trying to find it (it's hard). The one that found it said he went just as Chik-Fil-A was closing up for the evening and every employee left was standing in the window watching them look.
Well, we decided to head over to Chik-Fil-A and give it a shot. It was starting to get dark (about 8:00 or so) but there were a few customers about. We didn't attract any attention at all, and we actually found the cache in about 10 minutes. The cache was hidden in the base of a fake plant in a flower bed. This one was a 3-star difficulty cache. It always feels good to mark those off.
Note that I didn't have my good camera with me, so these pictures are taken with my cell phone (which does pretty good in the light, not so good at night). I also always resize the pictures to 640x480 for this page since large pictures are annoying.
Anyway, this triggered a mini-geocaching run, and we found 5 more caches last night after that one. All of them in the dark with a flashlight. Wife wanted to keep going, but I was actually pretty uncomfortable doing all the snooping in town at night with a flashlight. Every time we started looking, I was immediately conscious of looking suspicious and attracting attention. I didn't like that feeling and was therefore not really enjoying it.
One memorable cache we found last night was called "The Pesky Pole" and was placed by a Red Sox fan that we had just met at CiCi's (online name was TnT). We arrived at a park and found that the cache, indeed, was located very near to a baseball field. My suspicion was that it would be somehow near the foul pole.
My suspicion was right. The foul pole here was just a tall, white, PVC pipe that was tied to the fence. We looked for a bit and found nothing when I hit on the fact that the pole is actually able to move vertically. I lifted up on it while the wife looked under it. Bingo, there was the cache. Even more fascinating than this was the fact that some Indian/Pakistani (not sure which, honestly, some people from that area) kids were playing cricket on the field! It had rained a little bit that day, and every time they tried to field a ball they would wipeout in the wet grass hard. It was entertaining to watch for that reason and that I had never watched people play cricket live before.
nice finger jerkface